How the Whisper Game Influences Organizations
From the Telephone Game to the Boardroom:
Why Leaders Need Communication Protocols
Introduction: A Childhood Game With Serious Lessons
When I was a child, one of our favourite classroom games was deceptively simple. We would sit in a long chain, shoulder to shoulder. The teacher whispered a sentence into the ear of the first student, who then turned to the next and repeated what they had heard. The whisper travelled down the line until the last student stood up and announced the message aloud. Without fail, the final version bore little resemblance to the original. A phrase about “the cat chasing a butterfly” might emerge as “the captain buys a pie.” We laughed at the absurdity, but the game revealed something profound: messages change as they move through people.
At the time, it was just fun. As an adult working in leadership development, I see it differently. That game was a living metaphor for one of the greatest challenges leaders faces: ensuring that what they communicate is what others actually hear, remember, and act upon. In organizations, the stakes are far higher than a classroom giggle. Distorted communication can derail strategies, erode trust, and create costly misalignment.
This post explores what science tells us about why messages change, how this plays out in organizations, and what leaders can do to protect clarity. Along the way, we’ll revisit classic psychological experiments, modern digital studies, and practical leadership lessons.
The Science of Distorted Messages
Long before organizational psychologists began studying communication in the workplace, experimental psychology had already revealed a fundamental truth: messages do not travel intact. They bend, shrink, and reshape themselves as they pass from one person to another. To understand why, we can look at three pivotal strands of research, each conducted in a different era, each pointing to the same conclusion.
The first comes from Frederic Bartlett’s serial reproduction experiments in 1932. Bartlett asked participants to read a Native American folk tale, The War of the Ghosts, and then retell it to someone else, who retold it again, and so on. What emerged was not a faithful reproduction but a gradual transformation. Unfamiliar details—canoes, spirits, and cultural references—were dropped or replaced with more familiar ones. Supernatural elements disappeared, and the story became shorter, simpler, and more aligned with the cultural expectations of the participants. Bartlett’s insight was revolutionary: memory is not a recording device but a reconstruction process. Each retelling is shaped by the schemas—the mental frameworks—of the storyteller. The telephone game we played as children was, in fact, a live demonstration of Bartlett’s principle.
Two decades later, Gordon Allport and Leo Postman took this further with their studies of rumor transmission, published in 1947. They observed how rumors spread in groups and identified three consistent processes: leveling (details are dropped), sharpening (certain details are exaggerated), and assimilation (information is reshaped to fit cultural biases). Their most famous experiment involved showing participants an image of a white man holding a razor while arguing with a Black man. As the image was described down the chain, many participants eventually misremembered the razor as being in the Black man’s hand—a stark demonstration of how stereotypes and social biases infiltrate memory and communication. The lesson here was sobering: distortion is not random. It follows predictable patterns, often reinforcing the cultural assumptions of the group.
Fast forward to the digital age, and the same principles reappear in new form. In 2019, researchers studied message distortion in information cascades online, simulating how short news-like messages spread through chains of participants. The results were strikingly familiar. Accuracy decayed rapidly, often within just a few steps. Emotional or moral elements of the message were far more likely to survive than neutral details. And perhaps most troubling, participants often grew more confident in the distorted versions than in the original. In other words, the digital telephone game doesn’t just change the message—it amplifies the parts that resonate emotionally and gives people a false sense of certainty about them. In an era of social media, this explains why misinformation spreads so quickly: what survives is not what is most accurate, but what is most engaging.
Taken together, these three lines of research form a coherent picture. Bartlett showed us that individuals reconstruct stories through the lens of their own schemas. Allport and Postman revealed that groups reshape messages in systematic ways, influenced by cultural biases. The 2019 cascade studies demonstrated that digital networks accelerate and amplify these distortions, privileging emotion over fact and confidence over accuracy. The lesson is clear: distortion is not an accident of poor communication—it is a fundamental feature of how humans process, remember, and transmit information.
For leaders, this insight is both humbling and empowering. It is humbling because it means that no matter how carefully you craft your message, it will not survive unchanged as it travels through your organization. But it is empowering because once you understand the forces at play—reconstruction, bias, and emotional amplification—you can design communication systems that anticipate and counteract them. The telephone game is not just a childhood memory; it is a mirror of organizational life. And the science behind it gives us the tools to lead with clarity in a world where distortion is inevitable.
Why This Matters for Leaders
Organizations are, at their core, networks of conversations. Strategies are not executed by documents alone; they live and breathe through the words leaders share, the interpretations managers make, and the stories employees tell one another. This means that every organization is, in effect, a giant version of the telephone game. Messages rarely travel in a straight line from the top to the bottom. Instead, they cascade through layers of people, each adding their own emphasis, interpretation, or omission. By the time a message reaches the front line, it may bear only a passing resemblance to what was originally intended.
Leaders often fall into the trap of believing that clarity at the source guarantees clarity at the destination. After all, if you’ve spent hours refining a strategy statement or carefully explaining a decision, it feels obvious that others will understand it as you do. Yet research consistently shows that senders overestimate how well their messages are understood. Psychologists call this the “curse of knowledge”: once you know something, it becomes almost impossible to imagine what it’s like not to know it. This blind spot makes leaders assume their words are self-explanatory, when in reality they are open to multiple interpretations.
The costs of this illusion of clarity are significant. When messages distort, teams can end up pulling in different directions, each convinced they are acting on the leader’s intent. Strategic misalignment is one outcome, but so is the erosion of trust. Employees who hear conflicting versions of the same message begin to question whether leadership is disorganized or even disingenuous. Over time, informal narratives—rumors, assumptions, and hallway conversations—fill the gaps left by unclear communication. These narratives can become more powerful than the official story, shaping culture in ways leaders never intended.
The problem is not just that information gets lost; it is that distortion follows predictable patterns. As Bartlett, Allport, and more recent digital cascade studies have shown, messages are not merely weakened as they travel—they are reshaped. Details are dropped, certain elements are exaggerated, and the content is bent to fit the biases and priorities of the person retelling it. In an organizational setting, this means that a financial manager might emphasize cost implications, while a marketing manager highlights brand impact, even if both are recounting the same strategic update. Each retelling is a reconstruction, not a reproduction.
This is why communication protocols are not bureaucratic niceties but essential leadership tools. Without them, organizations are left vulnerable to the natural human tendencies that warp messages as they move. Leaders who fail to account for this risk end up playing a high-stakes version of the telephone game, where the prize is not laughter but confusion, wasted effort, and lost trust. Recognizing that distortion is inevitable is the first step. Designing systems to minimize it is the responsibility of every leader who wants their vision to survive the cascade.
Practical Lessons for Leaders
1. Anchor Communication in a Single Source of Truth
Instead of relying on verbal cascades, leaders should create shared, accessible artifacts: written summaries, dashboards, recordings. These serve as reference points that reduce reliance on memory and retelling.
2. Repeat With Consistency
Repetition is not redundancy—it’s reinforcement. Leaders should repeat key messages across multiple channels, using consistent language. Consistency combats distortion.
3. Check for Understanding
Communication is not complete until the receiver has understood. Leaders can build feedback loops by asking: “What did you hear me say?” or “How would you explain this to your team?” This surfaces distortions early.
4. Design Protocols
Protocols are structured ways of ensuring clarity. Examples:
• Every leadership meeting ends with a written summary of decisions.
• Updates are shared in a standardized format.
• Critical messages are communicated through multiple channels simultaneously.
Protocols may feel rigid, but they create freedom by reducing confusion.
The Human Side of Distortion
If we step back from the mechanics of cascades and look at the psychology underneath, three forces stand out as especially powerful: emotion, bias, and confidence. Together, they explain why messages don’t just get lost in transmission—they get reshaped in ways that feel inevitable once you understand how the human brain works.
Take emotion first. Neuroscience has long shown that emotionally charged experiences are more likely to be remembered than neutral ones. The amygdala, the brain’s emotional alarm system, strengthens the consolidation of memories in the hippocampus. This is why people can recall with vivid clarity where they were during a shocking event, even if the factual details of that memory are fuzzy or wrong. In the context of communication, this means that when a leader speaks with passion, urgency, or moral conviction, those elements are far more likely to survive the cascade than the dry details of a budget or timeline. The emotional tone becomes the “sticky” part of the message. Of course, this cuts both ways: a stray note of frustration or fear can echo longer than the facts themselves.
Bias is the second force, and it operates more subtly. Humans don’t receive information as blank slates; we interpret it through schemas—mental frameworks built from our prior knowledge, cultural background, and personal priorities. Bartlett’s participants unconsciously reshaped unfamiliar Native American story elements into something more culturally familiar. Allport and Postman showed how stereotypes influenced rumor transmission, with people misremembering details in ways that aligned with their expectations. In organizations, the same thing happens. A finance manager may retell a strategy update with an emphasis on cost control, while a marketing manager highlights brand implications. Both are repeating the same message, but each filters it through their own lens. The distortion isn’t malicious—it’s human. But it means that by the time a message has traveled across departments, it may look very different from the original.
The third force is perhaps the most insidious: confidence. We like to believe that certainty is a marker of truth, but research on memory shows otherwise. Elizabeth Loftus and others have demonstrated that people can be absolutely convinced of details that never happened. Each time we recall a memory, it becomes malleable, subject to reconsolidation, and can be subtly altered before being stored again. Over time, the altered version feels just as real as the original. In organizations, this means that two leaders can leave the same meeting with different recollections of what was decided, both held with conviction. The danger is obvious: decisions get reinterpreted, accountability blurs, and people act on “truths” that diverge from one another.
For leaders, these three forces—emotion, bias, and confidence—are not abstract curiosities. They are the invisible currents that shape how communication flows through an organization. Emotion explains why vision statements and stories travel further than spreadsheets. Bias explains why different teams interpret the same strategy in different ways. Confidence explains why relying on memory alone is a dangerous shortcut. The lesson is clear: distortion is not random noise. It is patterned, predictable, and deeply rooted in human psychology. Leaders who understand this can design communication systems that anticipate these distortions, rather than being blindsided by them.
Conclusion: From Playful Whispers to Leadership Clarity
The telephone game is funny when played by children because the stakes are low and the distortions are entertaining. But in organizations, the same process is at work with far higher consequences. Messages whispered down the chain of command do not arrive intact; they are reshaped by memory, bias, and emotion. What begins as a clear vision at the top can emerge at the bottom as something unrecognizable, leaving teams confused, misaligned, or even mistrustful.
The lesson is simple but profound: distortion is not an accident, it is a certainty. Bartlett showed us that individuals reconstruct stories through their own schemas. Allport and Postman revealed that groups reshape messages in systematic ways. Modern cascade studies prove that digital networks accelerate and amplify these distortions. Together, they tell us that leaders cannot rely on intention alone. If you want your message to survive the cascade, you must design for clarity.
That design comes through protocols: anchoring communication in shared sources of truth, repeating with consistency, checking for understanding, and creating structures that reduce the room for distortion. These are not bureaucratic burdens but leadership essentials. They are the difference between a vision that dissolves into rumor and one that inspires coordinated action.
So when you think back to the childhood game of whispers, remember the laughter—but also the lesson. In leadership, clarity is not a given. It is something you build, protect, and reinforce at every step. And without it, every organization, no matter how sophisticated, is just playing telephone.
But Wait - There Is More
But there’s another layer. It’s not just messages that change as they move between people—our own memories change within us. In my next post, I’ll explore the science of memory reshaping, from Elizabeth Loftus’s false memory studies to modern neuroscience, and what this means for leaders who rely on recollections of meetings, decisions, and events. Let's explore this in another post!
