New information doesn’t matter if people don’t trust the source. Obvious. And yet, it seems few organizations spend much time trying to figure out how to address that problem.
One department has some insights to share with others, yet the other departments have decided long ago that anything produced by those people in Education, Visitor Services, or you-name-the-department is compromised. It’s dismissed before it ever reaches an inbox or appears on a meeting agenda.
It’s one of those problems that are so pervasive people can almost forget they’re problems at all. The idea that knowledge wouldn’t be routinely dismissed is what’s novel. That we might even try to address the tendency is viewed as suspect, like pointing out that the background noise everyone’s learned to talk over could actually be quieter.
Only 14% of organizations rate their internal knowledge sharing as satisfactory. When researchers dug into why, they expected to find motivational barriers — people hoarding knowledge, refusing to share, that sort of thing. What they found instead was relational. The bottleneck was never data quality — it's the relationship quality between the people producing or sharing insights and the people invited to act on them.
Staff skepticism about handed-over findings isn’t irrational. People don’t resist evidence so much as they resist having no voice in the conditions under which the evidence was cultivated. The solution, though, is not involving everyone in the research itself, which would be impractical. It’s further upstream — defining together the terms by which findings are interpreted.
Imagine a group of people who have to share meals every day. Everyone wants their preferences accounted for, but you don’t want to have everyone cooking every meal together. Instead, you need everyone to agree on what’s on the menu. That way, when you serve salad for lunch one day, you know that the people who want to eat steak at every meal will complain, but at least you’re able to remind them that steak will be served, but “you agreed in June that sometimes we would serve salad. Did something change that now leads you to believe that salad should never be served or that steak is the only fuel you and other members of the group should rely on?”
You might think you’re already doing this. It’s true that many institutions follow a pattern of presenting findings and opening the floor. But inviting discussion about conclusions someone else has already drawn is a different act than building the frame together before there are findings to discuss.
When people share ownership of the frame, even unwelcome conclusions become workable — procedural justice research actually finds the effect is strongest when the outcome isn’t what people wanted to hear. (The salad reminder really works.)
The implications for external research firms (including MaP) run deeper. When institutions can’t build shared sense-making capacity, they hire someone to do the sense-making for them — which is how most consulting engagements begin. The demand for outside partners can itself be a symptom of the relational breakdown. It’s possible that, to some degree, external firms depend on this dynamic. The engagement with an external partner that actually changes something isn’t the one with the best report. It’s the one that leaves the institution better able to do the problem framing together, whether or not the external partner is still in the room.
The rare version of this isn’t collaborative research design — lots of institutions do that to some degree. It’s the harder conversation: agreeing before anyone collects data on what the findings would mean and what they’d require you to change. If your institution is having that conversation, or you’re trying to figure out how to start it, leave a comment or get in touch.
This post explores a concept from the reference garden. For sources and the fuller conceptual treatment: Action Gaps vs. Information Gaps