“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. ”
Here's a sentence you have written or perhaps spoken. Me too.
"We'll brief the executive team, who will cascade to their direct reports, who will brief their teams."
Mea culpa - the problem is, it's not so much a communication plan as it is trickle-down economics, wearing a lanyard.
Same premise: put the value in at the top, and it will find its own way down. Same comforting logic. And — I'd argue — the same fifty-year record of not working.
The concept – a theory nobody will admit to
Here's the first thing worth knowing about trickle-down economics: no economist has ever claimed it.
The term wasn't coined by an advocate. It was coined by a humourist. Will Rogers, writing in November 1932 about the Hoover administration's Depression response: "The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot."
It has been a pejorative ever since. Even Thomas Sowell — a committed supply-side economist — has pointed out that you cannot find trickle-down theory in the scholarly literature, because nobody has ever written it down and defended it.
John Kenneth Galbraith went further. In 1982 he noted that the idea was just a rebranding of something much older and much less flattering: the horse-and-sparrow theory. Feed the horse enough oats, and some of it will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
Sit with that image next to your last cascade pack. I'll wait.
And the evidence? Julian Limberg and David Hope at the London School of Economics examined fifty years of major tax cuts for the rich across eighteen OECD countries. The finding: inequality went up. Growth and unemployment didn't meaningfully move. Half a century of data, and the mechanism still doesn't do what it promises.
So why does it persist?
Because the alternative — direct, deliberate, costly distribution — is harder, more expensive, and requires you to admit that value does not flow on its own. It has to be carried.
Which brings us to your change comms plan.
Connecting the dots
A government services agency rolled out a new case management system. The executive briefing was genuinely excellent — ninety minutes, the full strategic rationale, the three options that were considered and rejected, the honest acknowledgement of what would get harder before it got easier. Attendance: 96%. That number went in the status report. Green.
Eight weeks later, the post-implementation review landed. Adoption was patchy. Frontline staff described the change as "something IT did to us." The review named the usual suspects: change fatigue, and the frozen middle.
Then somebody did something unusual. They asked the team leaders what they had actually received. The answer was four slides and a go-live date. Total content: about eleven minutes, most of it logistics.
These were the people responsible for a change that altered every single workflow their staff touched daily. They weren't withholding context. They had no context to withhold. Ninety minutes went in at the top; eleven minutes reached the layer where the work actually happens.
Nobody in that chain did anything wrong. Every manager passed on roughly what they'd been given, minus what they didn't have time for, minus what they didn't fully understand, minus what they weren't confident defending. Three small, rational subtractions per layer. Four layers. The maths were mathing.
The application: How to distribute change instead of hoping it trickles
1) Supply the middle before you brief the top
How it works: Cascade fails because middle managers receive the conclusion without the deliberation. They get the what, not the why, and certainly not the what-we-argued-about. Then we ask them to defend it under questioning.
Practical example: Run a genuine pre-brief with people leaders five working days ahead of the all-staff. Include three things the exec deck won't have: the options that were rejected and why, the trade-offs leadership consciously accepted, and the questions leadership cannot yet answer. Give them permission to say "we don't know yet, and here's when we will."
Why it works: You can only pass on context you were given. Supplying the layer that does the actual transmitting is direct investment, not spillover. People also like to think they are the carriers of "juicy" information - this is a form of power that drives communication.
Watch for: Pre-briefs that are just the same deck, earlier. If there is no new information in it, it isn't a pre-brief — it's a rehearsal. And managers can tell the difference immediately.
2) Measure what arrives, not what was sent
How it works: Trickle-down survives because it's measured at the point of injection. Attendance. Open rates. Slides delivered. All of it measured at the top of the pipe, where nothing has been lost yet.
Practical example: Two weeks after a cascade, ask a random sample of frontline staff two questions: "How would you explain this change to a new starter?" and "What does it change about your day tomorrow?" Compare their answers against the original executive briefing. The gap between the two is your actual communication metric.
Why it works: It converts a comfortable assumption into evidence. And unlike a sentiment survey, it tells you where in the chain the meaning fell out.
Watch for: Using the gap to performance-manage middle managers. The gap is a design fault, not a character flaw. It's a leak in the pipe — not a failure of the people standing next to it. If your measurement makes managers defensive, you have just guaranteed they'll pass on even less next time.
3) Distribute directly to where the change actually lands
How it works: The economic alternative to supply-side spillover is direct transfer — you give the resource to the people you intend to benefit, rather than hoping it arrives. The change equivalent is role-specific communication that skips the dilution steps entirely.
Practical example: Identify the three or four roles whose daily work the change genuinely alters. Build content for those roles, delivered by someone who does that job — a peer, not a sponsor. A twenty-minute session on "what changes in your queue on Monday" will outperform four cascaded all-staff briefings.
Why it works: Every layer removed is a subtraction that doesn't happen. And role-specific content survives transmission because it is already concrete — there is nothing left for the brain to fill the gaps.
Watch for: Treating this as bypassing managers. Direct distribution runs alongside the line, never around it. Strip managers of visible authority over the change and you'll win the message and lose the messenger — and you need them for everything that comes after go-live.
The caveat: the goal isn't to abolish the cascade — it's to stop treating it as a distribution system
The cascade does one thing genuinely well: legitimacy. Hearing it from your own manager, in your own team meeting, signals that this is real and that your leader owns it. That matters enormously, and no role-specific comms plan replaces it.
What the cascade is terrible at is carrying meaning intact across distance. It always has been.
So use it for what it's good at. Confer legitimacy through the line. Distribute understanding directly. Stop asking one mechanism to do both, and then blaming the middle when it can't.
And be honest about the cost. Direct distribution takes more time, more people, and more budget than an email template and an optimistic assumption. That's precisely why we keep choosing the cascade. Not because we believe it works — but because it's cheap, and the failure shows up later, somewhere else, under a different name.
Usually the name is change fatigue.
Over to you
Pick your current change. How many minutes of content went into the executive briefing — and how many minutes reached the team leaders? If you don't know that number, that's the finding.
And: what's the one thing your people leaders are being asked to defend that nobody has actually explained to them?