Regard­less of con­tent, the email pat­terns inside organ­i­sa­tions may be able to pre­dict approach­ing crises. This is the con­clu­sion of a study look­ing at how the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between Enron employ­ees changed as the com­pany approached its 2001 bankrupcy.

[Researchers] expected com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­works to change dur­ing moments of cri­sis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actu­ally hap­pened around a month before. For exam­ple, the num­ber of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every mem­ber has had direct email con­tact with every other mem­ber, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before [Enron’s] Decem­ber 2001 col­lapse. Mes­sages were also increas­ingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

[Ronaldo] Menezes thinks he and [Ben] Collingsworth may have iden­ti­fied a char­ac­ter­is­tic change that occurs as stress builds within a com­pany: employ­ees start talk­ing directly to peo­ple they feel com­fort­able with, and stop shar­ing infor­ma­tion more widely.

As other researchers in this area have sug­gested, such shifts in com­mu­ni­ca­tion pat­terns “could be used as an early warn­ing sign of grow­ing dis­con­tent within an organisation”.

via Mind Hacks