The Worst Game of Telephone Ever Played

On institutional strategy, operational reality, and everything that gets lost in between.

Remember playing telephone as a child? Someone whispers a message to the person sitting next to them, who whispers it to the next person, and so on until the last person announces what they heard. Inevitably, the final message bears little resemblance to the original, and everyone laughs at how spectacularly the whole thing fell apart.

I've come to think that higher education institutions play a remarkably similar game, except ours has considerably more participants, far greater consequences, and no one seems particularly amused when the message arrives completely mangled.

We play it every day.

An institutional priority begins as a strategic conversation among senior leaders. By the time it moves through several organizational levels, departments, committees, and implementation teams, its original purpose may have been reduced to a collection of tasks, deadlines, and expectations. The people responsible for carrying it out may understand exactly what they've been asked to do without fully understanding what the institution was trying to accomplish.

And the game works in reverse, too.

A frontline professional identifies a problem, perhaps one that has implications far beyond their immediate responsibilities. The concern moves through supervisors, directors, and administrative channels, gradually becoming a status update, a performance metric, or a recommendation that no longer conveys the complexity of what the person closest to the work actually understood.

By the time the message reaches its destination, everyone may have communicated exactly what they were supposed to communicate. But somewhere along the way, we've lost the meaning.

And unlike the childhood game, the consequences aren't particularly funny.

Different Views of the Same Institution

I've spent enough time in higher education leadership to appreciate the importance of institutional strategy. We spend considerable energy developing plans, establishing priorities, allocating resources, and determining how to position our institutions for the future. These are necessary responsibilities, and I don't mean to diminish them.

But I've also spent enough time close to the operational work of higher education to recognize that the institution we describe in our strategic plans is not always the institution that people experience in practice.

There is an enormous amount of intelligence embedded in the everyday work of our institutions. It's in the financial aid counselor who understands how a seemingly straightforward policy change will affect students whose circumstances don't fit neatly into established processes. It's in the registrar who recognizes that a proposed solution will create unintended consequences three steps downstream. It's in the admissions professional who knows that an enrollment strategy may look perfectly reasonable in a planning meeting but will require a very different set of resources and relationships to implement successfully.

These professionals aren't necessarily challenging institutional strategy. More often, they're trying to make it work. And because they're exceptionally good at what they do, the institution continues functioning, often without leadership fully appreciating the judgment, experience, and improvisation required to keep it that way.

I've sometimes wondered whether those of us in leadership mistake organizational functionality for evidence that our strategies and systems are working exactly as intended. We see the outcomes, review the performance indicators, and report progress against institutional goals. But we don't always see the extraordinary amount of human competence that exists between the strategy and the outcome.

And when that competence is quiet, we may be especially unlikely to notice it.

I don't think this is simply a story about disconnected executives and underappreciated staff. That would be too easy, and frankly, it would overlook the very real complexity of institutional leadership.

Senior leaders often possess information about financial constraints, competing institutional priorities, external pressures, and long-term strategy that may not be visible to the people responsible for implementation. Frontline professionals, meanwhile, possess detailed knowledge about how institutional processes actually work, where they break down, and what students experience when they encounter them.

Neither perspective is inherently more legitimate, and neither is complete. The challenge is that we don't always have effective ways of bringing those perspectives into meaningful conversation.

When the Message Changes Along the Way

Here's where I think our institutional game of telephone becomes more complicated than the childhood version.

Sometimes the message changes because people misunderstand it. But sometimes people understand the message perfectly well and change it anyway.

A director might soften an operational concern because they don't want their supervisor to perceive their unit as struggling. A vice president might simplify a strategic directive because they believe staff don't need to know the full institutional context. A manager might omit a complication because they don't want to delay a decision that leadership has already made.

And sometimes, the information is filtered because people have learned through experience which observations are welcome and which are not.

This isn't necessarily evidence of bad intentions. People make judgments about what information matters, what their colleagues need to know, and how best to communicate within the constraints of their positions. Some filtering is necessary. No institution could function if every conversation required a complete account of every consideration.

But there is a difference between simplifying information and removing the very context that gives it meaning.

I wonder how often we recognize when we've crossed that line.

We talk frequently about improving communication within our institutions, but perhaps our challenge isn't always that people are poor communicators. Perhaps we've developed organizational habits that reward the efficient movement of information without asking whether understanding has survived the journey.

Or, more uncomfortably, perhaps we've taught people which parts of the message are safe to repeat.

Translation Is More Than Communication

This is why I've become increasingly interested in the work of institutional translation.

Communication can tell someone what decision was made. Translation helps them understand why it matters, what assumptions informed it, and how it intersects with realities that may not have been considered.

And meaningful translation works in both directions.

Sometimes it means helping a frontline professional understand the institutional constraints behind a decision they find frustrating. Other times, it means helping senior leadership recognize that a perfectly reasonable strategic direction may be based on an incomplete understanding of how the work actually happens.

That second responsibility can be considerably more uncomfortable.

Translation requires more than the ability to explain something clearly. It requires enough institutional understanding to recognize the significance of different perspectives, enough curiosity to examine assumptions, and enough professional courage to communicate something that may not be particularly welcome.

It also requires the humility to recognize that the translator's own understanding may be incomplete.

We tend to associate this work with middle management. Certainly, directors, associate directors, assistant directors, managers, and other functional leaders frequently occupy positions where they're expected to interpret institutional priorities while navigating the practical realities of implementation.

But I've known people with impressive titles who were remarkably ineffective at this work, just as I've known staff members without formal leadership authority who possessed an extraordinary ability to see how institutional decisions and processes intersected.

Which makes me think that translation is both an organizational responsibility and a professional capacity.

We can assign responsibility for it through formal roles, but we can also develop the capacity across positions, functions, and levels of authority.

And I wonder whether we've been intentional enough about doing either.

Higher education invests in leadership development, strategic planning, technology, and data infrastructure. We train people to supervise employees, manage budgets, develop programs, and evaluate performance. These are important capabilities, but how deliberately do we develop professionals who can recognize the institutional significance of operational knowledge? Who can move between strategic and functional perspectives without losing the meaning of either? Who can help colleagues understand not simply what they're being asked to do, but why the work matters and how it connects to the larger institution?

I suspect many institutions depend heavily on people who possess these abilities without ever formally recognizing that translation is part of the work they're doing.

And when we fail to recognize a capacity, we are less likely to develop it, support it, or understand what happens when the people who possess it leave.

Are We Prepared to Hear the Message?

But I also wonder whether we fully appreciate what we're asking for when we say we want better communication between institutional levels.

Meaningful translation doesn't simply make information easier to understand. It can expose contradictions, challenge decisions, and reveal that the people closest to the work see problems differently from those responsible for setting direction.

We may say we want that kind of understanding, but are we prepared for what happens when it complicates a strategy we've already committed to? And perhaps just as importantly, are we willing to recognize and support the people who bring us those uncomfortable perspectives, rather than treating their observations as obstacles to progress?

I don't think we can eliminate the distance between strategy and practice, nor should we necessarily want to. Different roles provide different perspectives, and those differences can be valuable. But I do think we can become more deliberate about what happens in the space between them.

That begins with recognizing that institutional understanding doesn't flow exclusively from the top down, and that operational knowledge is not simply information to be collected and summarized for leadership. It is a form of institutional intelligence that can challenge assumptions, inform strategy, and reveal possibilities that might otherwise remain invisible.

It also means recognizing that translation isn't simply the responsibility of people who happen to occupy middle-management positions. It's a capacity we can cultivate throughout an institution, even as we create clearer expectations for those whose formal roles place them between strategy and implementation.

Perhaps most importantly, it requires those of us with positional authority to remain genuinely open to what translation might reveal. If we only welcome information that confirms our existing understanding, we're not really listening. And if we expect people to translate institutional reality honestly, we have to be prepared for the possibility that what they tell us will complicate our plans.

I've become increasingly convinced that some of the most consequential work in higher education happens in these spaces between functions, perspectives, and levels of authority. Yet much of that work remains informal, invisible, and dependent on the particular individuals who happen to be doing it.

So here's what I'm wondering:

Where in your institution does meaningful translation actually happen? Is it a responsibility you've formally assigned, a capacity you've intentionally developed, or work that certain people have simply learned to do because someone had to?

And perhaps more importantly, are we listening to what those translators are trying to tell us?