In the hallway, late on Thursday, someone tells a bit of information about your product that is 100% provably not true. You laugh, wink at the person, and say, “That’s goofy. What reasonable human would believe that?” And that conversation moves on.

Two hours later, different locations, different humans, and different contexts. Same exact piece of provably false information is shared with you. Your brain mentally perks up because here’s this laughable bit of data you’ve heard twice in the same day. Now, you’re curious. Now, you ask questions, “Weird. Where’d you hear that?”

To which they honestly say, “I don’t know.”

Twenty-four hours later, this silly bit of information is your entire life. It’s all you are focused on. You’ve had two meetings with stakeholders to strategize how to counteract this immortal lie.

It’s a Contagion, and while I can not tell you how to fix it, you must understand the rules, behaviors, and personalities influencing and contributing to its creation and why it thrives.

An Incomplete List of the Communication Rules

There are rules which govern communication in large groups of humans. Habits or tendencies are a better word, but I call these rules because of the significance of their impact. While these certainly apply to very large groups of humans, for this piece, I’m focused on the groups of humans within a company. This is an incomplete list of rules.

• The amount of information created, interpreted, and shipped around a group of humans is a function of the number of humans in the group.
• Similarly, the amount of noise introduced into a given piece of information increases as a function of the number of humans exposed to it.
• Simpler thoughts travel farther faster.
• The higher the perceived value of a piece of information, the faster it moves amongst a group of humans.
• The perceived value of a piece of information is terrifically situational. For example, you would care a lot to know a layoff is coming to your company. You’d be curious to learn there was a layoff in a different but similar company, and you wouldn’t care much to learn that a jean factory in Austin, Texas, had a layoff.
• Humans hate (hate!) not knowing things. In the absence of information, humans tend to make things up to fill the vacuum. This is generally considered but is not always framed as gossip.
• The further information travels from the source, the harder it becomes to confirm its veracity and source.
• The higher the stress of a group of humans, the more they are willing to accept increasingly goofy explanations for that stress.
• The quality of a piece of information decreases by 10%((Some)) each time it crosses a significant communication membrane. These significant membranes are: from one team (or organization) to another, up or down one level of an org chart, or when information is transferred between humans who are strangers. There are many contributions to the degradation, including the complexity of the thought, the transmission medium (in-person — low degradation, email — higher), the distance from the source, and, sadly, the time it takes to explain the thought.
• With each hop, humans tend to tweak information in their favor.
• Finally, humans tend to create echo chambers full of partial truth because: Humans like to hear things they agree with from people they know, and humans don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with, especially from strangers.

Network Nodes

I will describe two critical information networks in a moment, but to understand their construction, you need to understand the constituent parts of a network. There is the information traveling the network, the rules which govern how the information moves (described above), and finally, there are the nodes, the humans, which comprise the network. I see four types of nodes: