Christmas finds me in the most famous Holiday Inn in the world, here in Sarajevo, Bosnia.  Its initial claim to fame was as headquarters hotel for this city's hosting of the 1984 Winter Olympics, but it became best known as the home away from home to journalists covering the three-year siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s.

I can think of no more fitting place to write some year-ending thoughts about organisational communication.  For this city is all about perspective.

At its best, this city is about how people who see the world through five distinct value prisms (Islam, Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, and secularism) can coexist and co-create with one another.  At it's most chilling, its still-fresh tombstones a reminder of what happens when one group sees its value prism as "absolute truth" and seeks to impose such truths on the "infidel scum".

Though practitioners are becoming more enlightened thanks to the work of the Ragan organisation and the Council of Communication Management, and, to an extent, IABC and Melcrum, the hierarchical view that the role of organisational communication is to transmit the hierarchy's version of "absolute truth" to secure the compliance of "the workforce" remains pervasive.  It also remains as simplistic and brutal as the shellings that blasted the windows of this hideous yellow landmark from '92-'95.

I am not saying that hierarchy has nothing to contribute--nor that the role of organisational communicators is to serve anyone other than those who are playing the bills.  But a more effective and less brutal approach involves harnessing the added interest and discretionary participation that staff can offer when communication resonates instead of irritates. 

Some call this "employee engagement". But the overuse of the term, particularly in the past year, belies the ability of employees to engage as opponents as well as participants.  When the Serbs engaged the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) with shells and sieges, the Bosniaks engaged with the rifle.  Such engagement mirrors the culture in many hierarchical organisations today, perhaps with fewer visible weapons, and leaving notices substituting for tombstones.

Even though Sarajevo is defined by its most recent war in the popular culture, this city has been at peace for 12, governed by a framework where Muslims, Catholics (today is called "Catholic Christmas" due to the more numerous Serbs celebrating it later), and a small Jewish community live in the city proper, and where Serbs live in the surrounding suburbs.  It is beautiful and vibrant, and it appears to function well.   Even though it has a Muslim majority, it is no Islamist stronghold, judging by the juxtaposition of a mosque and a Jagermeister billboard on opposite sides of the same street.

Can a mosque and a Jagermeister billboard coexist in an organisational communication? I fervently believe so.  I think the secret is not in reconciling the contradiction between the two, but in uniting those on both sides of the streets to embrace and create the future together.

From a Jewish traveler in Sarajevo, a Merry Catholic (and Protestant) Christmas.