Communicating through Thick Boundaries: The Case of Informing National Policy Making

Abstract

[Organizations increasingly face competitive and security threats that require better intelligence to guide action. National policy makers face an especially pressing need for intelligence, and rely on complex, diverse information from many sources in monitoring their environment. The primary formal information system for conveying knowledge to government leaders is the system of national intelligence briefings, which collects data from a global network of analysts that is presented by a briefer to individual government leaders, in a short daily session. The quantity of information created by intelligence analysts far exceeds the capacity of a policy maker to assimilate, and the briefer has severe time restrictions for assembling and communicating the daily briefing. In this important, yet highly constrained setting, our exploratory research question is: ?How does the briefer experience communication with policy makers, and how does the briefer act to ensure that the information produced by intelligence analysts is useful to and understood by policy makers?? We conducted a qualitative study of boundary spanning dyad chains reaching from field analysts to policy makers at high levels in the United States federal government, and found: (1) a low degree of shared context between significantly different social and professional worlds; (2) a four-phase communication pattern crossing multiple boundaries, multiple times; and (3) a common 3-step embedded structure within the communication pattern in which the briefer tried to create shared meaning. Despite the extreme setting, we propose that the 3-step embedded structure our subjects enacted can be applied to improving communication for any manager across a wide range of thick boundaries in profit, non-profit and government boundary spanning contexts.]