Steve (Matthews) and I were sat with our wives. We had taken a rare afternoon off to take part in a golfing event which had been called off due to bad weather.

As we chatted together in the lounge on the 6th floor of the hotel overlooking the beautiful Welsh countryside, I looked out of the window and watched in awe as a flock of starlings went through their early evening murmuration.

Not that I knew what the hell that meant of course…  nor did I know they were starlings at this point.

I just sat there in amazement as the flock weaved back and forth making some incredibly intricate patterns… they even split into separate flocks and back to one again… continuing to weave at incredible pace… but not once did any bird collide with another.

Steve wondered what was on my mind as I stared out of the window and into the distance and, as I explained what I was looking at, his wife Michelle nonchalantly said, “yeah, that’s called murmuration!”.  Steve agreed and explained this applied mainly to starlings.

I was well impressed at their general knowledge and told them as much.

Why was I so impressed?  I had seen this phenomenon many times before, not just in birds but also in fish and animals. But, I’d clearly never actually ‘seen’ it. Nor had I drawn any link to a business lesson from it before.

But as the wise man once said, “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear” and I clearly wasn’t ready to see the connection before.

So, why did the behaviour of these birds invade my thoughts so much?

Well, it occurred to me that our businesses are like a flock of birds.  Yet very often our people are in a state of confusion. Not sure who’s leading. Unsure who they should be following. Hearing conflicting instructions from different people. Expected to complete work without full and complete instructions…

But, like the harmonious flow of the starling flock, our people should be moving in sync with each other.

They should know the vision; know where they are going?

They should know how we intend to get there? The steps we must take and when we will take them?

And most importantly of all, they must understand the part they play in that journey.

This not only applies to our staff but our investors, our sub-contractors, our suppliers and our customers play their part. And like a well conducted orchestra and the flock of starlings in my story… they must work together in perfect harmony or the flock will crash, the orchestra will sound awful and our businesses will end in chaos!

Yet, as business leaders, we all seem to go through this process believing we’ve communicated clearly and get incredibly frustrated when our people do things we don’t expect or fail to do what we expected.

Trouble is, entrepreneurs are not always the great communicators we think we are!

How many times have you walked out of a meeting totally confident that you communicated clearly what you wanted done… only to find out later that the recipient of your ‘clear’ instructions ‘heard’ a completely different message?

I use a particular technique to help explain this when I see it happen in any of our businesses or those of our fellow Renegades.

Bring the two parties involved in the confusion into a room.

Take a blank sheet of paper and draw a large number 9 on it.

Place it on the table between the two people.

Ask each of them what they see… one will see a 9 whilst the other will see a 6… yet they are obviously both looking at the same piece of paper.

So how do you get them both to understand the same thing?  In this simple case we could draw a line under one side of the number and both will see either the 6 or the 9.

Make no mistake, this applies to us all, from solo-preneurs to businesses with hundreds of staff.

But how will YOU ensure your people give and receive clear and unambiguous communication?

How will you ensure the whole team knows your vision?

How will you share the goals then track, manage and report back to all concerned how you are doing against those targets?

Food for thought, eh?

If you haven’t seen the murmuration phenomenon check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88UVJpQGi88