Communication lessons from the deaf

Is it possible that losing one sense can improve one's ability to communicate? Aerospace consultant Bruno Kahne asserts this in an amazing article in the magazine Strategy + Business ("Lessons of Silence").

Deaf people focus intensely on whom they're talking to face-to-face, they don't mince words, and don't interrupt. As a result, writes Kahne, they communicate must more efficiently than hearing people.

Here's one of a number of startling passages in a very short article:

Deaf people are direct. This is why people with hearing sometimes perceive sign language as blunt to the point of rudeness. It’s not. It’s just explicit. The deaf tend not to hide behind soft language, struggling to find the most diplomatic wording and hoping that the listener will be able to discern what they “really” mean.

I'll be reading this article again and again, and working to employ these techniques. Let me know if I'm communicating more clearly, won't you?

(Hat tip to Doc Searls for pointing this piece out.)

communications, oral communications

Bosses, choose your words carefully

From The Mistake Bank.

[The Mistake Bank has received permission to publish excerpts from the Harvard Business School Press/50Lessons series "Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World's Top Business Leaders," The books are full of great stories, including some very useful mistake stories. Our first is from Paul Anderson, Chairman of Spectra Energy]

As I progressed in my career and got into increasingly more responsible or powerful roles, …it was almost like my words took on the power of the position, and things that were casual before were no longer casual. I had my first example of this when I was a manager. It was fairly early in my career, and a woman named Sarah had come in. I was running a planning organization, and Sarah came in to me and said, “Look, I don’t have any background in planning—I’m from the IT group—but I would love to join your organization. I’ll work hard to learn what I need to learn to do a good job. I will strive to do anything you need done. Just give me a chance.”

I said, “Well, that sounds fair to me. Why don’t you join the organization? I’ll give you a year. At the end of the year you will either be a planner and contributing; or, if it’s not working out, you can go back to the IT group, and we’ll assume that it was a nice try but it didn’t work out.”

So she joined the organization and she was outstanding; she was the best new employee we had that year. She took on everything; she learned. She became the “go-to” person—everybody came to her with their issues. She was a star, there was just no question; she was doing an outstanding job.

And I thought, “Well, this has to be one of the best moves that I’ve ever participated in,” and I was quite comfortable that things were working out nicely. But at the end of a year, she came into my office, and she was in tears. I said, “Sarah, what’s wrong?” And she said, “Well, I don’t understand why it’s not working out. At the end of a year, you said you’d tell me if it was working out and you haven’t told me that, so I must assume that it’s not working out and I’m going to have to go back to IT.” I was flabbergasted, and of course I told her, “Hey, you’re doing a great job!”

But it struck me that I’d made a casual comment: “…in a year we’ll know.” She had gone back to her office and marked her calendar, and, by God, at the end of a year she expected me to walk into her office with a decision. That casual comment was very powerful to her, and so insignificant to me, that it really struck me that I had to be very careful in making comments as I went along.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Managing Your Career. Copyright (c) 2007 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.


management, narrative, leadership, communications, oral communications, organizational behavior, Mistake Bank

Most Significant Change - an update

A couple of months ago, I posted on Most Significant Change, a qualitative method to assess complex initiatives. Read here and here for some background.

Rick Davies, the developer of the technique, was kind enough to post a comment on the original post with some resources for those interested in MSC. Here it is in its entirety:

Hi John,

You and your readers might also like to know that there is an international email list, of 750+ people, who share information about the use of MSC. The members are mainly those using MSC in Africa and Asia, but there are also people from Europe, Australia and USA. People can join the list via this link:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MostSignificantChanges/

I have also recently posted details about a related method of constructing stories, using a participatory process, called "Evolving storylines: A participatory design process?" at http://mandenews.blogspot.com/2007/05/evolving-project-designs-participatory.html

regards, rick davies

communications, storytelling, measurement, innovation, narrative, strategy

More Most Significant Change (MSC) - how to use for business?

In an earlier post, I introduced the concept of Most Significant Change, a monitoring and evaluation technique that was developed for international aid programs. In short, MSC gathers stories and anecdotes on the impact a program has made for its clients, then sorts and selects them through several levels until a single story is selected that represents the most significant change brought on by that program.

So, in business, how would you use it? Let's take the example of the new performance evaluation program that we discussed in the earlier post. Let's say that the company used MSC to monitor this program. HR folks at each division collect stories, then via dialogue they select the most significant in their division; it's passed up the chain, and a further selection is done, and so on, until the executive team selects one story most significant for the whole program. In our example, here's the story they chose:

The most significant change for me, I guess, is that my boss never used to talk to me about performance until review time. Then, you know, I was usually in for a surprise-good or bad. Between reviews, nothing. So, then, after the new system was put in place, it took a few weeks, but all of a sudden she started talking to me about how I was doing as part of our regular one-on-one meeting. Things I was doing well, other things I should do differently. So I could fix what I was doing right away--and not get slammed in a review months later. More than that, a month or so after the program started, she came up to me and said, "Jim, this project plan you sent me to approve, it looks OK, but when you do your project plans, it would be more effective if you put the name of the responsible person alongside each task. That way, if there's a schedule slip, I know who I might need to follow up with." That's a pretty big change compared to what had happened before.

What does this story say about the program? It says that, at least in one case, it spurred a manager to provide feedback on a timely basis. (Disclosure: like the vast majority of technology managers, I am not very good at this aspect of personnel management.)

The story doesn't say that the program spurred this improvement for every manager--or even more than one. However, its selection as the most significant story tells everyone that this is the kind of behavior that the program was intended to foster. Which has three big benefits:

1. Clear communication - one very important program outcome is communicated to everyone in a very tangible, usable way.
2. Enables action - Management can now monitor whether this desirable change is a trend or an isolated case, and intervene accordingly.
   
3. "More like this" - The people who select the most significant stories are cued to look for stories like this as they do their selections.

And it's repeated on a regular basis, say every quarter or half-year. Over time, it shapes the organization's view of the project and its objectives, far better than a bland statement ("We intend to improve the effectiveness of management in the areas of personnel appraisal and feedback, blah blah blah"). And it brings the management teams together regularly for intense dialogue about important issues, and causes them to make a joint decision (which is rare for lots of management teams).

Pretty useful, eh?

(Illustration from the MSC Guide by Rick Davies and Jess Dart (c) 2004, via Inforesources.)

communications, storytelling, measurement, innovation, narrative, strategy

Your leader expects you to stay current

I love the article by Larry Bossidy (author of Execution) in this month's Harvard Business Review, although I do detect an obsession with command-and-control language by former Jack Welch lieutenants in the way they speak and write about business. (For example, Bob Nardelli and Steve Bennett, in addition to Bossidy.)

As you'd guess, the article is called, "What Your Leader Expects Of You."

But I digress. In spite of its military crispness and the frequent use of "I" as a synonym for the business itself, it is an excellent article. Here's the section I like best:

Stay current. There's nothing more depressing than sitting in a business meeting with people who don't know what's going on in the world. I expect people to read, to watch the news - not just because it makes them more interesting but because what happens in the world affects what happens to us, to our marketplace, and to out competition.

About fifteen years ago, I was a product manager, and I found that I kept being invited to meetings even though I wasn't formally connected to the meeting's subject matter at all. After I turned down several invitations, I learned that people were inviting me because I brought a provocative point of view and wasn't afraid to talk. Soon after this, one manager came to me and said the following,

"You're so knowledgeable about the industry and what's going on. Where do you learn all this stuff?"

"The Wall Street Journal and industry publications, for the most part. Sometimes Business Week and the Harvard Business Review. They're in the company library."

"That's great. Would you be willing to sit down with our group once a week and give us an overview of important things we should know?"

I was speechless for a couple of moments. "Are you saying you'd like me to do the group's reading for them?" I said finally. "I'm sorry, but I don't have the time or the desire to do that."

(Picture by a_kartha via stock.xchng)

leadership, communications, Harvard Business Review, management

P.S. To the title of Bossidy's book--isn't that another great military word? And it reminds me of an anecdote--a great old football coach named John McKay was asked, after a particularly poor performance, by his team, "What do you think about your team's execution?"

"I think it's a good idea," replied Coach McKay.

What in hell is Most Significant Change?

Let's first pose a problem. You've put in place a new performance evaluation system and spent a year conducting reviews using it.

How's it working out for you?

Your program will have target objectives like improved employee satisfaction, perhaps, or increased personnel retention. But the first indicator is difficult to baseline and measure, and the second requires a long time to discern a change.

Complex initiatives...vague indicators of success...the hunger to know whether something costly and labor-intensive was worthwhile.

International aid programs face this problem every day, and from that domain has emerged a new method for monitoring these types of programs.

It's called Most Significant Change. (Here's the official guide, written by Rick Davies, the creator of the approach, and Jess Dart.) At its most basic, this deceptively simple approach asks field workers (or first-line managers in the business context) to elicit anecdotes from the people affected, focusing on what most significant change has occurred as the result of the initiative, and why they think that change occurred. These dozens or hundreds of stories are passed up the chain and winnowed down to the most significant, as determined by each management layer, until finally one story is selected.

It's not numbers, or graphs, or ROIs. It's a story, with an explanation, and behind it a collection of other significant stories. A story that describes a real experience, reviewed, defended, and selected by the people charged with the success of the program.

Why can this monitoring method work for programs like our performance evaluation system? I'll discuss that in another post.

communications, storytelling, measurement, innovation, narrative, strategy

Putting ideas into language - and sharing them - makes them come alive

Ever heard someone say, "I have a book all figured out--I just have to put it on paper"? Millions of us are like that. The biggest delusion in this statement is that something in one's head exists for anyone but the thinker. It doesn't.

Which brings me to a great article in this month's Harvard Business Review (link - $) from Steelcase CEO James Hackett on using ideas from complexity theory to enhance the front end of the company's product development and launch process. (Worry not; it's a very practical article.)

Hackett makes a compelling case for taking a beginner's mindset, thinking deeply, and learning before starting implementation of a new product idea. He shows how this worked for Steelcase entering the market for clinical workstations. But this small quote also caught my eye.

Throughout [the thinking phase,] they document the depth and breadth of their research to assemble information into a sensible whole. Documentation is critical; the kinesthetic work cements their thinking [emphasis mine] and creates tangible evidence of their efforts....

The same concept was part of the Gap International and Anecdote Narrative in Business (which also touched on complexity theory) workshops I recently attended.

In summary: putting ideas into language forces your brain to organize and make sense of them; sharing the ideas commits yourself to them and allows others to commit as well.

[It's one of the uses I find for this activity of blogging.]

(Photo from andybahn via stock.xchng)

communications, creativity, ideas, narrative, product development

CEOs like stories

Conventional wisdom tells us that CEOs are bottom-line oriented. If you can't reduce it to numbers for them, it doesn't exist. I disagree with that characterization. I believe that CEOs hunger for non-quantitative information, but typical means of communication are too boring, time-consuming and contextless to provide them much value.

So what works? Stories. (Don't laugh--this is why I didn't post this yesterday, on April Fools' Day.) Stories are brief, detailed, vivid and provide context. Imagine this conversation:

CEO: We had to slam the Heltech merger in. What's the impact been on morale?

Division VP: It's been a bit of a struggle. There have been issues.

CEO: Such as?

Division VP: Well, for instance, there was the customer who got called on by two salespeople, one Heltech and one of our guys, and chewed out our guy for not being coordinated. He's our best sales guy, and got really upset by that.

CEO: Anything else?

Division VP: The websites got combined right away, but not the call centers, so a Heltech center started getting calls for our old products, and couldn't help, and there weren't good handoff procedures yet. So I got a bunch of angry customer calls. One said she was going to tell her CIO to start an RFP process to find a replacement. I think I got her calmed down, but we'll see.

CEO: OK, I get it. What do you think we need to do at this point?

Total elapsed time: less than 2 minutes. Information conveyed: terabytes. In these two brief stories, the CEO has gotten the message that they need to quickly fix the remaining integration issues. Think a stack of PowerPoint slides could've done that?

(Photo from scyza via stock.xchng)

communications, storytelling, narrative

Salespeople as Parents - prescription for failed sales

Have you ever spoken to a sales person & felt they were treating you like an idiot? We, as sales people, tend to have these types of conversations when we're trying to close a sale, even if we don't realize it.

Jeff Thull, in his book Exceptional Selling, calls these Parent/Child interactions. We as parents treat prospects like children, persuading, lecturing, pleading. The prospects, sooner or later, shut down. (Like me talking to my six-year-old.)

An adult conversation, where we and the prospects could talk like businesspeople, would be more effective, wouldn't it? (Sorry--didn't mean to lecture. Strike that last sentence.)

Voice-to-Screen messaging - powered by SpinVox

psychology, sales, spoken post, reading list

An innovator in government communications passes away

Like seemingly everyone else, I'm reading Made to Stick by the Heath brothers. So today's New York Times obituary of former CIA analyst Richard Lehman practically jumped off the page as I read it. Mr. Lehman crafted an intelligence briefing memo (the President's Intelligence Check List, or PICL) for President John Kennedy in 1961 that replaced an assortment of confusing, redundant and often omission-filled documents.

Says the Times:

Mr. Lehman recalled how “Kennedy was blindsided a couple of times” because he had not received important briefings. The president complained to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who, Mr. Lehman said, “came down on” the senior White House military aide, Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, “like a ton of bricks.”

Mr. Lehman said General Clifton told him to produce a daily memo that would fit into a breast pocket so the president could carry it around with him. What the general wanted, Mr. Lehman said, was “a single publication, no sources barred, covering the whole ground, and written as much as possible in the president’s language rather than in officialese.”

If that isn't following the Heaths' simple and credible rules., I don't know what is. And this document has remained in use for forty-five years, through eight succeeding Presidents.

Also, I must point out a very good use of concrete description in the next paragraph of the Times article: "On a Saturday morning in June 1961, President Kennedy read the first PICL while sitting on a diving board at a hunting farm in Virginia."

Rest in peace, Mr. Lehman.

innovation, communication, obituaries, New York Times