Archive for February, 2007
Around Valentine’s Day, we hear more about relationships than any other time of year. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal provides two interesting articles on relationships and technology. One story, its not u, focuses on ending relationships electronically– primarily through email or text messages. Its author calls the technology-arbited breakups, “techno brush-offs.”
Each article makes the point that our interpersonal relationships are changing for the worse. Tough conversations once reserved for face time are absorbed by people’s familiarity with—and inappropriate use of—technology. One woman, the recipient of a combination-text/email breakup, considers such a message “a product of our times.” “‘I hate what this has become,’ she says. ‘Every computer and cellular phone needs a little instruction manual to let people know what can be sent in a text, what can be sent in an email, what can be said on the phone, and what must be said in person.’”
Yet the appreciation for interpersonal interactions conflicts with our everyday tendencies. We check and respond to email constantly and depend on the web for to-the-minute information on both personal and professional topics. The WSJ article, Deleting the Habit, talks about the similarities between technology reliance and drug addiction. “Addicts” have a hard time unplugging during once-sacred quality time– on vacations, during family time, and even while honeymooning.
Global Ideas Bank, a London think tank, holds an annual “International Internet-Free Day” to encourage people to participate in face-to-face interactions. The Bank’s director said to WSJ, “It’s good to speak to people.” But getting off the Web grid encourages people to do things that seem archaic to techno-junkies, like reading newspapers, having face-to-face conversation, or making phone calls from (gasp!) land lines while sitting still.
Though the content of these articles isn’t groundbreaking, few of us relate these key learnings to our professional lives, like unplugging during meetings and conferences, and having phone or face-to-face conversations rather than instant or email messaging. Using one-way communication technologies, like the latter, cuts valuable interpersonal cues from our interactions. And like breaking off love relationships via email, breaking tough or sensitive news to colleagues is more difficult for recipients when they can’t hear your voice, ask immediate questions, or see your facial expressions.
We advise clients to consider the type of medium through which they send messages. The concept of media richness relates to the amount of feedback a medium affords to a sender or receiver of a message. Lean media are best suited to deliver specific, tactical, or historical information; while rich media are better suited to deliver strategic, persuasive, or emotion-invoking messages. And conversations with your colleagues, direct reports, clients, or leaders often fall into one of these three categories. Highly charged topics simply require face-to-face discussion, or at least a phone call. (Read more about CRA’s take on media richness here.)
So let this time of year remind you to move away from the computer, put down the cell phone, and take time to talk to your colleagues, friends, and family. Communicating this way may take more time (and sometimes gumption) on your part, but your relationships will more likely thrive and endure as a result.
(Read here about techno brush-offs and here about technology junkies. WSJ.com registration is required.)
Internal communicators are all too familiar with business buzz words—shareholder value, excellence, compassion—intended to engage employees. On the contrary, organizational strategy is often unclear to employees who don’t understand how their work fits into the mission. A Harvard Business Review piece (subscription required) explains that the “sweeping, general language” used in many organizational strategies and missions disconnects executives from staff. Authors and brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, explain this phenomenon as “The Curse of Knowledge” and offer the following definition:
Top executives have had years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, so when they speak abstractly, they are simply summarizing the wealth of concrete data in their heads. But frontline employees, who aren’t privy to the underlying meaning, hear only opaque phrases. As a result, the strategies being touted don’t stick (HBR, December 2006).
To reverse the “curse,” Heath and Heath suggest making strategic messages sticky. Sticky messages are relevant and clear to staff, and encourage them to (1) remember what they learn about their organization’s mission, and (2) carry out that mission daily.
This is consistent with what we advise our clients. Perhaps more simply put, all strategic messages must be:
- Universal
- Simple
- Broad
- Actionable
- Accurate
- Explanatory of what you’re doing and why
The challenge, then, is how else you can increase stickiness. Like the Heath article, a chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (which we recommend highly) identifies ways to do just this. For illustration, Gladwell presents two empirical studies of some of the least sophisticated, least biased audiences: preschoolers. From those studies, Gladwell highlights that people pay attention, and subsequently learn, when they understand the messages they hear and see. Taken together, Heaths’ and Gladwell’s arguments make a point that all employees echo: organizational strategies should appeal to common sense.
So how can you reverse the curse of knowledge? You can read more on sticky messages here, and consider these final tips. First, give people concrete language—even if it seems overly simplified. For example, “raising the value of our stock” is more concrete than the ubiquitous “creating value.” Next, the component parts of an organization’s strategy should be intuitive. Anyone can understand a phrase like, “Satisfy our customers’ needs.” The ways staff can satisfy their customers, of course, can be more complex and specific to each department or role. And finally, construct memorable stories that illustrate your organization’s values in action. Base the stories on what’s familiar—using well-known parables or examples of your staff doing great work—which will help eliminate business-speak, and create usable context for your staff.
Since Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, it has become almost a given in marketing, and to some degree in communications, that if you want to influence some audience or target group, you only need to influence the influencers, that small group of ‘connectors,” “mavens,” and “salesmen” who will in turn influence everyone else. Seems compelling, and makes sense. But is it true?
Not according to Duncan Watts, a sociologist and expert in social networks. Writing a brief note in the article “Breakthrough Ideas for 2007” in this month’s Harvard Business Review, (www.hbr.org) Watts alludes to research he has done that suggests greater complexity to the process of social influence. In fact, he goes as far as saying that:
“I have found that influentials [read connectors, mavens and salesmen] have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don’t seem to be required at all.”
The key to success, according to Watts, lies as much with the context and audience as with the influencer. For Watts, no matter how many connectors, mavens or salesmen you have working with you, if the group you’re trying to influence and persuade doesn’t have “a critical mass of easily influenced people”, forget it. Success is independent of the influencers, “…just as the size of a forest fire has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest.”
Does this suggest abandoning the search for and work with influencers? Not at all. But it does suggest that like all persuasive communications, understanding the audience and context is a necessity for success, no matter how many influencers you can bring to bear.
As part of my 2007 reading regimen I’m working through Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which is a fantastic if slightly academic text on how people make decisions—especially in time-compressed, high-risk situations. In the book I came across something that strikes me as a practical and powerful tool to use as you prepare for important communication events (be they an important speech, presentation to the board, or a face-to-face with the CEO). Klein calls it a “Pre-Mortem” strategy, and it’s a means of identifying assumptions and mitigating risk. The original approach comes from Choen, Freeman, and Thompson’s “Crystal Ball” method (PDF), which the US military uses in war game exercises. The Crystal Ball method goes like this:
- Select a critical assessment, no matter how confident you are that it is true (e.g., that the enemy will cross the river at point X).
- Imagine that a perfect intelligence source, such as a crystal ball, tells you that this assessment is wrong.
- Explain how this assessment could be wrong.
- The crystal ball now tells you that your explanation is wrong and sends you back to step 3.
The Pre-Mortem is a slight variation on this: After laying out a plan, look several months into the future and assume the plan has failed. The task is to explain why. The idea is to break the emotional attachment to the plan, and turn your creativity and experience toward identifying its flaws and opportunities for breakdown. These are contingencies to revise the plan against, making the plan as a whole stronger (and your or your team’s view of the plan more realistic).
Here’s why it’s important: The research shows that people tend to “fall in love” with their own plans. We lend them more credibility than they deserve, especially if we are not highly experienced in the area and do not have a good sense of what’s typical. As a result, we tend to underestimate risks and be under-prepared for contingencies.
In our work with leaders and communication professionals we’ve taken a similar approach for years, building what we call a “Risk Mitigation Checklist” for any significant communication event. It’s the list of all the things we know can introduce significant risk into a communication, all other things being equal. A small example might be “Test the TelePrompTer equipment” before a speech; a more significant example might be “Brief the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors about any change to the capital budget” for a multi-million dollar technology initiative.
We arrive at the items for the Risk Mitigation Checklist through our experience. The issue is that with the communication opportunities or problems you face day-to-day, you don’t (and shouldn’t) have us by your side to identify problems in the plan and craft contingencies. So here’s what you should do: Before your next important communication, project several months into the future and assume the thing failed—miserably. Then explain why it failed, and come up with as many explanations for failure as you can. Then work alone or with your communication staff to resolve those failure points in the design of the message and plan.
We have an adage at CRA that is one of the first things we tell a new employee, regardless of their level or experience: “Plan for the worst, expect the best. Find the worst thing that can happen, and eliminate it. Repeat.” It’s served us well for years, and I think the Crystal Ball / Post-Mortem method is a great little tactic to keep in your back pocket while you communicate as a leader.
At a recent lunch with corporate learning & development leaders in the Philadelphia area, I was struck by how the conversation kept coming round to, well, conversation. For example, those dealing with an aging workforce found that the necessary succession planning discussions were just not happening. The challenge in this case was to arm senior managers with the means for conversation that transfers knowledge and coordinates new action.
To a large extent, leaders and managers today are paid to talk–and we believe that modern corporations are largely “networks of conversation.” So, it stands to reason that conversation is the primary vehicle for getting things done. Then, why don’t we take the time to get better at it?
A common myth says that as budgets go through ever greater scrutiny, the bulk of L&D investment will be focused on job specific, technical training. Granted, there will always be some need for this. But as the L&D leaders gathered at our lunch clearly testified, a shift is abreast–a shift in spending from traditional training programs which seldom work (see David Maister’s “Why (Most) Training is Useless”) –towards programs that build conversational and relational effectiveness.
I posted some PowerPoint advice a couple of months ago, but then just last week I found the chart below that might help to bring the point home even more.
Look here for additional information about how you can avert death by PowerPoint and here for more reasons why you should rely on yourself as the message and not the tool as your message.
In trying to catch up on my journal reading I’ve just been through the August 2006 edition (Vol. 34 No. 3) of JACR, which is a special section on “Best Practices in Risk and Crisis Communication.” The basis of the review is the NCFPD’s list of ten best practices, which are a result of an extensive synthesis of the body of risk and crisis communication scholarship. The best practices are:
- Process approaches and policy approaches (meaning, have formal processes for this stuff and have the communicator at the policy formulation table)
- Pre-event planning
- Partnerships with the public
- Listen to the public’s concerns and understand the audience
- Honesty, candor, and openness
- Collaborate and coordinate with credible sources
- Meet the needs of the media and remain accessible
- Communicate with compassion, concern, and empathy
- Accept uncertainty and ambiguity
- Messages of self-efficacy
Straightforward enough, and a good list. More interesting, though, was the response by Peter Sandman (HTML, PDF). First, he provides an interesting frame on the topic, noting there are important differences between when people are not worried enough about a serious hazard, too worried about a small hazard, and rightly worried about a serious hazard. Second, he notes:
My final comment on the best practices may be the most important. In an article as short as this, with only a few paragraphs on each of the best practices, they come out sounding pretty abstract but also pretty obvious–so obvious, in fact, that the reader may fail to notice that they are extremely difficult to implement and very seldom accomplished. They’re not so much best practices as they are aspirational goals. Any reader whose overall response is, ‘‘Yeah, we do most of that,’’ has been ill-served by the article. Odds are you don’t. Almost nobody does.
The best practices wisely concede that candor and openness are tougher goals than honesty (#5). But in fact, all ten of these recommendations are tough. They fly in the face of organizational culture, of individual ego, of technical hubris.
This sounded like the clear-eyed perspective of someone who’s done the thing and not just studied it. Ultimately, the matter one must solve for–in particular, that the leader must solve for–is execution. Strong communicative practice is tough stuff, made tougher by the fact that most approaches to communication problems are relatively unsophisticated and grounded in historical precedence and a journalistic tradition. The ultimate best practice is getting things done.
I’m posting this a bit late, but one may find a set of significant speeches by Martin Luther King online, courtesy American Rhetoric. King has several speeches ranked by a group of scholars in the top 100 American Speeches:
There is full text and audio for each. Well worth the time.
