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The management faculty member explores how communication helps shape strategy, leadership and organizational life.
When Tomas Thundiyil looks at an organizational challenge, he often begins with the conversations surrounding it. A strategy may be clearly presented, for example, yet employees across an organization can hear the same message and arrive at very different understandings of what it means.
That gap between what is said and what becomes real for the people receiving it sits at the center of Thundiyil’s work as a management faculty member at Central Michigan University. It is also the foundation of CONSTITUTION, a nonfiction book he is developing about the role language plays in creating identity, relationships, commitments, organizations and shared futures.
Central to Thundiyil’s work are what he calls Speaking and Listening. He uses the terms more broadly than their everyday meanings of talking and hearing. In his framework, communication does not simply transmit information about a reality that already exists. What people say, and the context through which others understand it, participate in creating meaning, relationships, commitments and possibilities for action.
Thundiyil’s path to academia began outside the classroom. After studying economics and finance as an undergraduate, he entered the workforce but soon decided to build something of his own.
“I went out, I started work, I hated work, so I started a business,” Thundiyil said. “I grew the business. I had over 100 people working for me by the time I was 24.”
After selling the insurance business, Thundiyil traveled and began consulting. The experience raised questions about why some organizational change efforts succeeded while others stalled, even when leaders appeared to have the right plans in place.
“I started consulting and was very successful. I found some mentors who helped me grow,” he said. “What I wanted to do was figure out how to show people what I had learned in running the business.”
Those questions eventually led Thundiyil to pursue a doctoral degree. He wanted to connect what he had observed in business with academic research on management, leadership and organizational behavior.
His work today brings those experiences together as he examines organizational questions through both academic research and practical experience.
One example Thundiyil uses involves a company announcing that it plans to simplify its operations. Executives may intend the message to signal better processes, while some employees interpret it as a warning that their positions could be eliminated.
“They got the message, but they heard it from their perspective,” he said.
For Thundiyil, that difference is more than a messaging problem. People do not simply receive an organizational reality that executives have already created. Through their histories, relationships, expectations and prior conversations, they participate in determining what the strategy becomes in the organization. The same words can therefore create very different responsibilities, risks, identities and possibilities for different groups.
It is an example of what Thundiyil means by Listening. In discussing his research, he describes people as interpreting communication through the language and perspectives they already have. Those existing frameworks can affect what they understand another person to be saying and what becomes possible as a result.
His work draws on the constitutive view of communication, an established area of study that considers how communication participates in creating social reality rather than simply describing it. Thundiyil is developing the implications of that perspective for strategy implementation, workplace culture, leadership, identity and organizational change.
In CONSTITUTION, Thundiyil brings that central idea to a general audience through historical accounts, organizational examples and academic research. Rather than treating language as a tool people use after a reality has already formed, the book asks readers to consider how Speaking and Listening help create the realities in which people act.
“I wrote this to really get a concept across, which is that language constitutes reality,” he said. “Inside language constituting reality, it constitutes us as people.”
Thundiyil does not claim to have originated the constitutive view of communication. His contribution is to develop its implications across domains that are commonly treated separately, including perception, identity, relationships, commitments, leadership, organizations and the future. His academic research also examines constitution as a scientific question: what makes an event an instance of leadership, authority, commitment or another human phenomenon before researchers attempt to explain what causes it?
From there, the book turns toward management practice. It examines how Speaking and Listening participate in establishing authority, responsibility, commitments, organizational identities and the futures around which people coordinate action.
The practical implication is that organizations often attempt to change performance while leaving intact the organizational reality producing that performance. A new strategy, culture or future cannot be created through announcement alone. It must become real in how people listen, who they understand themselves to be, what commitments exist between them and how those commitments become registered in organizational action.
The same perspective has influenced how Thundiyil approaches teaching. He said faculty members and students can sometimes interpret the same interaction differently because they enter the classroom with different expectations.
“There is a natural mismatch between students and professors,” Thundiyil said. “Professors were students at one point, but usually by the time they are professors, they are so far removed from what it was to be a student.”
Recognizing that mismatch does not require faculty members to abandon classroom expectations, he said. Instead, it creates an opportunity to pause before treating an initial interpretation of a student’s behavior as fact.
“You start to develop an openness to other people being different than you,” he said.
That openness can help students as they prepare to work with colleagues whose experiences differ from their own. The same principle applies throughout organizations. Leaders may treat resistance as an employee attitude, departments may treat conflict as a personality problem and executives may treat implementation as a failure to understand the strategy. Thundiyil’s work asks leaders to examine the conversational reality within which those actions make sense before attempting to correct the people involved.
As Thundiyil prepares CONSTITUTION for publication, he is also developing opportunities to share its ideas through public writing, media and corporate presentations. He hopes the project will make his work accessible beyond academic journals and invite broader conversations about how Speaking and Listening create the realities people inhabit together.
“I’m trying to have this work that I’ve been working on for my whole adult life be available to the world,” he said. “I just want to contribute to others, and that’s why I want other people to have access to this.”
