Signal and Noise in Business: How to Get Everyone on the Same Page

Signal, noise, and a man on a unicycle

I once facilitated a board meeting for a B2B professional services business. The CEO, a particularly forceful character, opened proceedings with some exciting news. He’d just completed a £5 million equity investment.

“Let’s go for growth!” he announced.

12 people around the table cheered and applauded.

As the meeting went on, I began to notice something rather extraordinary. They were all talking about growth. They weren’t all talking about the same thing.

So, I stopped the discussion and asked everyone to write down, in a few words, what growth meant to them. Then I went round the table and asked each person to read out their answer.

“More revenue.”

“More people.”

“Bigger offices.”

“Increased EBITDA.”

“Increased shareholder value.”

And so on.

They looked at each other in astonishment. 12 intelligent, experienced people had

enthusiastically backed the same strategy, and each of them was heading for a different destination.

I’ll come back to what happened next but, first, I’d like to introduce you to a man called Claude. (No, not that one.)

The man who left meaning out

Claude Shannon was, by any measure, extraordinary. At 21, his master’s thesis showed how on/off switches could perform calculations, and it became one of the foundations of digital computing. In 1948, at Bell Labs, he published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, the work that established information theory. Every email you send and every song you stream owes something to him.

He also juggled, rode a unicycle around the corridors of Bell Labs and built a flame-throwing trumpet. He didn’t seem to draw much distinction between serious thinking and play. I rather like that.

But here’s what really caught my attention. Shannon’s problem was how to get a message through a noisy channel intact. To solve it, he deliberately left meaning out. What a message meant, he wrote, was irrelevant to the engineering problem.

For engineering, that was a stroke of genius. For anyone running a business, it’s exactly the opposite. In business, meaning is everything, and the most problematic.

Those 12 directors at the Board meeting all heard the word “growth” perfectly well. The signal arrived intact. The meaning didn’t.

Long before I’d heard of Shannon, I knew all about signal and noise.

At my old company, Turbosound, signal-to-noise ratio was part of the everyday language of professional audio. There’s the sound you want and the sound you don’t. Our job was to get the sound you want to several thousand people in a large venue as cleanly as possible.

These days I deal with a different kind of signal and noise. Two kinds of noise, in fact.

Noise you can hear

The first kind is sheer volume. Business owners aren’t short of information. They’re drowning in it: emails, WhatsApps, Slack, dashboards, management accounts, newsletters, LinkedIn.

And now AI, which will cheerfully give you an articulate, confident answer to almost anything in seconds.

I’m aware of the irony of saying this in a mailer. Feel free to include that in your assessment.

Shannon defined information as something that reduces uncertainty. By that measure, much of what reaches us every day isn’t information at all. You can read a report with 50 measures and still not know whether your business is heading in the right direction.

Meanwhile, the real signals get lost. The unhappy customer who hasn’t complained. The talented employee who’s quietly disengaging. Margins slipping while revenue keeps rising.

Noise demands your attention. Signal deserves it.

You can only tell them apart if you know what you’re listening for. That’s why I keep coming back to Purpose, the first element of the Quadruple Bottom Line. When you’re clear about what your business is actually for, it becomes far easier to see which opportunities, customers and reports matter, and which are simply loud.

I’ve watched plenty of founders become terribly busy chasing perfectly good opportunities.

Just not for their businesses.

Noise you can’t hear

The second kind is much harder to spot, because everyone thinks they’re hearing the same thing.

Back in that boardroom, we spent the next hour agreeing what growth should mean for that business. They settled on increasing revenue.

Was that the right objective? That wasn’t the point. The point was that they now had one.

They could make decisions, allocate resources and measure progress against it. That clarity spread throughout the business, and they went on to achieve considerable success.

I’ve lost count of the founders who’ve told me, with some exasperation, “But I’ve told them that!”

I’m sure they have. Perhaps once, at a meeting three months ago.

Telling people isn’t the same as being understood. If something really matters, whether it’s your purpose, your values or your priorities, say it often. Invite people to question it. And check they’ve understood it the way you meant it.

By the time you’re thoroughly bored with saying it, people are probably just beginning to hear it.

10 minutes, three questions

At your next leadership meeting, before the usual agenda, try spending 10 minutes on these:

1. What are we paying attention to that doesn’t really matter? The reports nobody

uses, the meetings that achieve nothing, the opportunities that distract us.

2. What important signals might we be missing? About our customers, our people,

our finances or the wider world.

3. What’s the one thing everyone needs to understand? And have we checked that

we all understand it in the same way?

I suspect that conversation will be worth more than another hour of paperwork.

Shannon spent his life working out how to get a clear signal through a noisy world. More than 75 years on, the world is noisier than he could have imagined. But the lesson for those of us running businesses is wonderfully simple.

You don’t need more information. You need to be clear about what matters, and to

make sure everyone understands it in the same way.

If you could benefit from some outside experience to help you navigate that, get in touch. I’d love to help.

As for the unicycle, I draw the line there.

P.S. Remember "No, not that one"? Anthropic's Al assistant is also called Claude, and it's widely reported to be named in Shannon's honour.