MGMT 8009M Week 8 Information Flow Memo Example

Memorandum

To: Chief Operating Officer, Ashby Components

From: Quality Systems Analyst

Date: November 17, 2025

Re: How the rear caliper noise complaints lost their detail on the way to the executive committee, and a raw-count channel to fix it

The Finding

Between May and August 2025, dealers reported a grinding noise from the rear brake caliper we supply for two light truck programs. Our field engineer logged 43 complaints, most from vehicles under 6,000 miles. In September the executive committee's dashboard showed the caliper line as "warranty claims within normal range." Both statements were accurate. The memo explains how the first became the second, and argues that the loss came from our report formats rather than from any person's choice.

One Fact, Four Versions

[after]

Reading across the table, the mileage pattern disappears at the second level, the count at the third and the signal itself at the fourth, where the dashboard measured warranty cost paid rather than complaints received. Because most complaints were on vehicles still under dealer goodwill, few had become paid claims.

Table 1

The Same Complaint Data at Four Levels of Reporting

Conclusions Travel, Evidence Stays

March and Simon (1958) described uncertainty absorption: when information passes through an organization, the people who see the raw evidence draw inferences from it and pass along the inferences, and those who receive them can no longer examine the evidence themselves. The receivers must rely on the summarizer's judgment. The first two losses fit this description closely. The quality manager had seen every case and summarized them as "investigating," a fair judgment. The vice president received the judgment, not the cases, and had no means to notice that early-mileage failures suggest a manufacturing or design cause rather than wear.

Bad News, Tested Hop by Hop

Tesser and Rosen (1975) reviewed evidence that people are reluctant to transmit bad news, even when they bear no responsibility for it. It would be easy to assume this explains the whole chain. The record does not support that at every level. At the first hop, the field engineer escalated within a day of the tenth complaint and wrote plainly. At the second, the weekly summary was brief but not softened. At the third, the evidence is stronger: the slide template allowed only green, amber or red with a six-word comment, and the operations vice president's earlier slides show amber used for issues expected to resolve within a quarter. Rating the caliper amber was consistent with that practice and avoided red, which triggers a review. The reluctance mechanism appears to operate where the format makes bad news costly to report.

Silence Without a Silencer

Morrison and Milliken (2000) described organizational silence as a collective condition in which employees withhold information about problems, shaped by shared beliefs and by structures that discourage upward communication. Their account fits this case only in its structural aspect. No one here decided to hold back. Each person reported what their format asked for, and each format had less room than the one before. The result, an executive committee unaware of a pattern that the field engineer had documented in detail, looks like silence even though everyone spoke.

A Channel That Skips the Summaries

The proposal is a raw-count appendix to the executive committee's dashboard: one page listing, for each product line, complaints received in the month, the share under 6,000 miles and the change from the prior month, generated directly from the field case log without editing. Quality engineering would own the appendix. It adds one page to the pack and, based on similar appendices elsewhere, about five minutes to the committee's review. The dashboard would also add complaints received beside warranty cost paid, so a gap between the two would be visible.

What the Memo Does Not Propose

It does not propose that managers escalate more aggressively or that the dashboard be rebuilt. Both would address people or formats in general. The appendix addresses the one fact, raw counts by mileage, that every summary in this case removed.

References

March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. Wiley.

Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. (2000). Organizational silence: A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic world. Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 706-725. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.3707697

Tesser, A., & Rosen, S. (1975). The reluctance to transmit bad news. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 8, 193-232. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60251-8