Why is cascade a flawed medium , which medium ( or media ) without imperfection have replaced it ?

Paul

In reply to my interlocuter, cascade is a flawed medium because its origins lie in the once (but no longer) fertile soils of the command and control industrial/military organisational model. No, honestly, bear with me. I know I sound like a raving Socialist Worker but I’m not. Command and control is increasingly not the way we like to see ourselves working. We have been taught that we are empowered. We have been schooled in the joys of bettering ourselves through choice. We have been freed by the interweb 2.0 to pass comment on everything including occasionally things we know anything about. These concepts sit increasingly uneasily with the way we are treated at work. To take the cascade metaphor, it is to say the least unsophisticated and out of step with the spirit of the times to cascade waterfalls of information in the hope that you irrigate the right people without really bothering with a robust mechanism for reaping what you sow. Metaphor ends.

What is better? Three things. Thing one is talk to people in person, as often as you can. Nothing ever beats this provided that you are also prepared to listen and to be honest about what you’ll do as a result.

Thing two is fix the y axis communication so that there’s an authentic flow of information back up (or whatever the word is that helps water flow up hill; pumping action, I suppose). Either that, or don’t enter into the pretence that that’s what you’re doing in the knowledge that you don’t really want to know what the consumers of your information think.

And thing three is be alive to the fact that the x axis is already alive and kicking in your company (you probably know it as the rumour mill, or gossip) so it would be as well to harness this in some intelligent way. 75% of the information in your company is carried in this way. A really smart way of tapping into this is to …

Ha!Ha! I see what you did there. You tried to trick me into giving out my years of insight and hard-won knowledge for free on my blog. I wasn’t born yesterday, matey boy.