The Cascade Problem
I‘ve sat in strategy sessions where the leadership team spent weeks aligning on direction. They left that room fired up, clear, committed. Six months later, when I talked to frontline employees, they had no idea what the strategy was.
The communication didn‘t cascade. It just stopped at the leadership level.
This happens in every organization I‘ve worked with—government ministries, NGOs, corporations. Not because the strategy is wrong or the communication is bad. But because cascading information is a system challenge, not a messaging challenge.
Why Cascades Fail: A Systems Diagnosis
The standard approach is: CEO communicates to executives, executives communicate to directors, directors communicate to managers, managers communicate to teams. Straightforward in theory. In practice, the message degrades at every level—not because people are incompetent, but because the system isn‘t designed for fidelity.
Three structural failures explain most cascade breakdowns:
The Translation Gap. The CEO speaks in strategy. Frontline teams need to hear in operations. The middle layer is supposed to translate, but nobody equipped them to do it. They either repeat the CEO‘s words verbatim (which sound abstract to their teams) or they improvise a translation (which may not be accurate).
The Courage Gap. The message often includes hard truths—we‘re deprioritizing this, we‘re restructuring that, this initiative is ending. Middle managers, who have to deliver this news to people they work with daily, soften it. They hedge. They add qualifiers. They protect their team‘s feelings. The hard truth becomes a vague implication, and people don‘t know what‘s changing.
The Feedback Vacuum. Information flows down but nothing comes back up. The CEO assumes the message landed because it was sent. Meanwhile, frontline teams have questions, concerns, misunderstandings, and outright resistance that never reaches leadership. Decisions get made without accurate information about how they‘re being received.
Building a Cascade That Works
Step 1: Get brutally aligned at the top.
Before anything cascades, the leadership team must be genuinely aligned—not politely nodding, but genuinely agreeing on what the message means and what it requires. I use the Ladder of Inference here—walking the group back down from their conclusions to the underlying data and assumptions. What are we actually saying? What do we mean by it? What will people hear? Where will they resist? What questions will they ask?
If your leadership team can‘t answer these questions consistently, you‘re not ready to cascade.
Step 2: Equip your translators.
This is the step everyone skips. Before middle managers face their teams, bring them in. Not to be told. To be equipped.
Give them: the core message, the reasoning behind it, answers to the ten hardest questions their teams will ask, explicit permission to say “I don‘t know“ when they genuinely don‘t, and time to process their own reactions before they have to manage everyone else‘s.
When I‘ve done this in organizations, the difference is immediate. Managers who‘ve had time to wrestle with the message themselves can deliver it with conviction. Managers who received it thirty minutes before their team meeting deliver it with anxiety.
Step 3: Design for conversation, not broadcast.
A cascade isn‘t a series of announcements. It‘s a series of conversations. At every level, people need the chance to ask questions, voice concerns, and connect the message to their reality.
This means: team meetings where the agenda is understanding, not just informing. Follow-up channels where questions can surface after people have had time to think. And explicit invitations for pushback—because resistance that‘s surfaced is manageable. Resistance that‘s suppressed becomes sabotage.
Step 4: Build the feedback loop.
The cascade isn‘t complete when the message reaches the frontline. It‘s complete when leadership knows how the message landed.
Structure this deliberately: pulse surveys a week after the cascade, skip-level conversations, designated feedback channels, town halls where the CEO addresses what they‘ve heard coming back up.
This isn‘t just good communication. It‘s good strategy. The feedback tells you where your strategy has implementation problems you didn‘t anticipate.
The CEO‘s Real Job
The CEO‘s role in a cascade isn‘t to be the sole messenger. It‘s to ensure the system works—that the message is clear, the translators are equipped, the conversations happen, and the feedback flows back.
A CEO who thinks their job is done after the all-hands is missing the entire system. The hard work happens after the initial announcement—in equipping people, listening to feedback, and making adjustments.
Communication isn‘t something that happens to an organization. It‘s something an organization builds the capacity to do. And that capacity, like every leadership capacity, requires deliberate investment.