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Information-Starvation

4 min readStatus:Seedling

Information starvation is the organisational pathology where teams lack sufficient context — about strategy, priorities, their own performance, or the rationale behind decisions — to do their work effectively.

It is a structural failure, not an individual one. Teams do not starve because engineers are uninquisitive; they starve because the Manager-as-Communication-Hub has stopped functioning.

Causes

  • Hub failure: When managers fail to translate information across organisational boundaries, context stops flowing. Engineers are left operating on assumptions.
  • Deliberate opacity: Leaders who withhold information to preserve optionality or control inadvertently create anxiety and speculation.
  • Busyness and neglect: Information sharing requires active effort. Without deliberate systems — recurring updates, explicit context-setting — it defaults to zero.
  • Hierarchical hoarding: Information asymmetry between management and rank-and-file employees is a well-documented phenomenon. Firms with larger manager-employee expectation gaps show lower future performance and higher executive turnover (Bergh et al., 2019).

Symptoms

  • Rumours and the Grapevine: When official channels go silent, informal networks fill the vacuum with distorted, anxiety-amplified versions of reality. Research estimates approximately 70% of organisational communication flows through informal grapevine channels — this figure rises sharply when formal communication fails. The grapevine surges under ambiguity, uncertainty, and fear (Davis, 1953).
  • Reactive decision-making: Teams without strategic context default to local optimisation, producing work that is technically correct but strategically misaligned.
  • Disengagement and attrition risk: Employees who feel uninformed also feel undervalued. Information starvation is a leading contributor to disengagement.
  • Political paranoia: When people don’t know why decisions are made, they manufacture explanations — usually conspiratorial ones.

The Grapevine as Diagnostic Signal

Lopp treats the Grapevine not as a nuisance to suppress but as a symptom to read. A thriving rumour mill signals that official information channels are inadequate. Managers who invest energy in rumour-control rather than root-cause communication are treating the fever, not the infection.

Remedies

  • Over-communicate deliberately: Default to sharing, not withholding. Use Alignment-vs-Informational-Meetings purposefully to push context downward.
  • Explain the “why”: Decisions shared without rationale breed speculation. Rationale shared alongside decisions builds trust.
  • Name what you can’t share: When information is genuinely sensitive, acknowledging its existence (“I can’t share the details yet, but here’s what I can tell you”) is far less damaging than silence.
  • Use Managementese as a warning sign: Corporate language that obscures rather than clarifies is often a leading indicator that a manager has lost the habit of genuine communication.

Sources

  • Lopp, Michael (2019). Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager. 3rd ed. Apress. ISBN: 978-1-484-23712-4.

  • Bergh, Donald D., David J. Ketchen, Ilaria Orlandi, Pursey P. M. A. R. Heugens, and Brian K. Boyd (2019). “Information Asymmetry in Management Research: Past Accomplishments and Future Opportunities.” Journal of Management, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 122–158.

  • Davis, Keith (1953). “Management Communication and the Grapevine.” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 31, No. 5, pp. 43–49.

    • Seminal research establishing the grapevine as a pervasive informal communication channel, particularly active when formal channels fail.

  • Kim, Young, and Nur Uysal (2025). “Transparent Communication and Employee Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Workplace Sense of Community in Enhancing Voice, Loyalty, and Positive Work Behaviors.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

  • Deloitte (2024). “The Transparency Paradox: Could Less Be More When It Comes to Trust?” Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Report.

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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