1. The problem in practice

Imagine the following scenario. A decision gets made at senior level in the institution. Multiple people agree to “cascade” the information to those who need it. But there’s no agreed route, no designated owner, no single authoritative version. The same information travels through parallel pathways—email, Teams, SharePoint, informal conversations—accumulating reformatting and reinterpretation at each step. Recipients must decode which messages are about the same topic and which version is correct. This pattern reveals how academic communication systems fail in higher education.

The costs accumulate quietly. Hours spent managing redundant communications. Cognitive load from constant context-switching between channels. Mistakes from following outdated or conflicting versions of information. Decisions delayed because nobody’s certain they have the complete picture. Research time diverted to administrative coordination. Teaching preparation rushed because communication overhead consumed the available time.

This isn’t about individual incompetence or poor email habits. It’s about systemic failure. Universities operate communication systems that organisations in other sectors abandoned decades ago because they don’t scale and they waste enormous amounts of time. The dysfunction persists because it’s distributed—nobody sees the full cost, and the people who experience it most acutely typically lack authority to redesign systems.

But the absence of institutional solutions – in a higher education context – doesn’t mean nothing can be done. It means understanding what causes these failures and what individuals at various levels can do to create better practices within their sphere of influence.

2. Why academic communication systems fail

Communication cascades fail because they’re built on faulty assumptions about how information moves through organisations. Organisational charts describe authority relationships, not communication infrastructure but universities seem to see them as channels for information.

The cascade model introduces four structural failures.

Absence of clear accountability

When three people from the same meeting independently agree to share information, nobody owns the communication. There’s no designated person responsible for ensuring the message reaches its destination. Vague collective responsibility means some people forget entirely, others assume someone else has handled it. The message becomes everyone’s job and therefore no one’s job.

Multiple parallel pathways with no coordination

Information travels through different routes simultaneously, but these pathways aren’t coordinated. One person shares to you, another to your line manager, a third forgets. Your line manager then cascades to you again. Nobody knows who else has received the information or through which route. The system treats redundancy as a reliability feature, but it creates noise.

Format fragmentation

Each person reformats the message according to their preferences. One forwards the original email where critical information is buried three levels deep. Another creates a SharePoint news post. A third summarises in Teams. Recipients receive multiple versions through different channels with different subject lines, making it difficult to recognise they’re reading the same update.

Human bottlenecks substituting for infrastructure

Each person in the cascade becomes a relay station. Information can’t reach its destination without passing through multiple individuals, each adding delay. If someone is away or dealing with other priorities, communication stalls. When this happens repeatedly, you realise your role isn’t to add value—it’s to compensate for absent infrastructure.

These problems exist because universities have failed to establish basic communication governance. Other sectors—healthcare, technology, manufacturing—recognised decades ago that ad hoc cascades don’t scale. They invested in communication protocols, designated accountability, and integrated platforms. These solutions are well-documented, proven, and largely standard practice outside higher education.

Why hasn’t higher education adopted them? Universities prioritise autonomy, which translates into resistance to standardised processes. Distributed decision-making means no single authority can mandate infrastructure changes. Technology procurement is fragmented. And academics who experience these dysfunctions don’t typically have positional authority to redesign systems.

But the absence of solutions isn’t inevitable. Better systems exist. The question is what individuals at various levels can do to advocate for and create better practices within their sphere of influence.

3. Principles of effective organisational communication

The structural failures in communication cascades aren’t mysteries. Other sectors have addressed them through four core principles that have become standard practice in healthcare, technology, manufacturing, and professional services. These principles directly counter each problem identified: unclear accountability, uncoordinated pathways, fragmented information, and human bottlenecks.

Clear accountability through defined roles

The RACI framework—Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed—eliminates ambiguity about who owns each communication (there are other frameworks; this is just a suggestion). One person is designated as Accountable for ensuring a message reaches its audience. That person may delegate the Responsible role (who actually sends it) and determine who needs to be Consulted beforehand or Informed afterward. The critical insight is that accountability cannot be collective. When three people agree to share information with no designated owner, the system has failed before anyone clicks send. The framework doesn’t require sophisticated technology. It requires explicit agreement about who owns what.

Single source of truth for information

Rather than allowing the same information to exist in multiple formats across different channels, organisations designate one authoritative location where information lives. Everyone accesses the same version of the message in the same format. Updates happen in one place rather than requiring manual forwarding through human relay stations, each reformatting according to their preferences.

Customer relationship management systems demonstrate this principle. Sales, marketing, and support teams access identical customer records from a single system rather than maintaining separate spreadsheets with conflicting information. The principle extends beyond software; it’s an architectural decision about how information is structured. When universities cascade the same message through email, Teams, and SharePoint with different formatting and subject lines, they’re violating this principle at the most basic level.

Direct communication infrastructure

Instead of cascading messages through multiple human intermediaries, effective organisations create infrastructure that allows information to reach target audiences directly. When senior leadership needs to communicate with programme leads, the system enables direct communication rather than routing through deans, then heads of school, then programme directors. People are removed from roles as relay stations and bottlenecks.

This doesn’t mean eliminating all hierarchical communication. It means distinguishing between communication that requires human judgement and communication that simply needs to reach specific roles. A curriculum change might require discussion through management layers. An administrative deadline does not. Direct infrastructure ensures that humans add value rather than simply forward messages.

Communication governance and standards

Effective organisations establish explicit protocols for different types of communication. They specify which channels serve which purposes, who has authority to communicate on behalf of the organisation, and what approval processes apply to different message types. These standards aren’t bureaucratic obstacles—they’re infrastructure that prevents the chaos of everyone improvising their own approach.

Communication governance includes seemingly simple decisions: Will important announcements go through email, the intranet, or both? Who approves messages before they’re sent? What’s the maximum acceptable time between a decision and its communication? When standards are absent, every communication becomes a new negotiation, and the default becomes whatever feels expedient in the moment.

These principles work because they convert communication from an improvised activity into a designed system. The question for universities isn’t whether these principles are valid—other sectors have proven their effectiveness. The question is how to adapt them to academic contexts where authority is distributed, autonomy is valued, and nobody has the positional power to mandate wholesale change.

That adaptation is possible. It starts with understanding what these principles look like when translated into practices that academics can actually implement at different organisational levels.

4. A practical framework for academic contexts

Adapting these principles for academic communication systems requires acknowledging what makes universities different. Academic culture values autonomy and resists standardisation. Authority is distributed across departments, schools, and faculties. Decisions happen in silos. Most importantly, the academics who experience communication dysfunction most acutely i.e. those responsible for managing programmes, portfolios, and projects, rarely have the positional authority to redesign institutional systems.

The framework must work at multiple levels simultaneously. Individual academics need practices they can implement tomorrow. Small teams need approaches they can pilot without requiring institutional approval. Programme and school leaders need strategies that demonstrate value before seeking wider adoption. And those with institutional influence need evidence-based proposals for systemic change.

Establishing accountability starts with clarity about roles

Before sending any communication, ask: who is accountable for ensuring this reaches the right people? Not “who should probably share this” but “whose job is it to ensure this happens?” For routine communications within your control—module announcements, project updates, team decisions—you can simply declare accountability. “I’m accountable for ensuring this reaches programme leads by Friday” makes expectations explicit.

For communications you don’t control, you can introduce RACI language in discussions. When someone suggests that “we should all share this with our teams,” respond with: “Should we designate one person as accountable for confirming it reaches everyone, with the rest of us as informed?” This reframes vague collective responsibility into explicit roles without requiring formal adoption of RACI frameworks.

Creating a single source of truth begins with choosing one channel

For information within your sphere—your module, your project, your programme—decide where authoritative information lives. Your module information lives in the course LMS, SharePoint document repository, or Google Drive, not scattered across emails, individual OneDrive accounts, or personal laptops. Project decisions live in shared meeting notes, not buried in message threads. Programme updates go through one designated channel, not simultaneously through email, Teams, and SharePoint.

The diagnostic question is simple: if someone needs to find the current, correct version of this information in three months, where would they look? If the answer is “I don’t know” or “they’d have to check multiple places,” you don’t have a single source of truth.

Enabling direct communication requires challenging cascades

When you receive information to “cascade to your team,” ask whether direct communication would work better. Could programme leads receive this directly rather than through multiple nodes in the network? Could the source send one message to a designated distribution list rather than relying on manual forwarding? Often, the cascade exists because nobody questioned whether it was necessary.

Where you have authority to communicate directly to end recipients, do so. Eliminate yourself as a relay station when you’re not adding value beyond forwarding. Where you don’t have that authority, you can still advocate: “This would reach people faster and more reliably if you sent it directly to programme leads rather than cascading through portfolio directors.”

Implementing governance means establishing team agreements

Within any group you coordinate—a teaching team, a research project, a special interest group—you can establish simple communication protocols. Which channel serves which purpose? Who has authority to make decisions? What’s the process for sharing information? These don’t require institutional policy. They require agreement among the people actually working together.

Start by documenting current practice: “Here’s how we currently communicate. Does this work? What would we change?” Often, teams discover they’ve been operating with different assumptions about which channels matter, who needs to be informed, and how quickly people should respond. Making these assumptions explicit is governance, even if it feels informal.

This framework works because it creates pockets of better practice that can expand. The module runs more smoothly. Your programme team wastes less time. Your school demonstrates a more effective approach. Evidence accumulates that better systems are possible. When opportunities arise to influence broader practices—through committee work, strategic planning, or conversations with leadership—you have concrete examples of what works and why it matters.

The question isn’t whether to wait for institutional change or act locally. It’s recognising what you can do at each level of influence, and how those actions connect to broader systemic improvement.

5. What you can actually do

The question isn’t whether better communication systems are theoretically possible. It’s what you can implement from your current position. The strategies below organised by sphere of influence, from immediate individual actions to longer-term institutional advocacy.

Individual level: tomorrow

You control how you send and manage information within your own sphere of influence. Start by applying accountability to your own communications. When you send a message, be explicit about who needs to act and by when. Instead of “Can someone look at this?” write “Sarah, I need your feedback on section 3 by Thursday.” Clear requests eliminate ambiguity and reduce follow-up messages.

Designate a single source of truth for information you control. Your module information lives in one location—the course site (or wherever your team decides is best). When students email questions answered there, respond with: “That information is in the course site under Assessment Guidelines. Here’s the direct link.” You’re not being unhelpful; you’re training people where to find authoritative information rather than treating your inbox as the source of truth.

Stop being a relay station when you’re not adding value. When you receive a message to cascade, ask yourself: am I providing context, filtering for relevance, or just forwarding? If you’re just forwarding, reply to the sender: “This would be more effective sent directly to programme leads rather than cascaded through me. Would you like me to provide their contact details?” Many cascades exist simply because nobody questioned them.

Small team level: this week

For any group you work with regularly—teaching team, research collaboration, project group—propose a brief conversation about communication protocols. Frame it as reducing everyone’s workload: “We spend a lot of time managing messages. Could we spend 15 minutes agreeing on how we communicate?”

The conversation covers three questions: Where does important information live? (Not “everywhere” but one designated place). Who needs to approve decisions before we communicate them? (Establishing accountability). What channel do we use for what purpose? (Governance). Document the agreements and refer back to them when communication issues arise.

This works because you’re not imposing standards; you’re facilitating agreement among peers. You’re asking, not mandating. And you’re framing it as collective benefit, not personal preference. Your team members will likely discover they’ve been operating with different assumptions and welcome the clarity.

Programme and school level: this term

At programme or school level, you likely coordinate communication for a larger group but lack authority to mandate practices. Your approach shifts from implementation to demonstration. Run a pilot that proves better practices work, then use evidence to advocate for broader adoption.

Pilot a single source of truth for programme-level information. Create a simple page or document where key dates, policies, and decisions live. When people ask questions answered there, direct them to it consistently. When you need to share information, post it once and share the link rather than sending full details through multiple channels. Track the questions you receive. If they drop significantly, you have evidence that the approach works.

When you receive cascaded information, create templates that make direct communication easier. “I’ve drafted an email to go directly to module leaders. Would you like to review before I send, or shall I send it on your behalf?” You’re making it easier for people to communicate directly by removing the friction of drafting messages. Often, cascades persist because direct communication feels like more work.

Build buy-in by focusing on time saved rather than principle. “This approach reduced email volume by 40% for the programme team” is more persuasive than “This aligns with RACI framework principles.” Demonstrate value first, explain methodology second.

College and institutional level: longer-term advocacy

Influencing institutional practices requires patience, evidence, and allies. You’re advocating for changes you can’t implement yourself, so your strategies differ.

Document the costs of current practices. How many hours per week does your team spend managing cascaded communications? How often do people receive duplicate information through different channels? Concrete data about wasted time strengthens proposals for better systems. Frame this as opportunity cost: “If we reduced communication overhead by 20%, what could we do with that time?”

Find allies experiencing similar frustrations. You’re not alone in this. Senior lecturers and readers across your institution are managing the same dysfunctional cascades. Build informal coalitions of people willing to pilot better approaches and share results. Collective advocacy is more effective than individual complaints.

When opportunities arise (e.g. at strategic planning discussions, committee work, conversations with leadership) come with specific proposals, not general complaints. “Our current cascade approach creates these measurable problems. Here’s a pilot we ran in our school that reduced communication overhead by X%. Could we test this approach at college level?” is actionable. “Communication is broken” is not.

Be strategic about timing. Proposals gain traction during transitions—new leadership, system reviews, strategic planning cycles. Have your evidence ready before these moments arrive. Position better communication practices as enabling institutional priorities rather than just fixing annoyances.

The reality is that institutional change is slow. But demonstrating better practices at smaller scales creates existence proofs that change is possible. Your programme runs more efficiently. Your school wastes less time. These examples accumulate. And when institutional conversations about communication infrastructure finally happen, you have evidence of what works.

6. Starting tomorrow

The frameworks and principles matter, but meaningful change starts with one specific action. Here’s what to do tomorrow.

Pick one recurring communication you control—a module announcement, team update, or project decision. Apply clear accountability explicitly. Instead of sending information assuming everyone knows what to do with it, state exactly what you need: “Programme leads: please confirm you’ve updated your handbooks by Friday. Reply to this email when complete.” One person is accountable (you), specific people are responsible (programme leads), and everyone knows what action is required.

That’s it. One communication with explicit accountability and clear expectations.

You’ll notice what changes. Fewer follow-up emails asking “What should I do with this?” Fewer messages sent to the wrong people who then forward to the right people. Fewer assumptions about who’s handling what. This single practice—making accountability explicit—eliminates most communication ambiguity.

Once this feels natural, add the second practice: designate where authoritative information lives for something you control. Your course site becomes the single source of truth for your module. Your project folder becomes the reference point for project decisions. When people ask questions answered there, direct them to the location rather than answering directly. You’re not being difficult; you’re training people where to find reliable information.

The signal that it’s working is subtle. You’ll receive fewer “just checking” emails. People will stop asking you questions they could answer themselves. Communication threads will shorten because expectations are clear from the start. Your colleagues might ask what you’re doing differently.

When they ask, share the principle without the jargon. “I’m trying to be clearer about who needs to do what” is more accessible than “I’m implementing RACI frameworks.” Show, don’t explain. Let the reduced confusion speak for itself.

Then identify one team or group where you could propose a 15-minute conversation about communication protocols. Use the approach from section 5: frame it as reducing everyone’s workload, facilitate agreement rather than imposing standards, document what you decide.

Better academic communication systems don’t require institutional mandates. They start with one person deciding that their own communications will be clearer, and demonstrating that clarity reduces everyone’s burden.