Communication breakdowns don’t happen overnight. The signs show up long before anyone identifies the problem. You can see it in the data; fewer people opening key updates, more questions repeating in meetings, slower turnaround between teams that usually move fast.
Most organizations collect this data already; they just don’t look at it through a communication lens. Engagement reports, service tickets, intranet analytics, all of them show where understanding is starting to fade. When those pieces start to form a pattern, they point to where messages are missing their mark.
Using data this way isn’t about creating dashboards for the sake of it, it’s about catching problems while they’re still small. When a message stops landing, you can see it in how people act. They hesitate to move work forward, make their own versions of an update, or start asking questions that were already answered. That’s the moment to check whether the message itself is the issue.
Internal data won’t tell you everything, but it can keep you from being surprised. It shows where clarity is slipping and where to steady the message before alignment breaks.
