Nothing Travels Faster Than Gossip in a Reorg
In every organization, there are two communication plans: the one you draft... and the one whispered over coffee before the deck even loads. Guess which one works faster.
Reports from The Resistance Journal Entry #322
The announcement went out at 10:00 a.m.
By 10:03, it was already wrong.
Someone had misread the org chart. Someone else had filled in the blanks. A third had taken that blank and built an entire conspiracy theory. By lunch, three people had been “eliminated,” two had been “promoted,” and one had allegedly accepted a job in Finland.
None of it was true.
This is the physics of change: nothing moves faster than gossip in a reorg. Not the official email. Not the SharePoint update. Certainly not the “FAQ document” that Legal spent five days redlining. Gossip breaks the speed limit. It doesn’t wait for alignment. It thrives in ambiguity and dines on silence.
And we - change professionals, communicators, well-meaning middle managers - keep forgetting that.
We treat communication like a faucet. Turn it on. Turn it off. Schedule the drip. But the humans? The humans are already downstream, passing notes and connecting dots that may not even exist.
“I heard Finance is taking over Ops.”
“Apparently Marketing is merging with… Facilities?”
“Someone said we’re being bought by a private equity firm owned by Tony Stark’s cousin.”
“Oh yeah, I knew this was coming. Saw it in someone’s calendar.”
I’ve come to respect gossip, not admire it, but respect it. Gossip isn’t the enemy. It’s the unofficial communications channel of every organization. A barometer of trust. A warning flare. And sometimes, oddly enough, a survival strategy.
When people don’t have information, they make it up. When they don’t feel safe, they whisper. When they see change happening to them—not with them—they reach for certainty wherever they can find it.
Even if it’s from a guy named Brent who “heard something from his buddy in HR.”
So we can either try to outrun it - which we won’t - or we can engage it. Acknowledge the swirl. Communicate early. Communicate again. And when in doubt, go on camera and say the part out loud.
Final Thought
In times of change, people don’t wait to be informed. They fill the silence with story. If we don’t shape the narrative, the rumor mill will. And trust me - it doesn’t fact-check. It just forwards.
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