Proactive communication – anticipate the gaps and fill them

People don’t like living with gaps in their knowledge. We seek wholeness and our minds attempt to make wholes out of pieces. In the absence of information people will take the pieces they have and created information to fill in the pieces they don’t. Good leadership and communication seeks to minimize the gap by providing relevant information. If we want people to understand the whole then we must understand the whole and think in wholistic terms. People will no accurately understand the whole if we only communicate some of the parts. Instead, bless them by communicating how the pieces fit. That takes more time in preparation as it requires the leader to spend time understanding things but this averts a lot of room for rumors and hearsay. In the absence of reliable information people are quite capable of making up their own information and often think of the information they make up as at least as legitimate and accurate as the facts they were told. So let’s communicate well. If you have a gap in your understanding, don’t make something up to fill it. Instead do due diligence and find out the truth.