Avoiding the game of Telephone

I often find myself in the space between teams and executive leadership.  This is the space where transparency in both directions will catapult an organization to hyper productivity.

I have worked with different product development organizations over the years and have seen complete open transparent communication that resulted in the illusive hyper productivity.

Here are some of the key things that I attribute to the success:

1.     Visible prioritized list of areas of focus for the entire organization.  

2.     Weekly dashboard report via email and screen display around the office from each scrum team.

3.     Weekly 1/2 hour Opt In all company review of Kanban board which comprised all work in flight across the entire organization.  The board columns showed Epics from ideation through to scrum team implementation.

4.     Essentially a flat organization with an open door policy from CEO to new employee in training.  

In the absence of transparency, there are stories told at different layers of an organization to articulate the status of any given initiative.  The stories told are very rarely aligned, quite like the game of Telephone we all played as children.  

An organization relying on meetings and communication plans to propagate information, are missing the opportunity to leverage an open transparent environment where fluid status is more readily available for everyone who wants to be informed.