I’ve spent enough time on Australian and British trains to notice something peculiar about how they talk to passengers. In Australia, the driver updates you constantly. “We’re approaching Central, on time, next stop Town Hall.” Five minutes later: “Just leaving Central now, we’re running two minutes ahead of schedule, conditions are good.” Nothing has changed. Nothing is wrong. But you know exactly where you are and what to expect.
In the UK, the default is silence. The train moves. You wait. If something goes wrong—a delay, a signal failure, a cow on the track—then the driver says something, usually in a tone that suggests they’re mildly annoyed about the whole business.
The result is stark. Australian passengers are calm. They chat, read, relax. They have information, so they have agency. UK passengers get anxious the moment the train slows unexpectedly. Silence plus change equals threat. When finally the driver speaks, it’s always to explain a problem, which just confirms everyone’s mounting suspicion that something is broken.
This is a perfect metaphor for how organisations communicate, and most of them are running the UK model.
The teams and leaders who create the most functional, trusting, autonomous environments are the ones who communicate proactively—even when there’s nothing dramatic to report. “Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s where we are in the project. This deadline has shifted, here’s why. We’ve decided to pivot, here’s the reasoning. We don’t have a decision yet, but we will by Friday.” Constant, low-level updates that keep people grounded and informed.
The ones who only communicate when things go wrong create something entirely different. Silence is read as either “everything’s fine, they don’t need to tell us anything” or “they’re hiding something.” When the communication does come, it’s always bad news, so communication itself becomes associated with problems. Pretty soon, people start speculating, assuming the worst, asking their peers what they think is happening because the official channels have gone quiet. And once speculation starts, you’ve lost the room.
I’ve seen this play out in organisations where the leadership team goes dark for a week or two, and by the time they emerge with updates, entire narratives have been constructed in the void. People have made decisions based on incomplete information. Teams have started protecting their own interests because they don’t know the bigger picture. Nobody feels safe assuming good intent anymore.
The antidote is boring, relentless communication. Not theatre. Not performative all-hands meetings where executives talk about their vision. I mean the unglamorous stuff: regular status updates, transparent decision-making, explaining the reasoning behind changes, and crucially, updating people on things that haven’t changed but that they might otherwise worry about.
One of the best ops leaders I’ve worked with used to send weekly emails to her team that often had very little new information in them. “Week 27 wrap: we delivered the three features we said we would. We’re on track for launch. No blockers. Next week we’re focusing on QA and the dashboard redesign.” Nothing shocking. Nothing that couldn’t have been inferred. But everyone knew exactly where they stood. There was no gap for anxiety to creep in. People could make decisions in their own work because they weren’t second-guessing the broader context.
The shift to remote work has made this even more critical, because you’ve removed all the ambient information that comes from being in a physical space. You don’t overhear conversations. You don’t catch the vibe in the office. You don’t get the micro-updates from hallway chats. So the discipline of explicit, regular communication becomes non-negotiable. And yet most organisations have actually communicated less since going remote, which is backwards.
Here’s the thing: over-communication doesn’t mean over-talking. It means you say what you have to say clearly and without filler, but you do it consistently. It means you default to telling people things rather than waiting for them to ask. It means you treat silence as a gap to fill, not as a resource to preserve.
The Australian train driver isn’t wasting your time by telling you the train is on time. He’s giving you something you can’t get any other way—certainty. In an organisation, certainty is what enables autonomy. People who know what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what comes next can make good decisions without constantly checking in with their manager. People who are left in silence get small, risk-averse, and stuck asking permission for everything.
It’s not a coincidence that the most dysfunctional teams I’ve seen are run by leaders who treat communication as something you do when necessary. The functional ones treat it as infrastructure. The Aussie train driver has the right idea.