Those who know me know that I've spent a long time thinking about what it means to be recall ready. If there's one area where I've seen even well-prepared companies come up short, it's communication. It usually comes down to some underlying assumptions that don’t support effective communication. I want to talk about those assumptions, because most of them are hiding in plain sight.

The first one is the most common: sending a message is the same as reaching someone. A notice goes out — to a distributor, a retailer, a store location — the checkbox gets checked, and the team moves on. But a message sent is not a message received, and a message received is not a message acted on. I've seen recalls where notifications were issued promptly and product still sat on shelves for days, because somewhere downstream, someone wasn't sure what they were supposed to do with the information.

The second assumption is that what happens downstream is someone else's problem. If you manufacture a product and you've issued your notice, it can feel like your obligation ends there, but someone downstream is still deciding whether to pull it, hold it, or pass along an instruction that may have already drifted from what you sent. Every link in the chain between you and the consumer is a place where the message can slow down, get distorted, or stop entirely. A communication failure three steps removed from you is still your recall failing.

The third assumption is that communication systems can be figured out when the time comes. I understand the thinking. Recalls are infrequent, unpredictable, and easy to deprioritize. A recall is also the worst possible moment to be searching for a current contact list, drafting templates from scratch, or discovering that your product data doesn't export in a format your partners can use. 

And then there's a fourth assumption that tends to go unexamined: that compliance and effectiveness are the same thing. We’ve all seen recalls that met every regulatory standard and still left consumers at risk. The right question isn't just "did we send the notices?" It's "did we reach the people who needed to be reached, and did they do something about it?" That question is harder to ask, and harder to answer clearly, which may be why it doesn't come up often enough.

The lesson, after watching this go wrong more times than I'd like, is simple: the companies that get recall communication right didn't get lucky. They made deliberate decisions in advance about how to get the right information out and know the job was done right.