Michael Lissack
Consider the communication landscape of a typical modern organization: The marketing department communicates through email, Slack, Zoom meetings, collaborative documents, project management plat- forms, design software comment threads, and casual conversations. Each channel develops its own linguistic patterns, jargon, abbreviations, and norms. Some team members participate actively in all channels while others engage primarily through a few preferred platforms. And all this communication must somehow align with broader organizational lan- guage about strategy, values, and purpose. This fragmentation creates what communications scholar James Katz calls “channel complementarity problems”—challenges that emerge when different communication systems don’t effectively complement each other. Information shared in one channel may not reach those who primarily use another. Terminology that evolves in one platform may create confusion when used elsewhere. And the overall linguistic landscape can become so complex that people struggle to integrate messages across channels into coherent understanding. Organizations that successfully navigate this challenge focus on what might be called “metacoherence”—creating sufficient alignment across channels while respecting the unique characteristics of each communica- tion context. They develop shared linguistic foundations that apply across platforms while allowing for appropriate variation in different settings. They establish clear norms about which channels serve which purposes rather than treating all communication platforms as interchangeable. And they create deliberate bridges between different communication environ- ments to ensure critical information and meaning transfers effectively. Patagonia exemplifies this approach through what they call their “voice guidelines.” Rather than prescribing identical language across all contexts, these guidelines establish core principles that inform communication across channels. Their commitment to environmental activism, authentic- ity, and direct language remains consistent whether in formal sustainability reports, social media posts, or internal communications. This consistency
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