Posts Tagged “Communication”

Novice communications professionals love to write goals along the lines of, “Create 100% awareness of the benefits of Initiative X.”

Don’t do it. Never make the goal 100%. Let me explain with a story.

On February 23, 2007, The Wall Street Journal published a piece on how the Census Bureau is planning for the 2010 census. Question number 3 will be, “What is this person’s sex? (Mark ONE box).”

You would assume that 100% of people should be able to answer this question correctly. This would be a bad assumption. In a 2005 field test, .05% of people asked checked both answers. Extrapolated out, 150,000 people in our country of 300 million would answer this question incorrectly.

If you choose to pursue 100% of anything – even the most basic communication goal – you will fail. Just think about the 150,000 confused folks among us.

So what is realistic?

• If you don’t have 70% of people prepared to move in a particular direction, the group will take an inordinate amount of time to go. 70% is your awareness tipping point.
• The high 80s begin to become problematic. You are spending lots of resources for the last few points of awareness. Perfect will become the enemy of good.
• If information is fairly basic, low 80s is a reasonable, yet challenging goal. If the information is more complex, 75% is reasonable.

Don’t forget, new hires, vacations, leaves of absence, travel schedules all get in the way of achieving super-high awareness numbers. It won’t be your efforts that are the issue; it will be the changing nature of your audience. 

Remember, the internal communicator’s job is to broadcast messages to everybody, and management’s job is to narrowcast within their area of responsibility. The two efforts need to work together. Practically speaking, managers will be picking up “loose ends” that don’t get addressed during your broadcasting. On the other hand, recognize you must reach that 70% minimum. Without it, management’s initiative will be fighting an uphill battle.

Monday’s post on the need for leaders to communicate during the economic crisis has been buttressed by some recent research. An October survey of over 500 working Americans by Weber Shandwick showed that:

• 62% were expecting difficulties in meeting corporate goals.
• 71% believe their company’s leadership should be communicating more about the economic situation.
• 54% had not heard from their company leaders on the impact of the crisis on their company.

Now is the time for leaders to be most visible. Visible leadership enables stability, stability turns into productivity, and productivity turns into dollars. Abdication to the company rumor mill is a wasted opportunity.

Disclosure statement: Monday’s post quoted from the CEO of Weber Shandwick. Today, I quote from one of their research documents. I have no affiliation with the company, but find it interesting that they got the same message to me through two different channels. Kudos to the public relations company – you seem to know something about executing PR.

The current economic crisis offers plenty of change, but little in the way of change leadership. Harris Diamond writes in an Op-Ed in the October 14, 2008 edition of The Washington Times…

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” The immortal line from the movie “Cool Hand Luke” is especially apt these days.

The systemic failures plaguing our banking and financial system are real and have caused genuine pain to millions of Americans. But the problems have likely been made worse by the public’s reaction, or overreaction, to the systematic failure of our nation’s political and financial leaders to communicate effectively with us since the crisis began.

At every step along the way, we have been told that the most recent government initiative taken to resolve the problem was sufficient and would be successful. And, within a matter of days or weeks, the claim was proven wrong. As a result, the banking crisis has morphed into a crisis of confidence in our leaders, our institutions and, in no small measure, in the free market system itself.

There are many rules to follow in the practice of crisis communications, but two are inviolate: when in crisis, communicate; and don’t do anything to undermine your credibility. The people who run our government and financial institutions have violated both.

(The whole piece is available at this link: http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/14/a-crisis-of-confidence/)

I saw the effects of this leadership crisis on Saturday night during a dinner with several friends. One of these friends is a nationally-known investment manager. (Our children go to school together and you may have seen him on the television.) He told a story about eating dinner with somebody even more well-known – a general of the financial industry and a political appointee of the highest level. It wasn’t a good story.

Much like we were waiting for some form of comforting wisdom from our friend, he had had wanted to hear similar wisdom from this uberexpert. The general’s answer to the question, “how do we get out of this,” was relayed to us with just one degree of separation, two days of aging and three measures of nervousness: “pause…. pause…. clear throat…. pause…. I’m not sure if anybody knows.”

We were crushed. If anybody could have provided us wisdom and comfort, it would have been our friend. Instead, he gave us cause to worry well beyond his own pedigree.

Whether it is a dinner among friends, or a meeting where a VP says, “I don’t have time to worry about preserving productivity, I need to cut heads quickly,” our leaders are showing fear these days.

I’d suggest a “cool hand” is far more necessary in times of crisis. People who look up to you are basing their actions on yours.

The first Obama-McCain debate hit on one of my favorite topics – the difference between tactics and strategies. Between the two candidates, they managed to say the words “strategy” and “tactic” about 35 times – all in reference to the Iraq troop surge. We even got the perennial zinger, “I’m afraid Senator X doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.” (I’m intentionally avoiding a conversation over who might have been right or wrong. If you want to form your own opinions, a transcript is available at this link. This is post about two words – not two candidates.)

A little Googling shows disagreement over the word “strategy” is not new to our presidential debates. George Bush and John Kerry were debating virtually the same topic in 2004.

BUSH: I listen to our generals. That’s what a president does. A president sets the strategy and relies upon good military people to execute that strategy.

GIBSON: Senator?

KERRY: You rely on good military people to execute the military component of the strategy, but winning the peace is larger than just the military component. 

A little more Googling yields some text (claimed by quite a few different authors) on the differences between military strategy and tactics:

Broadly stated, strategy is the planning, coordination, and general direction of military operations to meet overall political and military objectives. Tactics implement strategy by short-term decisions on the movement of troops and employment of weapons on the field of battle. The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz put it another way: “Tactics is the art of using troops in battle; strategy is the art of using battles to win the war.”

Strategy and tactics, however, have been viewed differently in almost every era of history. The change in the meaning of these terms over time has been basically one of scope as the nature of war and society has changed and as technology has changed. Strategy, for example, literally means “the art of the general” (from the Greek strategos) and originally signified the purely military planning of a campaign. In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, with the rise of mass ideologies, vast conscript armies, global alliances, and rapid technological change, military strategy became difficult to distinguish from national policy or “grand strategy,” that is, the proper planning and utilization of the entire resources of a society–military, technological, economic, and political. Tactics have always been difficult–and have become increasingly difficult–to distinguish in reality from strategy because the two are so interdependent. (Indeed, in the 20th century, tactics have been termed operational strategy.)

Now that nearly everybody has weighed in, let me: One person’s strategy is another person’s tactics. It all depends on the relative position of the people involved and how the objective is being defined.  Let me give a personal example.

I have an objective to retire at a reasonable age. To meet my objective, I have a strategy to limit expenses and maximize savings. Within this strategy, I have a tactic, called: “turn off the light when you leave a room.” This tactic is emphasized to my children on a regular basis.

If, however, you ask my children, they will tell you that turning off the lights is clearly a strategy. To them, turning off the lights results in a marked decline in dad’s crankiness. It is a major maneuver – a surge, if you will – in the balance of power and peace within the house. Their objective is different than mine. In short, strategies exist to meet an objective and tactics fit within a strategy.

Bush and Kerry were talking about different things: winning a battle and winning a peace. McCain and Obama were also talking about different things: McCain was answering a question about “the lessons learned in Iraq” and Obama was talking about broader issues.

It will never happen, but I wish I would hear more people say, “You mention ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics.’ Could you define what you mean by those words so we all have the same understanding?” Now that would be unbelievable change!

Transformational change results in lower productivity. People are worrying about jobs, who is getting which job, how they will work in the new job, and a gazillion other things. Every level in the organization is wondering, “What’s in it for me?”  The wondering and worrying translates into lost productivity – and large opportunity costs. What value would employees create if they weren’t worrying about the big change?

It would probably take a doctoral study to analyze the numbers comprehensively, but some directional assumptions point toward a scary story. The spreadsheet below takes some average numbers for revenue and costs per employee, and estimates the value created by each employee.

The logic continues that if the average employee’s productivity falls 10% during the change, the company has foregone $2,070 in value. Because the employee contributed 10% less, less value was created. People aren’t creating new products, selling to new customers, analyzing trends for opportunities, negotiating better prices, etc… They are too busy wondering and worrying.

Carrying the logic all the way out, if the change program lasts 12 months and the company has 1,000 employees, the company has an opportunity cost of nearly $25M. 

$25M is a big number, and one would naturally ask, what can be done to reduce it?

The two options are “faster” and “better.” Faster says: get the 12 month project done in 11 months. Better says: get the project done in a manner whereby productivity is preserved. (This productivity preservation requires change management approaches.) Based on the assumptions I used, “better” is clearly – well… better.

A couple comments in closing:

• To repeat – these numbers aren’t an analysis. These numbers are directional estimate based on some reasonable assumptions. Using the mildest of assumptions, however, shows that productivity losses extrapolate into some large foregone value.
• If you would like to try your own numbers, you may download an Excel version of the Change Initiative Cost Estimation Worksheet.
• The figures regarding revenue and costs per employee in the spreadsheet come from PriceWaterhouseCoopers – Saratoga’s 2007 / 2008 US Human Capital Effectiveness Report.

This post is not intended to be an analytical review of demographic differences. The sample size is essentially one, my daughter – and a few of her friends. Today’s high school seniors are different than those in the past, and their behavior will seem mighty strange when they hit the business world in five years.

E-mail is so yesterday – The only reason to look at an e-mail account is to communicate with somebody older than 35. There are no e-mails to peers.

The cellphone is primarily for texting – If I text her, I get an immediate response. My calls go unanswered however. It isn’t just my calls, she isn’t attuned to the sound of her own ringer.

Facebook changes the rules – She has “friends” she doesn’t and won’t talk to. Let me explain: A neighbor’s 18 year-old daughter was led away in handcuffs. The handcuffed girl attends a different school than my daughter and they are far from friendly. Here are the surprises…

• They were Facebook friends. Not only were these two “friends,” but I found my daughter had many other “friends” she never spoke to. The biggest shock was she was “friends” with the captain of the archrival school’s basketball team. They elbow each other all night, never speak, and “friend” each other.
• The girl shared things on Facebook my generation would have definitely kept quiet. Our scandals were definitely hushed up.

At a minimum, businesses will need to change how to communicate with employees. Definitions of acceptable behavior will be challenged as well.

By the way, she already knows demographics are on her side. She knows baby boomers are retiring and will be looking for as many young workers as they can get. She has also been studying Chinese for the last four years. Assuming past performance is an indicator of future success, she will be highly marketable. She thinks my generation will change – not hers.

Young and cocky is not a new combination. Fundamentally changing the “what” and “how” of communication is.

The view of communication as information transfer was furthered by the application of Claude Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” as posited in his 1948 paper of the same name.

In his paper, Shannon posited the reproduction of messages as an engineering problem and looked at the process of communication in terms of accurately conveying the symbols of communication through technological sources, such as the telegraph. The main issue at stake for Shannon was the proper encoding of information, which he felt would allow for a time savings by encoding the message sequences into proper signal sequences that eliminated some of the redundancy found in language, and which, in turn, would lead to better encryption forms.

Shannon’s one-way communication model helped to set off the academic field of modern communication theory and research by providing an understanding of the main components to communication: source, message, channel, receiver.

The ability of a theory from one academic discipline to provide intellectual points of leverage for investigation in another discipline shouldn’t be discounted. Applying theories in new ways enhances our ability to think more broadly about the worls. However, not carefully exploring new paradigms can intellectually trap us in unfounded assumptions.

That said, the No. 1 reason Shannon’s theory shouldn’t have been applied to human communication rests in its origins. Shannon’s major goal was to determine how an information source could be described mathematically to ensure proper information encoding to save time and protect the message. It was not to influence or cause someone to take some action.

Shannon’s theory grew from the desire to prevent effective communication, by introducing noise to the message, making the encrypted message more secure. Thus noise was a positive aspect of his information theory. The more noise, the more secure the encrypted message.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the transmission model is based on the work of John Locke. It also has ties to the transport model from the 19^th century when writing (communication) had to be transported from writer to reader in some physical form like books, letters, newspapers (Chandler, 1994, para. 15). Applying the transmission model to modern communication is problematic because it focuses on the transmission of information and not of meaning.

First, the transmission model fixes the roles of sender and receiver – with the sender having the primary role and the receiver a secondary, passive role – in a linear, one-way model that relies on the receiver to absorb information (Chandler, 1994, para. 22). But, a linear communication model can’t accurately explain or account for proper communication in a multi-vocal world consisting of multiple societies, languages and belief systems.

We also have the processing of information – in this case in terms of absorption, as if through the skin – of content or information in the form of words and a not their meaning. But we don’t just absorb information. Rather we frame the information we receive based on many factors – our gender, age, social class and education in a nonlinear world- and on the relationships we have with the “senders.” So, there’s no possible way any one message could have just one fixed meaning for all “recipients.”

Likewise, a third issue revolves around the purpose of language, which is to express ourselves to one another through recognizable symbols. Given that the 500 most common words have more than 13,000 different meanings, language is a tricky and elusive thing. Thus we can’t assume that two people will use or understand the same language we use in the same way. And we can’t take an Orwellian approach and create our own Newspeak to purge the shades of gray and redundancy in our language.

This leads to a fourth issue with the transmission model: the model equates content with meaning even though the intended and generated meanings might diverge. But books, letters and such only contain words; meaning is constructed when a listener or reader makes sense of those letters and words. So inserting a meaning into a message isn’t easily done.

Finally, the transmission model doesn’t account for context. Context is often based on our perception, and perception is not single-sided. We see things in their completeness – like a complete table, and not just its top – in the context of our kitchen.

Before we can discuss the true nature and definition of noise, and how to combat it, a short review of some contributing theories is called for.

First is to define communication, another term that academics and practitioners alike have many different definitions for communication. Some say it’s the accurate transmission of information (Hutton & Mulhern, 2002). Some define it as the passing of information or the exchange of ideas. Others believe it’s the process by which a sender and a receiver establish a commonness in their thoughts (Belch & Belch, 1998). Any way you slice it, most will agree the definitions all suggest a transfer of information, and not meaning, between parties.

Regardless of how you define communication, its origins lie mostly in the transmission model of communication, in which:

• A sender encodes a message and sends it through a communication channel, which might be affected by noise, interference or distraction.
• The intended recipient gets and decodes the message and may or may not provide feedback upon its receipt.

The transmission model of communication was developed by John Locke in the 1690s. Yes, it was written more than 400 years ago and communication as information transfer is still a leading communication theory. Locke believed the “end of Discourse and Language” was to convey thoughts and ideas to one another; to “excite ideas in the hearer as they exist in the speaker” (Locke, 1996).

Much of the shift in thinking about communication – from a means of sharing to a means of conveying messages – took hold following the Industrial Revolution as the modern organization came into existence. With the Industrial Revolution, society moved from an agricultural economy to one of mass production, mass distribution and mass promotion (or communication).

No longer did individuals relate with others on a one-on-one basis. Rather, they began relating to the large, impersonal organizations providing jobs, goods and services. In this way, communication took on a one-way, single-sided aspect.

Communicators grapple with noise in their message every day. We spend years honing our communication skills – everything from improving our writing to developing creative, cutting edge designs – to eliminate as much noise as possible and get our messages read. But we often feel we’re working in vain when our messages, carefully crafted for simplicity and clarity, are completely misunderstood because of noise.

Communication noise has been defined as “anything that interferes with” the message being received as intended, and it is deeply rooted in the transmission model of communication: a sender sends a message and a receiver receives it. It arose from the application of Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Information, which he developed in the 1940s to enhance the encryption of military messages. For Shannon, noise was a positive because it meant a message couldn’t be read easily.

Since then, Shannon’s theory and the idea of noise have been applied to many different human communication disciplines, including marketing and advertising. But the definition for noise is largely insufficient, is opposite of the meaning Shannon had placed on it, and reflects the problematic assumptions inherent in the transmission model of communication: that human communication is nothing more than a sender encoding his ideas into words or pictures and a receiver interpreting them.

As a graduate student, noise became of particular interest to me. I found that my general observations of family and friends showed very different and inconsistent reactions to messages, particularly television ads. This led me to take a look at the idea of noise and to build my master’s thesis around the subject.

I’ll share my thoughts and findings from my thesis work in future posts. because, if we ever are going to combat noise in our communication programs, I feel we need to rethink the definition of noise.