Why Information Flows But Decisions Stall

I've seen organizations drowning in data while making terrible decisions. The information exists. The reports get filed. The meetings happen.

But somehow, nothing connects.

This phenomenon has a name: "un-understood information." It's data that exists within an organization but fails to be effectively interpreted, shared, or acted upon by those who need it most.

The problem isn't missing information. It's information that remains inert.

The HVAC Story That Reveals Everything

Consider this scenario for small investments I encounter repeatedly: A tenant reports HVAC problems to their facility manager. The facility manager escalates to the property manager, who sees the repair cost and realizes it will hurt building profitability.

The property manager, fearing criticism from the building owner, buries the information.

Months later, the tenant leaves due to unresolved issues and frustration that comes with it. The very fear that caused the information hiding creates the expensive outcome everyone wanted to avoid.

This isn't incompetence. It's a predictable cultural pattern.

Research shows that one full day per work week is consumed by information dysfunction and communication silos.

The Vicious Cycle of Information Paralysis

Here's what makes organizational communication problems so persistent: they create self-reinforcing cycles.

When bad news surfaces at the last minute, managers get angry. Their anger confirms their belief that employees are unreliable and don't know what they're doing.

This reaction makes employees even more likely to hide problems in the future.

The system rewards the very behaviors that caused the information breakdown. Leaders who created cultures of fear use the consequences of that fear to justify more control and less transparency.

Edgar Schein identified this dynamic decades ago: culture is always helping and hindering problem solving. The key is being specific about which behaviors impact your problems and what future behaviors you want to see.

People need to be aware that 90% of their behavior is driven by cultural rules and not personality. — Edgar Schein

Why Information Becomes Un-Understood

Un-understood information refers to information that exists within an organization but fails to be effectively interpreted, shared, or acted upon. It’s not just missing data—it’s information that is available but not meaningfully understood or applied by those who need it.

Information paralysis happens through five predictable mechanisms:

Information overload overwhelms employees who cannot discern what matters. They receive endless data streams but lack frameworks for prioritization. The useless reminder comes in the same way as the super urgent task to do.

Complexity without context creates confusion. Technical information gets shared without explanation of why it matters or how it connects to decisions. Data are spread across multiple interfaces making it difficult to get a big picture view.

Hidden knowledge assumptions cause breakdowns when those holding critical information assume others "already know" what they know.

Cultural filtering shapes what gets shared based on fear, hierarchy, and organizational politics rather than relevance or importance. The order of what really matters is affected by internal politics.

Structural barriers prevent information from reaching decision-makers even when employees want to share it. Certain person are super hard to reach or communication channels are limited on purpose.

The result: organizations confuse information transmission with actual communication. Just because something gets sent doesn't mean it gets understood.

The Four Root Causes Leaders Miss

Most leaders focus on symptoms rather than root causes. Here are four categories that create information dysfunction:

Cultural root causes include fear of negative consequences, hierarchical mindsets, lack of trust, silo mentality, and norms favoring indirect communication. When employees fear punishment for mistakes, they hoard information and spread rumors instead of communicating transparently.

Structural root causes involve overly complex reporting lines, missing formal communication channels, ambiguous roles and responsibilities, and overemphasis on written reports over meaningful dialogue.

Leadership behaviors significantly influence communication culture. Top-down leadership styles discourage upward communication. Inconsistent messaging creates confusion. Leaders who fail to model openness establish patterns employees inevitably follow.

Psychological factors amplify communication gaps through fear, anxiety, insecurity, information overload, stress, and misaligned incentives that reward "looking good" rather than collaborating.

Research confirms this analysis: 97% of employees believe poor communication leads to misunderstandings, conflicts, and low workplace morale.

Breaking the Pattern Requires Both Levers

Fixing communication problems requires moving two levers simultaneously: cultural norms and formal reward systems.

If you only address culture by telling people to "be more open," they won't risk it if the system still punishes them. If you only change structures by adding communication channels but ignore fear and norms, people will still hide.

Both levers must move together.

Diagnose the hidden curriculum first. Make visible how your system actually teaches people to hide information. People see that those who "look good" or stay silent get rewarded while messengers of bad news get punished or ignored.

Leadership modeling becomes the cultural leverage point. Leaders must publicly reward openness, especially when it's uncomfortable. They need to admit their own mistakes, lowering fear barriers and signaling that truth-telling is safe.

Realign incentives and structures. Change performance metrics to reward collaboration, knowledge sharing, and risk surfacing rather than just short-term results. Tie promotions to candor and cross-functional cooperation.

Create protected spaces for communication. Use forums like after-action reviews and cross-functional learning sessions where people can speak without fear of reprisal. Start with small experiments practicing radical transparency, then showcase successes.

What Real Change Looks Like

Let me show you how a leader might handle that HVAC situation differently.

Instead of the old pattern where reporting failure gets people blamed, imagine this response at a town hall:

"I realize we've had recurring HVAC issues that we haven't solved properly. Looking back, I can see that I didn't create the space for people to tell me how serious this was. That's on me. I need us to get better at surfacing these problems early, even if they're uncomfortable."

When a frontline technician says, "We've been patching the units because budgets are tight, but it's only a temporary fix. The truth is, we need a full replacement plan," the leader responds:

"Thank you for telling it straight. That honesty is exactly what we need. Let's make sure this input informs our decision-making, and I want others to see that speaking up like this helps us solve problems."

The leader then convenes a lessons learned session, asking "What allowed this issue to go on so long without a decisive solution?" while listening without defensiveness and documenting process changes.

Finally, at the next all-hands: "Last month, our facilities team raised the tough truth about our HVAC system. Because they spoke up, we're saving ourselves from years of patch costs. That's the kind of openness we want everywhere in this organization."

The story itself becomes cultural currency. The new pattern emerges: silence equals risk, honesty equals value.

The Skin in the Game Problem

But here's the uncomfortable truth I've observed: most organizational leaders have low skin in the game.

They're not shareholders or directly impacted by results in ways that force real change. When communication problems surface, they typically do a basic reshuffle of the organizational chart while keeping their jobs and working methods intact.

They avoid reconsidering how teams actually interact and communicate because it’s harder and more painful than simply changing the organizational chart.

Even leaders with genuine skin in the game often resist changing systems they've built or inherited. The difference between those who make real changes and those who just talk about it comes down to systematic root cause analysis.

They identify and analyze the specific gaps in communication and transparency that create dysfunction. They look for the cultural, structural, leadership, and psychological factors that prevent good information from flowing to where it's needed.

DOWNLOAD our guide of the most frequent root causes of communications issues.

The Cost of Staying Broken

Organizations that don't fix information dysfunction pay predictable costs.

Decisions get made with incomplete information. Problems remain undetected in departmental silos. Different teams develop conflicting interpretations of the same data.

With the multiplication of gaps between what people understand and what is done, cynicism develops and people start saying "words, words but nothing happens" or "the rules say something and we do the opposite."

This cynicism becomes the death knell for any cultural change effort. When employees see leaders asking for honesty but then hiding behind "that's just how our approval process works," trust erodes fast.

The real tragedy: the information needed to solve problems often exists somewhere in the organization. It's just trapped by fear, hierarchy, and broken systems.

Making Information Work

Effective information processing requires four elements working together: systematic collection of the right data, meaningful interpretation, effective distribution to appropriate stakeholders, and feedback loops to ensure comprehension.

Organizations must create systems for information flow while cultivating cultures that encourage understanding, sharing, and acting upon information.

The biggest insight from Edgar Schein's framework: communication, culture, and information processing are deeply interconnected. You can't fix one without addressing the others.

When done right, properly understood and shared information enables strategic alignment, organizational agility, trust-building, and innovation.

The question isn't whether your organization has information problems. The question is whether you are ready to diagnose and fix the root causes creating them.

Because the information you need probably already exists. It's just waiting to be understood and worked on in a collaborative way.