Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
Book Announcement: The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices
After two years of chewing up most of my free time, I’m delighted and relieved (in about equal measure) to announce that the book I’ve written with Paul Culmsee is finally out: The Heretics Guide to Best Practices is now available through Amazon (also on Kindle) and iUniverse.
In this post I present the first couple of paragraphs from the book to give you a flavour of the content and style. I also include some quotes from reviewers who read drafts of the book.
The first few paragraphs
The following lines are taken from the start of the book:
Have you ever noticed that infomercials trying to sell you the latest ab-sculpting, fat burning, home fitness device with three easy credit card payments, always start with questions designed in such a way that the answer is invariably “Yes”? We have too—so as a tribute to these infomercials, we are starting this book with some seriously loaded questions.
- Have you ever had the feeling that something is not quite right in your workplace, yet you cannot articulate why?
- Are you required to perform tasks that you instinctively feel are of questionable value?
- Have you ever questioned an approach, only to be told that it is a best practice and therefore cannot be questioned?
- Have you ever sighed and blamed the ills of your organisation on “culture” or “that’s just the way things are done here”?
- Have you ever lamented to others that “If only we got ourselves organised”, we would stop chasing our tails and being so reactive?
If you answered “No” to these questions then, seriously—you are holding the wrong book. What’s more, if you manage staff and you answered ”No” to these questions, then chances are your staff gave you this book to read in the hope that you might learn a few home truths.
For those who said a hopefully emphatic “Yes!”—and we are hoping that’s a fair chunk of our readers—this book might offer you some answers and put some names to some of the things that make your organisational “spider senses” tingle. Bear in mind, you are not going to get any glib “Seven Steps to Organisational Nirvana” type stuff here. Instead, you are about to undertake a varied and, at times, heretical journey into the fun-filled world of organisational problem solving. Not only will this book provide you with some juicy ammunition in relation to organisational debates about the validity of best practices, but the practical tools and approaches that we cover might also give you some insights in how to improve things.
Quotes from reviewers
Here are some pre-publication quotes from reviewers who read draft versions of the book:
“In Paul and Kailash I have found kindred spirits who understand how messed up most organizations are, and how urgent it is that organizations discover what Buddhists call ‘expedient means’—not more ‘best practices’ or better change management for the enterprise, but transparent methods and theories that are simple to learn and apply, and that foster organizational intelligence as a natural expression of individual intelligence. This book is a bold step forward on that path, and it has the wonderful quality, like a walk at dawn through a beautiful park, of presenting profound insights with humor, precision, and clarity.”
—Jeff Conklin, Director, Cognexus Institute
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“Hugely enjoyable, deeply reflective, and intensely practical. This book is about weaving human artistry and improvisation, with appropriate methods and technologies, in order to pool collective intelligence and wisdom under pressure.”
—Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK.
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“This is a terrific piece of work: important, insightful, and very entertaining. Culmsee and Awati have produced a refreshing take on the problems that plague organisations, the problems that plague attempts to fix organisations, and what can be done to make things better. If you’re trying to deal with wicked problems in your organisation, then drop everything and read this book.”
—Tim Van Gelder, Principal Consultant, Austhink Consulting
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“This book has been a brilliantly fun read. Paul and Kailash interweave forty years of management theory using entertaining and engaging personal stories. These guys know their stuff and demonstrate how it can be used via real world examples.
As a long time blogger, lecturer and consultant/practitioner I have always been served well by contrarian approaches, and have sought stories and case studies to understand the reasons why my methods have worked. This book has helped me understand why I have been effective in dealing with complex business problems. Moreover, it has encouraged me to delve into the foundations of various management practices…”
—Craig Brown, Director, Evaluator
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“Paul and Kailash have written a book that largely mirrors what I have learned through my own (sometimes painful) experience: at the foundation of every technical solution there should be a clear understanding of the business problem. It amazes me how many projects proceed without this basic planning building block, and yet the percentage of projects that fail remains fairly constant. This book provides an informative and entertaining look at the role of the business analyst, with guidance on how to improve your problem-solving skills.”
—Christian Buckley, Director, Product Evangelism at Axceler
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“Paul and Kailash have done a fantastic job of pulling together many areas of research and presenting this in an accessible and compelling way. They walk you through their discovery process, helping you gain a real understanding of way things work but more importantly why things work, and then apply these in the real world. If you have ever been told something is a best practice, you owe it to yourself to read this book.”
—Andrew Woodward, Founder and CEO, 21Apps
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We think there is something is the book for most professionals, regardless of where they sit in their organisation’s hierarchy. But in the end it is your opinion that counts. We would love to know what you think of our effort, and look forward to hearing from you – either via a comment on our blogs or a review on bookseller websites.
Note (added on 31 Jan 2012):
Check out the customer reviews on Amazon.
Not on the same page, not even reading the same book
In the course of a project it is not uncommon to have stakeholders with conflicting viewpoints on a particular issue. Some examples of this include:
- The sponsor who wants a set of reports done in a day and the report writer who reckons it will take a week.
- The project manager who believes that tasks can be tracked to a very fine level and the developer who “knows” they can’t.
- The developer who is convinced that method A is the best way to go and her colleague who is equally certain that method B is the way to go.
These are but a small selection of the conflicts I have encountered in my work. Most project professionals would undoubtedly have had similar experiences. It can be difficult to reconcile such conflicting viewpoints because they are based on completely different worldviews. Unless these are made explicit, it is difficult to come to for those involved to understand each other let alone agree.
Consider, for example, the first case above: the sponsor’s worldview is likely based on his reality, perhaps a deadline imposed on him by his boss , whereas the report writer’s view is based on what she thinks is a reasonable time to create the reports requested.
Metaphorically, the two parties are not on the same page. Worse, they are not even reading the same book. The sponsor’s reality – his “book” – is based on an imposed deadline whereas the report writer’s is based on an estimate.
So, how does one get the two sides to understand each other’s point of view?
The metaphor gives us a clue – we have to first get them to understand that they are “reading from different books.” Only then do they have a hope in hell of understanding each other’s storylines.
This isn’t easy because people tend to believe their views are reasonable (even when they aren’t!). The only way to resolve these differences are through dialogue or collective deliberation. As I have written in my post on rational dialogue in project environments:
Someone recently mentioned to me that the problem in project meetings (and indeed any conversation) is that participants see their own positions as being rational, even when they are not. Consequently, they stick to their views, even when faced with evidence to the contrary. However, such folks aren’t being rational because they do not subject their positions and views to “trial by argumentation.” Rationality lies in dialogue, not in individual statements or positions. A productive discussion is one in which conflicting claims are debated until they converge on an optimal decision. The best (or most rational) position is one that emerges from such collective deliberation.
The point is a simple one: we have to get the two sides talking to each other, with each one accepting that their views may need to be revised in the light of the arguments presented by the other. Dialogue Mapping, which I have discussed in many posts on this blog is a great way to facilitate such dialogue.
In our forthcoming book entitled, The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices, Paul Culmsee and I describe Dialogue Mapping and a host of other techniques that can help organisations tackle problems associated with people who are “not on the same page” or “reading different books.”
The book is currently in the second round of proofs. We’ll soon be putting up a website with excerpts, review comments, pricing, release dates and much more – stay tuned!
The pragmatics of project communication
Introduction
Much of the research literature and educational material on project communication focuses on artefacts such as business cases, status reports and lessons learned reports. In an earlier post I discussed how these seemingly unambiguous documents are open to being interpreted in different or even contradictory ways. However, documents are only a small part of the story. Much of the communication that takes place in a project involves direct interaction via dialogue between stakeholders. In this post, I discuss this interactional aspect of project communication, drawing on a book by Paul Watzlawick entitled, The Pragmatics of Human Communication.
The pragmatics of communication
Those who have done a formal course on communication may already be familiar with Watzlawick’s book. I have to say, I was completely ignorant of his work until I stumbled on it a few months ago. Although the book was published in 1967, it remains a popular text and an academic bestseller. As such, it is a classic that should be mandatory reading for project managers and others who work in group settings.
Much of the communication literature focuses on syntactics (the rules of constructing messages) and semantics (the content, or information contained in messages). Watzlawick tells us that there is a third aspect, one that is often neglected: pragmatics, which refers to the behavioural or interactional aspect of communication. An example might help clarify what this means.
Let’s look at the case of a project manager who asks a team member about the status of a deliverable. The way the question is asked and the nature of the response says a lot about the relationship between the project manager and his or her team. Consider the following dialogues, for example:
“What is the status of the module? “ Asks the manager
“There have been some delays; I may be a couple of days late.”
“That’s unacceptable,” says the manager, shaking his head.
….
As opposed to:
“What is the status of the module? “ Asks the manager.
“There have been some delays. I may be a couple of days late.”
“ Is there anything I can do to help speed things up?”
….
Among other things, the book presents informal rules or axioms that govern such exchanges.
The axioms of interactional communication and their relevance to project communication
In this section I discuss the axioms of interactional communication, using the example above to demonstrate their relevance to project communication.
In the presence of another person, it is impossible not to communicate: This point is so obvious as to often be overlooked: silence amounts to communicating that one does not want to communicate. For example, if in the first conversation above, the team member chooses not to respond to his manager’s comment that the delay is unacceptable, the manager is likely to see it as disagreement or even insubordination. The point is, there is nothing the team member can do that does not amount to a response of some kind. Moreover, the response the team member chooses to give determines the subsequent course of the conversation.
Every communication has two aspects to it: content and relationship: Spoken words and how they are strung together form the content of communication. Most communication models (such as sender-receiver model) focus on the coding, transmission and decoding (or interpretation) of content. However, communication is more than just content; what matters is not only what is said, but how it is said and the context in which it is said. For instance, the initial attitude of the manager in the above example sets the tone for the entire exchange: if he takes an adversarial attitude, the team member is likely to be defensive; on the other hand, if his approach is congenial the team member is more likely to look for ways to speed things up. What is really important is that relationship actually defines content. In other words, how a message is understood depends critically on the relationship between participants.
The relationship is defined by how participants perceive a sequence of exchanges: A dialogue consists of a sequence of exchanges between participants. However, the participants will punctuate the sequence differently. What the word punctuate means in this context can be made clear by referring back to our example above. If the team member feels (from previous experience) that the manager’s query is an assertion of authority, he may respond by challenging the basis of the question. For instance, he may say that he had to deal with other work that was more important. This may provoke the project manager to assert his authority even more strongly, thereby escalating discord…and so on. This leads to a situation that can be represented graphically as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Illustration of exchange
The important point here is that both participants believe they are reacting to the other’s unreasonableness: the team member perceives groupings 1-2-3 , 3-4-5 , where his challenges are a consequence of the “over-assertive” behaviour of the project managers etc. whereas the project manager perceives groupings 2-3-4, 4-5-6 etc., where his assertive behaviour is a consequence of the team member’s “gratuitous” challenges. In other words, each participant punctuates the sequence of events in a way that rationalizes their responses. The first step to resolving this problem lies in developing an understanding of the other’s punctuation – i.e. in reaching a shared understanding of the reason(s) behind the differing views.
Human communication consists of verbal and non-verbal elements: This axiom asserts that communication is more than words. The non verbal elements include (but are not limited to) gestures, facial expressions etc. Since words can either be used or not used, verbal communication has an binary (on/off) aspect to it. Watzlawick refers to verbal communication as digital communication (and yes, it seems strange to use the term digital in this context, but the book was published in 1967). In contrast, non-verbal communication is more subtle; a frown may convey perplexity or anger in varying intensities, depending on other expressions and/or gestures that are used. Watzlawick termed such communication as analogic.
In the context of our example, the digital aspects of the communication refer to the words spoken by the team member and the project manager whereas the analogic aspects refer to all other non-verbal cues – including emotions – that the participants choose to display. The important point to note is that digital communication has a highly developed syntax but lacks the semantics to express relationships, whereas analogic communication has the semantics to express relationships well, but lacks the syntax. In lay terms, words cannot express how I feel; my gestures and facial expressions can, but they can also be easily misunderstood. This observation accounts for many of the misunderstandings that occur in project and other organizational dialogues.
All communicational interchanges are either symmetrical or complementary, depending on the relationship between those involved: Symmetry and complementarity refer to whether the relationship is based on equality of the participants or differences between them. For, example the relationship illustrated in figure 1 is symmetrical – the PM and the team member communicate in a manner that suggests they see each other as peers. On the other hand, if the team member had taken a submissive attitude towards the PM, the exchange would have been complementary. Seen in this light, symmetrical interactions are based on minimization of differences between the two communicators and complementary relationships are based on maximization of differences. It should be noted that one type of interaction is in no way better than the other – they are simply two different ways in which communication-based interactions occur
Communication can be improved by strengthening relationships
In the interactional approach to communication, the relationship between participants is considered to be more important than the content of their communication. Unfortunately, the relational aspects are the hardest to convey because of the ambiguity in sequence punctuation and the semantics of analogic communication. These ambiguities are the cause of many vicious cycles of communication – an example being the case illustrated in Figure 1.
Indeed, the interactional view questions the whole notion of an objective reality of a particular communicative situation. In the end, it matters little as to whose view is the “right” one. What’s more important is the recognition that a person’s perception of a particular communicative situation depends critically on how he or she punctuates it. As Watzlawick puts it:
In the communicational perspective, the question whether there is such a thing as an objective reality of which some people are more clearly aware than others is of relatively little importance compared to the significance of different views of reality due to different punctuations.
In their book, they also point out that it is impossible for participants to be fully aware of the relational aspects of their communication (such as punctuation) because it is not possible to analyse a relationship objectively when one is living it. As they put it:
… awareness of how one punctuates is extremely difficult owing to another basic property of communication. Like all other complex conceptual systems which attempt to make assertions about themselves (e.g. language, logic, mathematics) communication typically encounters the paradoxes of self-reflexivity when trying to apply itself to itself. What this amounts to is that the patterns of communication existing between oneself and others cannot be fully understood, for it is simply impossible to be both involved in a relationship (which is indispensable in order to be related) and at the same time stand outside it as a detached, uninvolved observer…
The distinction between content and relationship is an important one. Among other things, it explains why those with opposing viewpoints fail to reach a genuine shared understanding even when they understand the content of the other positions. The difficulty arises because they fail to relate to each other in an empathetic way. Techniques such as dialogue mapping help address relational issues by objectifying issues, ideas and arguments. Such approaches can take some of the emotion out of the debate and thus help participants gain a better appreciation of opposing viewpoints.
To sum up
The interactional view of communication tells us that relationships are central to successful communication. Although traditional project communication tools and techniques can help with the semantic and syntactical elements of communication, the relational aspects can only be addressed by strengthening relationships between stakeholders and using techniques that foster open dialogue.
Eight to Late 