CASE STUDY: Creating an Organizational Communication Culture (FATHOM, Summer 2026)
By Dean Brenner, Kendra Raguckas, and Will Ricketson - VIEW & DOWNLOAD the magazine version of this issue of FATHOM
In all industries, communication matters — for innovation, for efficiency, and for value. And the roadblocks to great communication are real… and everywhere. Especially for large, complex organizations facing rapidly evolving environments. It is imperative that organizations deal with those roadblocks head on, to make sure information is flowing to the right people, at the times, and in the right ways.
In this issue, we explore a real-life case study of the solutions The Latimer Group was able to provide for a medium-sized aerospace company facing strong headwinds.
Enjoy!
The Problem
In the aerospace industry, speed has become a market signal.
In this highly-regulated space, companies are contending with rapidly changing geopolitical issues, severe price pressures, and the need to make large business bets that can have major consequences. For aerospace and defense firms competing for multibillion-dollar programs, organizational speed is no longer merely an operational concern; it is a strategic capability.
One medium-sized U.S.-based aerospace company, which we’ll call XYZ CORP, generates more than $10 billion in annual revenue and employs tens of thousands of people across the United States. Its multiple business units reflect the way it has expanded over decades through corporate acquisitions, resulting in a highly siloed structure.
For years, that decentralized model worked reasonably well; from a leadership perspective, these autonomous units minimized the disruption that often occurs after acquisition and preserved each unit’s culture of innovation. At the same time, XYZ CORP had made massive investments in manufacturing technology to increase speed and keep up with a fast-moving industry, leaving the company highly leveraged even as the payoffs from those investments remained unclear.
Facing these pressures within a rapidly consolidating industry, the company’s leadership recognized that the organization needed to become faster and more efficient.
They increasingly saw that the company was losing business not because it lacked technical capability, but because it lacked organizational coherence.
At the same time, the siloed nature of the business meant that even identifying the shortcomings was difficult, because no single group could see the full scope of the problem.
Then artificial intelligence entered the conversation.
The company had moved aggressively into generative AI without first grounding these investments in a strategic plan: they had purchased tools to say they had them, but failed to decide what problems the tools were solving and if they were the right tools.
It was a decision based in competitive pressure andan assumption common among large enterprises at the time: AI would accelerate productivity, improve efficiency, and help eliminate bottlenecks.
But without a strong strategic framework, the implementation of AI into XYZ CORP’s work led to concerns throughout the organization. Leadership worried about regulation and cybersecurity. Middle management was concerned about the accuracy of information being produced and felt unsure what kind of guidance to provide their teams. Individuals feared that the technology would soon eliminate their jobs entirely.
XYZ CORP soon approved a generative AI platform that had significant restrictions. The platform alleviated leadership fears about confidentiality and I.P. theft, but middle managers received little practical guidance on when and how to use it. Employees, meanwhile, encountered mixed messaging: leadership encouraged AI adoption while simultaneously warning about risk.
Predictably, workers gravitated toward the safest and easiest ways of using AI: to draft emails, prepare slide decks, and summarize meetings.
While AI did improve efficiency, it also created new issues.
Employees increasingly passed AI-generated content forward with minimal editing or critical review. Managers began noticing documents that looked polished but lacked analytical depth, contextual understanding, or operational specificity — requiring more intensive reviewing and correcting at higher levels.
The productivity gains achieved initially were being offset by these burdens of oversight and revision.
Much of the public conversation surrounding generative AI has focused on productivity gains. Early research demonstrated measurable improvements in speed and output volume, particularly among less experienced workers. For instance, a National Bureau of Economic Research study found that generative
AI tools improved productivity among customer- support agents by roughly 15%, with the largest gains occurring among lower-skilled employees.1* But emerging research also suggests that productivity gains are uneven and context dependent.
Researchers have increasingly identified the phenomenon of AI-generated communication materials as “workslop” — AI-generated output that appears complete but shifts cognitive labor onto others in the organization.2 Another study showed that generative AI frequently shifts human labor away from production and toward evaluation and correction — a dynamic that can create hidden productivity losses inside complex organizations.3 This may account for the findings of a recent report from the MIT Media Lab, showing that 95% of companies using AI have seen zero return from their investment in the technology.4
For XYZ CORP, AI didn’t just represent a challenge with the technology — it had revealed deep weaknesses in the way the company approached communication and amplified the issues it was already facing with its siloed functions and communication.
Before AI, XYZ CORP’s siloed teams already struggled to share information effectively. Generative AI simply exacerbated these weaknesses as the organization became faster at generating content, without becoming better at coordinating decisions.
Split decisions
How did these problems emerge in practice?
In one instance, an external project failed because two leaders had fundamentally different ideas about a go-to-market strategy. While both were integrally involved in the strategy, the directions they gave their teams were at odds. One leader told his team to streamline internal processes to create expense reduction and more financial agility. The other told her team to make sure customer support resources were intact and trained up. It took a while before the conflict was identified, and it delayed the strategy hitting the marketplace for a year — a major disappointment for the client.
Another internal project stalled because two teams, both relevant to the outcome, were working independently, each unaware of what the other was doing. The project involved streamlining manufacturing processes and spaces. One team was trying to solve for process with changes to the space. The other team was trying to solve for space with changes to process. Work was replicated, time was wasted, and some of the outputs from the different teams conflicted with each other. The result was significant losses of time and resources.
In both examples, the disconnect in communication created both dissension and disruption, as teams and departments blamed each other and both leaders and reports refused to take accountability for the breakdown.
Even when the issues were identified, the company lacked the organizational structure to find a path to resolve and rectify these issues. And the company’s use of AI only added to the problem: communication quality became sacrificed to speed. In other words, nuance and stakeholder understanding had been completely lost.
Taking stock
XYZ CORP knew they had a problem — but the problem was so deeply entrenched and difficult to diagnose internally that they were struggling to fully define the problem, much less find a solution.
The Latimer Group had a long-standing relationship with XYZ CORP, mostly from prior engagements providing leadership development program workshops and high-end executive coaching for senior leaders. While employee communications training had been reduced in recent years, the relationship remained strong. XYZ CORP extended an invitation to The Latimer Group to provide an opinion on roadblocks and potential paths forward.
From the outset, Latimer focused on the communications issues and their related impacts. In addition, leadership asked Latimer to work on solving the external issue laid out above — with the goal of scaling up that solution across the company, including to the teams that had struggled with the internal project. This narrow scope allowed us to drill deep into what had gone wrong, and why.
Our work began with a process to uncover friction points and communication gaps, from multiple perspectives. By “audience mapping” these perspectives, we could define what success might look like and identify behavior changes. We used a combination of discussion and survey data to pressure-test and validate each observation from multiple points.
The fact-finding took place across multiple stages:
Stage 1: We conducted extensive interviews with the two leaders, meeting with each one separately. What were the issues? What was the genesis of the issues? What were the impacts of the issues?
Stage 2: We then expanded our interviews to a select group of project leaders for each team, interviewing the two teams separately. This allowed us to validate what we learned from the leaders and to expand and enrich our understanding from multiple perspectives.
Stage 3: We undertook roundtable discussions with a broad section of each team, separately. These discussions further deepened our knowledge of what had happened, and why.
Stage 4: We then conducted blind surveys of everyone involved to validate one more time what we were learning.
Our findings
Our interviews all confirmed myriad problems that the company faced.
Most significant was the lack of history or expectation of cross-team or cross-business unit collaboration. Each business unit operated as their own “company,” with their own processes and procedures — independence that meant that they did not work well with other business units.
Across XYZ CORP, effective communication and collaboration had long been deprioritized. They had neither implemented communication standards nor worked to develop a culture of continuous improvement in communications.
Relatedly, the company had developed a broken meeting culture: too many meetings that started and ended late, were required of too many people, and had no clear purpose.
Latimer offered a detailed report of the issues and high-level solutions for the teams involved in the external project, as well as for company leadership. In our factfinding, a key discovery was that a “I’m right, you’re wrong” mentality had pervaded the siloed units, creating a barrier both to understanding the issues and creating solutions. Our goal was to offer a depersonalized assessment that would allow all parties to see the issue as one of business outcomes, rather than internal competition — and create a mindset of “this must change.”
Based on this assessment, XYZ CORP charged Latimer with constructing a more detailed roll-out plan for the teams involved in this particular situation, with an eye to implementing more broadly if successful.
Chief among Latimer’s findings was that these teams had struggled to work together not because of any technical incompetence, but because inconsistent communication across the business units made collaboration itself taxing, both cognitively and emotionally. A recent study has shown the crucial role that communication plays in building a functional team environment that is supportive of innovation, with teams characterized by information sharing, collaboration, and balanced participation significantly outperforming teams lacking these communication norms.5* Creating a standard of communication behaviors would allow team members to focus less on how they worked together, and more on what they wanted to accomplish.
Putting solutions in place
Latimer recommended a new communication framework consisting of three major elements:
A set of desired individual communication behaviors. This would offer each employee a template of what good communication looks like, including a blueprint for stakeholder understanding and effective information sharing.
A set of desired group communication behaviors, including a playbook for “meeting culture behaviors” and processes for cross-functional collaboration.
Defined guidance on when to use A.I. tools for communication purposes, aiming for a machine- human partnership that enhances rather than creates communication.
In implementing these elements, Latimer focused first on working directly with the teams involved. We engaged them in full workshop training using our time-tested models for active, measurable practice and improvement in communications, and followed up with individualized coaching. Through this training and coaching, we mapped out a set of behavior changes that were shared by all, along with metrics to gauge both individual and unit success in implementing these behavior changes.
Along the way, we tracked progress with data and satisfaction surveys. These were taken before any training or coaching began; at each step of the training process; and at 3- and 6-month intervals. As we assessed the findings, we added additional training and coaching to address any issues that cropped up along the way.
Through this training and coaching, we mapped out a set of behavior changes that were shared by all, along with metrics to gauge both individual and unit success in implementing these behavior changes.
The pilot program was just a start: based on results, a similar program was planned to roll out company- wide. Crucially, both the pilot program and the company-wide program required detailed timelines, check-ins, and accountability plans: all to ensure that, whatever the business unit culture, the behavioral and communication norms could be integrated and followed successfully. The training and coaching approach might vary based on each unit’s culture and current communications behavior, but the outcomes needed to be the same. Latimer’s expertise in working across many types of organizations and companies allowed for this flexible but cohesive approach.
In the months following these changes across the company, Latimer continued to monitor XYZ CORP’s progress. We saw measurable improvements. Communications across units improved, making coordination in bids and projects smoother, more efficient and faster, and more successful.
Clear expectations for AI use allowed employees to take advantage of its benefits as a communication aid without outsourcing their thinking to the tool — reducing the need for intensive review on the managerial and leadership level.
Across the organization, meetings had become more efficient and outcome-oriented. And as the most urgent issues began to be resolved, XYZ CORP was able to continue to refine its processes and make ongoing improvements in its communication.
While the situation XYZ CORP faced had elements specific to its industry, many of its problems are endemic throughout all industries — the difficulty of integrating communications in units that may have evolved independently, the rush to implement AI into business practices without creating a thoughtful structure for its deployment, and internal blindness toward institutionalized inefficiencies.
At The Latimer Group, we are deeply familiar with the barriers that keep organizations from reaching their full potential. Entrenched power dynamics and hierarchies can obscure a frank accounting of issues, and communication barriers can keep information from flowing freely. Like XYZ CORP, many organizations with these issues can work well— until they don’t. In today’s world, with the advent of AI and the ever-increasing speed and volume of information, creating a communication culture that is clear, structured, and shared is vital. We can help.
