I was reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown when I stumbled across something I couldn’t leave alone.
Signal flags.
More specifically, the French Navy’s remarkable system for communicating between ships during the American Revolution.
I went looking for the mechanics of the system and found myself somewhere else entirely.
Because this isn’t really a story about flags.
It’s about a problem every leader, salesperson, marketer, teacher, parent—and probably every human being—eventually encounters:
I know what I said. But is that what you understood?
Two hundred and fifty years ago, that question could determine the fate of a fleet. Today it can determine the fate of an organization.
Imagine trying to command a fleet
Put yourself aboard an 18th-century flagship.
Around you are dozens of wooden warships. Each has its own captain and crew. Once battle begins, they may be scattered across miles of ocean, maneuvering through smoke, wind and cannon fire.
You’re the admiral. You can see something developing. You need everyone else to see it too.
There is no radio. No telephone. No email. No Teams. No group text.
You have flags.
And somehow those pieces of colored cloth have to convey your intent to dozens of people making independent decisions aboard moving ships.
The problem becomes even more interesting when you remember that naval combat had a nasty habit of shooting away masts, spars and rigging—the very infrastructure being used to communicate.
One French naval officer became obsessed with solving this problem. His name was Jean-François du Cheyron du Pavillon.
The breakthrough
Du Pavillon had witnessed France’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759. In the years that followed, he devoted considerable attention to naval tactics and signaling.
His breakthrough sounds almost trivial today. It wasn’t.
Earlier signaling systems relied heavily on particular flags displayed in particular places. The signal and its meaning were closely connected.
Du Pavillon helped change the architecture.
Instead of requiring each signal to carry a unique meaning, combinations of flags could function numerically and point to instructions in a shared signal book.
The system could organize commands into tables. A combination of flags identified where to look. The officers receiving the signal consulted the same reference and recovered the intended order.
In simplified form:
SIGNAL → CODE → MEANING
And that changes everything.
Because the flag no longer has to contain the message. It only has to tell you where the meaning is.
The flags aren’t the message
Think about a QR code.
Those little black squares aren’t the restaurant menu. They tell your phone where to find the menu.
A URL isn’t a website. A telephone number isn’t a person. An IP address isn’t a computer. A database key isn’t the information stored in the record.
Each works because sender and receiver share a system that allows a small amount of transmitted information to unlock a much larger amount of meaning.
That’s what caught me.
Du Pavillon wasn’t simply designing better flags. He was designing an information system.
And the most important part of that system wasn’t hanging from the mast.
It was what the people on both ships already shared: the same code, the same reference, the same expectations, the same understanding.
Without that shared framework, the flags were just colored cloth blowing in the wind.
Then came the American Revolution
This is where Philbrick’s larger story comes back into view.
By 1781, French naval power had become essential to American hopes of defeating Britain.
George Washington understood this long before Yorktown. He described the naval superiority he desperately wanted from France as the “pivot upon which everything turned.”
In late August 1781, Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse arrived in the Chesapeake with 28 ships of the line and thousands of French troops.
The British responded. On September 5, the fleets met outside the Virginia Capes.
The Battle of the Chesapeake was not Trafalgar. Neither fleet was destroyed. No great armada disappeared beneath the waves.
But strategically, the result was enormous.
The British failed to break French control of the Chesapeake. Cornwallis remained trapped at Yorktown. Washington and Rochambeau approached by land. De Grasse controlled the sea.
Six weeks later, Cornwallis surrendered. Major combat in the American Revolution was effectively over.
And communication played an intriguing role in what happened at sea.
“What exactly does he want us to do?”
During the battle, British commander Admiral Thomas Graves displayed signals calling for his ships to maintain the line of battle while also signaling for closer action with the French.
His subordinate Samuel Hood interpreted maintaining the line as taking precedence.
The result was hesitation and confusion. Hood’s squadron never became significantly engaged in the fight.
Historians can debate how much that affected the outcome. The British faced other tactical problems, and it would be foolish to reduce the Battle of the Chesapeake—or the victory at Yorktown—to signal flags.
But the moment is irresistible.
Because suddenly one of the most consequential naval engagements in American history contains a problem perfectly recognizable in a modern organization:
“What exactly does the boss want us to do?”
And that is where my little naval-history rabbit hole became something else.
We have better flags now
We have spent the last 250 years making communication faster.
Email. Text messages. Websites. Video conferencing. Social media. Push notifications. Fiber optics. Satellites. Smartphones. Artificial intelligence.
I can send information from Indiana to France faster than du Pavillon could hoist a flag.
And organizations remain remarkably capable of communicating badly.
Maybe that’s because we have mistaken transmission for communication.
Sending an email is transmission. Holding a meeting is transmission. Publishing a web page is transmission. Posting on social media is transmission. Sending a customer a notification is transmission.
Communication is something harder.
Communication happens when meaning survives the journey.
What arrives in your mind must resemble, closely enough, what left mine. And if action is required, you must understand that too.
That is a much higher standard than clicking Send.
Sometimes the problem is the missing codebook
When communication fails, our instinct is often to communicate more.
Another email. Another meeting. Another slide. Another notification. Another paragraph explaining the previous paragraph.
But du Pavillon’s system suggests another possibility.
Maybe the problem isn’t the message.
Maybe the problem is the missing codebook.
Perhaps we haven’t agreed on what the words mean. Perhaps the priorities conflict. Perhaps I know context you don’t know. Perhaps the organization has never made clear which instruction takes precedence when two instructions collide. Perhaps I’m using language that makes perfect sense inside my world and very little sense inside yours. Perhaps I think we share an understanding that we never actually established.
If so, sending the message again—louder, longer or through another channel—doesn’t solve the problem.
We have to build the codebook.
Consume. Create. Communicate.
Much of my thinking about knowledge work comes down to three verbs:
Consume → Create → Communicate
We consume information.
We do something with it. We connect ideas, solve problems, make decisions and create something new.
Then we communicate what we have created.
But this rabbit hole has changed how I think about that third word.
Communication isn’t the act of sending.
It isn’t complete when the email leaves my outbox, when the presentation ends, when the web page goes live or when the customer notification is delivered.
Communication is complete only when meaning successfully crosses the distance between us.
That distance might be three miles of ocean. Or three cubicles. Or three levels of management. Or the distance between a company and its customers. Or between a salesperson and a prospect. Or between a website and the person who arrived there looking for an answer.
Technology keeps shrinking the physical distance.
It does nothing automatically about the distance between what I mean and what you understand.
Communication is a force multiplier
Imagine two fleets with equally capable ships and equally skilled sailors.
One can understand the commander’s intent and coordinate its actions. The other cannot.
Those fleets no longer possess equal capabilities.
Communication has multiplied the effectiveness of one of them.
Organizations work the same way.
A company can employ extraordinarily talented people and still underperform if they don’t understand the priorities.
A sales organization can have an excellent product and struggle if customers don’t understand its value.
A utility can possess sophisticated systems and still frustrate customers if those customers cannot understand what is happening during an outage.
A manager can have a brilliant strategy that accomplishes very little if nobody knows what it means for Monday morning.
Communication doesn’t merely describe the work.
Communication changes our ability to do the work.
That makes it a force multiplier.
Before you send
So I’m leaving this rabbit hole with a different question.
Before the next email. Before the presentation. Before the customer notification. Before the meeting. Before clicking Publish.
Instead of asking only:
How can I explain this better?
Ask:
What do we need to understand together for this message to mean what I think it means?
Sometimes the answer will be better words. Sometimes it will be more context. Sometimes it will be clearer priorities. Sometimes it will require defining the terms.
And sometimes you’ll discover that the message was never really the problem.
The codebook was.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, du Pavillon confronted that problem with numbers, signal books and pieces of colored cloth flying above wooden warships.
Today we possess communication technologies he could not possibly have imagined.
But we are still trying to solve the same human problem:
How do I get what is in my head into yours without losing the meaning along the way?
The technology changes.
The problem doesn’t.
The flags were never the message.
The shared meaning was.
A note on the rabbit hole
This essay began while I was reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown. Philbrick’s account of French naval operations during the Yorktown campaign introduced me to the signaling story and sent me looking more deeply into the work of Jean-François du Cheyron du Pavillon.
That journey—from a few paragraphs in a history book to questions about how organizations communicate—is also a pretty good example of Consume → Create → Communicate in action.
Sources & further reading
Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.
The American Revolution at Sea, American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati.
The Pivot Upon Which Everything Turned, Naval History and Heritage Command.
