Mike Klein has an interesting post up about how "tw0-way" communication just isn't enough to be "progressive" any more. He says it's better than the old "one-way" directive style of pure order-giving, but:
organisational decisions have wider impacts than on managers and staff. They impact customers, perhaps alter supply chains, and reflect on the organisation's credibility with a wide range of stakeholders. And, in many respects, finding out what a staff member's opinion is could be much more valuable when it becomes known how and with whom he or she shares it.
He goes on to suggest that we're still only just developing the tools to understand "intensity of opinion" and what I might quickly summarise as the social path and impact of opinion.
[As always, go read the full article, it's not long and it's worth it.]
Naturally, I agree with Mike, but it also reminded me of something I have on my company pages, but don't blog about that much. I really believe that lateral communications is a much ignored topic, both in internal communications practice as it stands (which is Mike's focus) and in the understanding of how the totality of communication works in companies.
The totality is a viewpoint that tries to think about "functional communication" (the passing of information to get "work" done), "corporate communication" (the passing of information to support the objectives of those who hold power in an organisation) and "social communication" (the passing of information for the purposes of the people doing the communication) in a more holistic manner.
[I accept that "passing of information" is an incomplete definition of "communication" but you perhaps get the gist of the idea.]
The purpose of the holistic view is to suggest that real advances in corporate performance can accrue from working to analyse, improve and facilitate communication. Right now this responsibility is split over numerous parts of the business (IT, IC, Marketing, Procurement, etc.) and thus, despite local "wins" few companies really advance in this aspect.
Once this holistic view is taken up, it becomes clear that the vast majority of communications in the organisation are "lateral," between people who (at least for that communication) are largely operating as peers. Thus we need to put much more effort into facilitating and improving this lateral communication.
A quick note: Mike's newest project EMELI is scheduled for 18-19 July in Amsterdam. I'm certainly trying to fit it into my schedule, if you're interested in internal comms, you should investigate whether it would suit you too.
No comments:
Post a Comment