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Now this is not to suggest that there are ''no'' meaningful communications between line manager and direct report: that would be absurd. If they are both in the office, they will be ''constantly'' be in contact — one more reason [[working from home]] is not the [[paradigm|paradigm shift]] some would like to believe — relaying important information to each other more or less in real time. But this, too, will be an ''informal'' dialogue: unminuted, off-the-record, oral, instantly evaporating, plausibly deniable and, ''until formalised'', entirely beyond management’s purview.  

Consider what it takes to formalise that live dialogue into “management information”: firstly, it must be filtered to weed out the usual interpersonal pleasantries, low-level exchanges about the technical details various projects; updates about the [[BAU]]. That leaves the revenue and risk items, the latter being the usual hitches, [[snafu]]s, market dislocations and brewing ructions with clients and counterparties that is the basic ''raison d’être'' of a risk department. Here, the key objective of any report is to get this information to the boss P.D.Q. ''so she isn’t blindsided by someone further up the chain''. If someone outside your chain of command knows about an unfolding problem, you best make damn sure your manager knows it, so she can tell ''her'' manager about it, and so on, up the chain. But all this, to reiterate, is still informal, off-grid communication.

By the time an unfolding “situation” makes it into the written record, it has been euphemised, contextualised, narratised and put into an absolving passive that will give little hint of the potential enormity of the problem, whilst still allowing scope to claim “I did tell you” should the problem reach its potential.

Thus, formal communications along the official chain of command are as likely to mislead management into a state of complacency as they are to alert it to a real problem. This was more or less the tale of the [[Credit Suisse]] losses on [[Archegos]].