Enoptron: organisation | communication | culture

Blogging... but not here...

2010-10-06T06:39:00.000-07:00

My blogging has moved, along with my commercial activity to Throughline.

http://www.throughline.co.uk/water-cooler/

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Prague and preparation.

2008-08-23T15:56:00.001-07:00

Last week I spent some time in Prague for the first time. Before I travel somewhere new, it's usually my habit to invest some time and energy in preparing to understand the place I'm going to and the people there. To get a sense of the language forms and a feel for the culture.

However, the week running up to the trip was just so busy (and the main purpose of the trip was to deal with a very international set of people) that I did not undertake my usual level of local preparation.

If this was a marketing pitch, I should have a list of the disasters that thus ensued. However, in fact, everything passed off very smoothly overall. Everyone was very friendly and the setting, whilst subtly different, was similar enough to other parts of Central Europe to enable me to extrapolate from other visits to the region.

All the same, I definitely noticed a difference in the levels of stress (higher) and confidence (lower) that various parts of the trip presented me with. Cultural preparation is as much about arriving at the critical moment in the right frame of mind as anything. It is not just about avoiding disaster, but creating a platform for success. Most people have the ability to perform under stressful circumstances, but orientation can help both remove distractions (by providing a framework for understanding differences in behaviour and situations) and allowing you to spot opportunities (through understanding the ritual element of what is going on.)

I'm resolved to make the time for more of my own preparation in future. Next stop: India. Bangalore and Mumbai in the first week of September. My family roots are in West Bengal, so it's clear that there are plenty of differences to think about.

Technorati Tags: cultural orientation,culture,prague

Culture and new products

2008-08-10T09:03:00.001-07:00

I recently came across this open letter from Osamu Higuchi to Google, about the arrival of "Streetview" into Japan. [Translation by Chris Salzberg.]

It's a great reminder that despite convergence between countries, there remain significant differences and if your new product hasn't been developed from an international mindset, it may not be as popular as you thought.

Japanese life is full of advanced technology and Osamu Higuchi is no ageing luddite:

Now, let me start by saying that I actually really like Google (everybody likes them, no?). While I was involved in the creation of the Japanese Infoseek, I always felt envious of Google, a company that presented, as their vision, a dream that we were never able to attain. This was the dream that “if all the information and knowledge scattered all over the world on the Web could be organized in an orderly way, so that anybody could access it whenever they needed to, then the world would undergo a major change”. This was a dream that Google managed to realize.

His basic objection to the "Streetview" system on Google Maps is:

The residential roads of Japan's urban areas are a part of people's living space, and it is impolite to photograph ~~a stranger's~~ other people's living spaces.

And he notes to back this up that:

In the United States, and particularly in the case of people living on the west coast, the boundary line between private space and public space, both in terms of actual ownership and in terms of the way people think, is in the boundary line between the public road and privately-held land.

...

For people living in urban areas in Japan, though, the situation is quite the opposite. The residential street in front of a house, the so-called “alleyway” (roji/路地), feels more like a part of one's own living space, like a part of the yard.

His request to Google:

Could you please remove the residential roads of Japan's urban areas from Street View?

Should Google do so? Am I contending that you cannot at all release a product that challenges the boundaries in a culture?

Clearly not. However, "Streetview" has been released in Japan, as in many parts of the world, silently. This is quite normal for Google products, which slip quietly out of the labs, with little fanfare. And if it is not a success, or has to be modified after attracting a lot of bad publicity, Google are rich enough not to care.

However, if your reserves and cashflow aren't Google sized, it's worth remembering that just because your new product is accepted in your home market, does not mean it will be so everywhere.

What can you do?

1) Consider carefully how the product might not fit with the culture of the people who will be buying it, before you try to sell it to them.

2) Think carefully about possible modifications. Do not try to change the soul of the product, but if a small adjustment can make it more acceptable, you'll reap the rewards in acceptance.

3) If no change is possible without disturbing the core proposition of the product, ask yourself whether any resulting bad publicity will outweigh sales revenue through damage to your brand (possibly affecting sales of other products.)

4) If you are going ahead with no changes, then you should prepare a communications campaign alongside your product introduction, aimed at easing the cultural objections. Perhaps you can persuade people to view your product as an exception to the unspoken rules, or at least deflect the debate from your product to the cultural values that are in play.

Technorati Tags: google,intercultural communications,japan,marketing

Sometimes translation is the problem?

2008-08-02T03:55:00.001-07:00

When I describe my work to a new set of people I often have to spend some time encouraging them to think beyond language and translation as the problems in international business co-operation. The things that words don't say, about expectations, about different ways of approaching work and different assumption are often the real root of the problem.

However, recently I was introduced to an area where translation issues really are part of the problem. The setting is a small UK company that has been bought by a larger foreign organisation. Local management have mostly remained in place, although there are some ex-pats from the main organisation now present. [Details are obscured to protect confidentiality.]

Senior management from the larger corporation journey out from their home country twice a year or so to ask questions about performance and set new directions for the UK subsidiary.

Analysing a fundamental breakdown in performance it seems to be the case that communication between the foreign leaders and local managers is a particular part of the problem. Certainly, the foreign leaders show signs of misunderstanding the local business context and the local managers do not seem to grasp the strategic import of certain decisions.

As a simplification, they are not managing to question each other properly and as a result, not obtaining important information from each other.

So why do I say, this time, language might be the problem? After all, we know that different cultures have different reactions to how various levels of the hierarchy should interact. Might that not be the root of this problem?

I won't deny that there were some of those issues in play. However, the key analysis point was that the situation had got noticeably worse with a change in translation services. So, for once translation is the problem!

This being a language I am certainly no expert in, I had to consult with others. They did an assessment and report back that the translator is of technically a very high standard and well suited to the nuances involved. The next step was "live" observation of the interaction between local managers, foreign leaders and the translator. At last, things start to become more clear. The culture of this particular foreign nation has a traditional tendency to place women in a subordinate position, putting less weight on their words, particularly when they disagree with someone of higher status. The previous translator had been male and the new one was female. The technical quality of translation had not changed, but the reception by the audience definitely had. So translation was the problem, but the problem had cultural roots.

Technorati Tags: business problems,cultural translation,culture,international managers,translation

Engaging the English?

2008-07-29T16:10:00.001-07:00

Four years after publication I've finally found the time to read Kate Fox's "Watching the English." It's a bit embarrassing that it's taken me that long, since it is all about "English culture" but I'm glad I finally did so. If you haven't read it, it is rich with insights into the "English character" and how these manifest in daily life. Kate Fox is a serious anthropologist and doesn't over-generalise too much, but at the same time has managed to write a witty and insightful book that is easy to read.

It's been widely reviewed, so I won't dwell much on the content, except to say that if you ever find yourself watching an English ritual (ordering at the pub, for instance) and wondering "what on earth is going on?" then this is a good book to read. The rules of "pub life" have also been put on the web at the SIRC site. (SIRC is the research centre where Fox works.)

However, the essential characteristics she laid out really got me thinking about the culture clash within a lot of "employee engagement" programs, especially within multinational firms.

A stereotypical example (to avoid identifying anyone!): a large US firm has an engagement program, with pieces implemented by HR and Internal Comms. Within the UK office, this is put in place by local workers.

Picking out three characteristics from Kate Fox's list, moderation/balance, humour, and finally a taboo against earnestness we can begin to see some problems. The program may well be sold locally with a good dose of humour by the local workers, despite the earnestness present in the original descriptions written in Michigan. However, the underlying aims of "employee engagement" as defined at the US HQ might well conflict with local cultural norms about "not being too earnest" or "moderation/balance in work and play."

Now in the case of a small division, this isn't fatal, because culture is a broad assessment and every country contains a range of personalities. You can fill out a single department with people who fit well with the originating culture (in this case the USA) but as your employment requirements grow it will become ever harder to find candidates who aren't typical of the culture.

In time then, we will need to develop different sets of philosophical ideas of employee engagement that can fit with the cultures of different employees. That requires not only an assessment of the culture but also a real sense of "engagement" beyond the stereotypical notion of a hypermotivated, hyperactive, workaholic team.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,cultural translation,culture,engagement,English culture

More Social Networking examples...

2008-07-09T08:32:00.001-07:00

Shiv Singh at TheAppGap tell us a bit about his panel talk with representatives from Best Buy, Serena Software and Oracle on their use of Web 2.0 social software.

The BestBuy experience is very interesting as an example of how certain kinds of business knowledge aggregation come out of social networking, but the one I am going to have to research more is Serena Software:

Serena Software is another interesting company and I blogged about them a few years ago (on another blog) when they first rolled out their Facebook Fridays initiative. Rather than trying to build a behind the firewall social networking enabled intranet, Serena chose to build their intranet on the Facebook platform. But not just that, they also built tools to allow the Facebook pages to connect with company data sources in a safe and secure manner. So rather than bringing the employees to the intranet, they went to where their employees were spending most of their time - on Facebook.

This is exactly what most companies are scared of doing on security/productivity grounds, so I think it's a fascinating development.

[N.B. After lunch with Steve Ward today, I realise I've been blogging far too much about various technologies and not enough about culture and communication as it features in my general work. Expect a shift of emphasis over the coming months.]

Technorati Tags: Best Buy,business case,future of internal communications,Oracle,Serena Software,social media,social networking

Momentum of Social Networking in the Enterprise.

2008-07-03T03:42:00.001-07:00

It's growing. I posted recently about IBM, I was at a recent event where Michael Ambjorn described the tools they are putting in place at Motorola and Lee Smith notes that social networking has landed at BT.

I'm not surprised by this, I've argued for a while that the large corporation is exactly the kind of large, geographically disparate body that could benefit from social networking.

Questions that remain:

a) If it's obvious for large corporations, how do we persuade the remaining "big boys" to take it up? Senior management resistance is still a big issue.

b) How big does the organisation have to be for social networking to be a no-brainer? What's the needed "critical mass" of a network to make this kind of software useful?

Technorati Tags: BT,business case,future of internal communications,IBM,Motorola,social networking

Is this Facebook's answer to LinkedIn?

2008-06-29T09:01:00.001-07:00

So the new app on the Facebook block is the Visa Business Network. It's interesting because it isn't in fact a direct analogue of LinkedIn. Rather than being a tool for presenting our "business personas" it appears more geared to being an organisational persona for smaller businesses.

It's only in Beta, so the networking features are rather rudimentary and until the number of participants increases it's not clear how useful they will be. And personally, I'm not sure that this will be enough for Facebook to take on LinkedIn. I think they are going to have to take on board the fact that we all have more than one persona (the usual example is business vs personal) and if they want to be a site that contains both, they have to give people a way to present both sides. This seems to do so, a little bit, for those of us who own smaller organisations, but I'm not sure quite what it does for those who work, say, for IBM. By contrast, LinkedIn at least has some potential there (along with a growing userbase.)

Of course, this could be an example of one of those "enabling technologies" that helps smaller businesses create "virtual organisations" or "network businesses" to cover market requirements that are normally served by much larger organisations. However, there doesn't seem to be enough interactivity to really be better than a phone directory so far. Also, the address form assumes you are in the USA.

This is a pet peeve of mine, but so many "Web 2.0" sites hobble their functionality by not considering non-US users when they first start up. If you're looking for early adopters, it's best to cast the net wider. Ignoring the world outside the US might save 10 minutes coding up the HTML for location, phone and address handling, but you lose half the advantage (geo-location neutrality) of a Web App in the first place.

Technorati Tags: business case,facebook,linkedin,social networking

On new channels

2008-06-22T15:42:00.001-07:00

Over at Black Belt Dojo, guest poster Jeffery McMillan posts some musings about podcasts and their place in his new assignment in Russia. He makes some interesting points about how the different medium elicits different responses from interviewees and how it can build a more intimate connection with the audience.

However, what got me thinking was this:

Let's return to the paradox with which I began this blog post. It seems the better I get at producing podcasts the lower the number of listeners tuning in.

...

It could be a cultural thing. Perhaps podcasting is as of yet a western phenomenon. PwC Russia is a solid 93% Russian in its staff composition and, let's face it, maybe you can't blame my Russian colleagues for having an instinctive skepticism toward the media—corporate media included. I wonder what the experiences of my colleagues around the world have been. Do podcasts resonate further in some necks of the woods than in others?

Now I'm no techno-slouch, per se. I have 2 iPods (car and general use) and I'm rarely without my laptop. And yet... I barely listen to podcasts. It's true that I don't work for an organisation that puts out vital information in this format, but plenty of high quality blogs in the IC space and others produce a podcast. But the only podcast I generally make an effort to listen to each year is the Guardian's Tour de France daily report. And I usually end up listening to that in the evening on my laptop.

Now there are a variety of reasons for this, from the fact that I don't drive on a regular basis, to the miserable quality of bandwidth on the train and in various hotels for streaming.

I must also admit that once I get the new iPhone, I might be more likely to find it easy to organise such that podcasts are with me all the time.

I think that these sort of infrastructure issues are a big part of Jeffrey's situation. It's often not that convenient/appropriate to sit in an open plan office listening to a podcast. But elsewhere, bandwidth can be a bit scanty. And (guessing) perhaps the Russia office has a lower iPod ownership.

And this is a problem which a lot of new media channels face. The main reason every "social networking" conversation eventually turns to Facebook (and occasionally LinkedIn) is that they are the main ones with any kind of serious user density.

For myself, I can see lots of interesting possibilities for mixing my virtual life with my physical one. Examples include things as diverse as Facebook's status update, Twitter and Dopplr. The problem is, candidly, very few of the people in my physical world are on any of these services.

Interestingly, email was easy, because everyone got it with internet access. I wonder which other channels will turn out to be "basic" in the same way.

Technorati Tags: podcasting,social networking

How much knowledge work do you actually do?

2008-06-11T07:11:00.001-07:00

Or perhaps, more importantly, how much knowledge work does your organisation actually do? There's a whole host of recent posts that touch on the collision of innovation, knowledge work and systematisation in business. (e.g. Victoria Axelrod, Dave Snowden.)

One thing I am still struggling to understand and (roughly) quantify is how much "knowledge work" is actually going on. Over the years, many commentators have taken the "Gold Collar Worker" as a starting point and believed that the future of work for many (if not most) will be more flexible, more satisfying and more knowledge-based than before. This leads of course both to a view of education as a tool for income improvement (not to mention as the source of increased value-added for businesses.)

However, my own observation of various "knowledge industries" is that many firms may be large, but many of the people inside are doing rather routine work (which might be termed "mental labour") which is not particularly creative or flexible, but for various reasons is not cheap to automate at this time. So, I'll put the question to knowledge workers reading this, how much of what you do is really "creative knowledge work" and how much will be outsourced to lower-skilled subordinates using a computerised system in the next few years?

Technorati Tags: knowledge economy

Social Media case study

2008-06-05T16:03:00.001-07:00

It seems that the first real case study of social media in a corporate setting is leaking out of IBM. Those who remember earlier incarnations of the company can't help but be a little surprised at that fact, but it's a fascinating test case.

Business Week has a short article on developments. Key points include:

Social networks in the corporate world involve very different dynamics, and scientists at IBM (IBM) Research's Collaborative User Div. in Cambridge, Mass., are learning all about them. Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits.

...

So far, IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks. The biggest success is the nine-month-old social network, Beehive, which is based on the premise of Facebook. It has already attracted 30,000 users, including top executives.

Of course, IBM is so large (400,000 employees) that it's easy to build something and get the user density to replicate internet applications quite directly (Del.icio.us; Facebook). And equally, the benefits are of more value in a larger, more disparate organisation:

Already, social scientists are studying the benefits IBMers are getting from the network. They see that it strengthens what are called "weak ties." These are the people employees might know only casually, some in a different division or down a distant corridor. Getting to know these people, even if it starts out with a Top Five list, widens employees' range of contacts and knowledge within the company.

Employees also use Beehive for self-branding. It's a way to strut their stuff for colleagues and managers at the company—whether it's for a promotion or funding for a pet project.

However, it's a case study of the kind we've all been waiting for. I'm going to have to watch the IBM Research pages for more detailed information.

Technorati Tags: business case,social media

Two-Way Communication is not enough

2008-06-05T15:50:00.001-07:00

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.

Technorati Tags: EMELI,future of internal communications,lateral communications

Culture and Web 2.0

2008-05-29T03:25:00.001-07:00

Over at The AppGap, Matthew Hodgson has made a post uniting some of the themes I've been blogging about recently: the effect of different cultures on the take up of Web 2.0 tools.

Of course, I have to add the industry standard disclaimer that I too have philosophical and technical doubts about Hofstede's categories like "Power Distance" but overall it's not a bad starting point in this case (and definitely a post worth reading) Hodgson points to some recent research:

The book The Emergence of the Relationship Economy looks at a wide range of factors in the adoption of social computing tools, including culture. In bringing together a number of studies, chapter nine [1] deals specifically with the issue of culture.

The book reports that cultures who have very high Power-Distance scores also have low adoption of social computing tools. What organisations are likely to be high Power-Distance cultures? Many government agencies, defence and security organisations, and manufacturing companies could be described in this way.

He goes on to muse on how to address the problem. I agree overall with his contention that you can build an organisational culture that accepts social web tools even where the national culture seems to mitigate against it. However, what I've seen so far is that many companies still fail to take the time to consider that there may be cultural differences across different branch offices before they roll out these tools. So I make that the most important take home point of this post: Find out what cultures are operating across your organisation before you roll out a one size fits all change program.

Technorati Tags: corporate culture,culture,internal communications,international communications,social media,social networking

Willingness to work together?

2008-05-19T08:26:00.001-07:00

Shiv Singh recently posted some Reflections on the Nature of Collaboration over at the app gap. He says:

An often forgotten fact about collaboration is that the people who typically want to collaborate are also the ones who trust each other the most. They are also the people who recognize that they can benefit in some manner by collaborating. Those benefits usually extend beyond just learning from one another to also recognizing that their reputations get enhanced as more peers observe their ongoing collaborations. But these people aren’t always in the majority.

Shiv concentrates on the implications of this for "Enterprise 2.0 software" but it reminded me of the often unspoken political problems when "intercultural communication problems" are identified in a business. Every now and then, two offices are not co-operating well on a project, but the problem is not at the level of the cultural differences in ways of working and communicating, or generating trust across two groups who perceive strong differences between them.

Instead, the problem comes out of a company's structure, which may place parts of those two offices in competition for certain customers, or particular bits of work. Or the director of one of the offices doesn't want the project to succeed because the director of the other office would get all the credit (and the coming promotion!)

Business problems can have many roots and it may not be the one you expect. This is why it is so important to begin with an analysis of the business and the context of the perceived problem. When you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. That's why I feel my experience in other fields has helped in cross-cultural consulting. It helps me be open about what the root causes may be and allows me to step back and say "This problem is really about the way you force these offices to compete against each other over business. If you don't address that, co-operation between them will not improve, no matter how many "cultural awareness" workshops are put on.

Technorati Tags: collaboration,intercultural communications,internal communications,office politics

Virtual Communications

2008-05-15T07:32:00.001-07:00

Over at IABC Cafe, Julie Freeman asks about people's experiences with teleconferencing, which reminds me of a recent conversation with a lawyer. He asked me my general opinion of video conferencing and other technologies. I was moved to enthuse about a recent demonstration I'd seen of Cisco's TelePresence. I think that the approach of representing people in high definition at life size is the way of the future for virtual business communication. For now the cost, both for equipment and bandwidth, is beyond most organisations but (other than holography) it's the first setup I have seen that begins to offer an experience that offers some of the affordances* of face-to-face meetings.

However, I ended the conversation by touching on my reservations. The lawyer heads up a branch office and was wondering about the use of technology to reduce travelling to meetings at the central office. That sounds very promising, it could save time, money and help save the planet. Unfortunately, I was of the opinion that for him, it was a bad idea. Why?

The firm is run as a partnership and these meetings at the central office are where the partners gather to decide how the business will be run. My experience is that every such partnership has it's share of low-level politics. And if you move to "virtual meetings" you will amplify any communications gap between the people at central office and those from various branches. That gap no doubt already exists, politically, with those who work in each location tending to discuss matter with each other before the overall gathering takes place. Low-tech teleconferencing however raises the danger that those in central office can have a "back conversation" throughout a virtual meeting, which puts those on the other end of a video link in a position where they have much less awareness of what is going on and thus less ability to influence proceedings.

Is there then no hope for a greener teleconferencing future? I think there is hope, but it relies in understanding that meetings are often not the best forum for discussion or decision-making. If other methods are taken up, they can proceed using "virtualisation technologies" and a smaller number of meetings be made face to face.

*Affordances is a word which means "action possibilities" and I first encountered it in the book "The Myth of the Paperless Office" which I highly recommend if you like thinking about the way various media delimit the way we work and communicate.

Technorati Tags: improving communication,office politics,technology,teleconferencing

Interacting with the world

2008-05-06T09:00:00.001-07:00

David Ferrabee has a nice post on the way globalisation is affecting every business, not just those with branches out in "foreign places." He asks some important questions about the ethical basis of our interactions with other countries, for us all to consider:

Do our buying policies help serve countries that need the trade?
How can we support sustainable development (like drought resistant crops) is developing parts of the world?
Do we have any way of influencing fertility rates in countries where children are still being born at a rate of 5/6 per woman?
How can we help keep children in school...? Children who could be contributing more effectively to the economy is a matter of years...
What kind of investment brings people and communities along with us, rather than sitting in opposition?

I'd emphasise that these questions apply all the more strongly to those businesses who are already, or are in the planning stages of doing business abroad. If you do (or are going to do) business in far off places you should be looking at every avenue to develop engagement and understanding of the culture there.

Think carefully about acting on some of David's questions and you will not only improve your understanding of the local market and employees, but you can improve your CSR ratings and get some goodwill, good PR both at home and abroad.

Technorati Tags: alternative ways of thinking,cultural translation,culture,engagement

Communications are leaky, so what?

2008-05-01T14:08:00.001-07:00

I blogged recently about the new reality that any communications will leak beyond the intended recipients to all sorts of other stakeholders, particularly departments of the business in different countries.

So how should you construct your communications? Shel Holtz has a nice summary of the implications:

The core message absolutely must be consistent.

...

However, I don’t agree with the notion that you can craft a single communication for each audience. Whether or not you share your external communications with employees, they’ll see it—or, at least, have access to it. The message to analysts ends in analyst reports which find their way into investment blogs, the media message is published on news sites and from there into the blogosphere.

But employees still need the internal spin, and I’m using that word in the constructive sense. In a merger, analysts care about the impact on value and share price. Employees may also care about that—particularly if they own stock—but they have more immediate concerns that aren’t on the minds of other publics (including local communities, NGOs, activist groups, the government, and so on). They want to know about the security of their jobs, the status of existing projects, where they’ll wind up in the revamped structure of the new company and whether their benefits will change.

Spinning stories (in the good way) to accommodate the unique interests of each constituency is at the heart of effective communication. It’s why we research the audiences before we craft the communications.

Of course, defining the boundary line between the "core message" which must be preserved and the "details of specific interest" which can vary from audience to audience isn't easy. But that's why they pay us...

Technorati Tags: internal communications,law of leaky communications,multiple audiences,segmentation

Wars for talent?

2008-04-23T08:33:00.001-07:00

This post is part inspired by Kevin Keohane's recent post on restructuring comms departments, which I commented on yesterday. However, the thought process was also stimulated by Charles Gancel's presentation at IABC Eurocomm 2008 and the recent post at Cognitive Edge; "Whither the MBA?"

Audrey Scarff highlighted one of Charles Gancel's major points over at the Eurocomm blog:

Charles Gancel says there’s more head hunting going on today because of retiring baby boomers and consequently a senior management shortage. This brings up the need for even better knowledge management, and retention of talent.

Kevin noted:

1. Take the existing functions and force them to work together holistically, probably by making them report to a single person who gets the “holistic” nature of communications. The problem is, I think these people are pretty rare; most “Heads of Corporate Communications” tend to stick to their functional (or even sometimes channel management) heritage.

Charles Gancel was talking in the context of managers who run departments outside (or spanning beyond) their home country. That kind of internationalism requires a greater flexibility of perspective than a typical management position. He contends that such candidates have never been thick on the ground, but demographics are making them much more difficult to find.

Likewise, Kevin feels that an ideal "Head of Corporate Comms" has a holistic view which is not common amongst candidates who rise through one communication track (e.g. Investor Relations.)

I expressed the view on the day at Eurocomm that this situation is not at all an accident. It seems clear to me that the hiring, training and development of staff concentrates very much on identifying and creating functional experts and ignores the need for flexibility of perspective.

I was reminded to blog about this by the post at Cognitive Edge about the MBA:

Further than an MBA is this day and age seems to be taught content, rather than a masters programme involving a degree of independent thinking. Mind you PhD's also seem these days to be more taught, with a narrow focus using various survey and other type instruments whose validity I and others have challenged. The Mediaeval model why which you engaged in discourse, attended lectures and then presented your ideas to examination by your peers seems to have got lost somewhere along the way in the journey to commoditisation of learning in general. Originality is punished in favour of conformity.

Having done an MBA myself, I have a whole host of observations on them, but that's for another post. However, I think the point "originality is punished in favour of conformity" is the key to understanding why we find ourselves lacking appropriate candidates across a number of sectors. It starts in the hiring processes, where all too often candidates with a true diversity of interests are screened out. Training and development is often focused on a narrow range of technical skills and an interest in wider issues is not encouraged.

How to rectify this? I'll be posting some thoughts about that soon...

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,corporate culture,international managers,war for talent

Audiences and the structure of comms depts

2008-04-22T07:55:00.001-07:00

In a similar vein to my post on The Law of Leaky Communications (but focusing on corporate functions, rather than international culture) Kevin Keohane notes that the distinctions between different audiences in corporate communications are breaking down. He moves on to ask what this means for the organisational structure of the communications function:

I think most organisations still aren’t structured to deal with this - I suspect most still structure their communications functions around internal, marketing, corporate, human resources, etc.

So what’s the solution?

2. Get functions to cooperate and share accountability for delivering a core agenda across the piece. Probably works better in some situations than others based on politics and the strength of senior management to make it work.

3. Restructure the function. But how? seems to be the burning question. Is the answer to restructure by audience? Probably something along those lines. But then, these conversations can come full circle, since while internal-external lines and indeed audiences are overlapping and blurring, there is still a perceived need to control marketing communications, brand communications, HR etc. etc.

Observations:

1) They may be rare, but I'm not sure you can work it out without them. I think any restructuring is going to bring at least some of the communication functions together and they will need a leader. Perhaps we should all be asking "Does this organisation actually train/develop people to be more than just another product of their functional silo?" If not why not? (I'll be coming back to this issue in my next post, too.)

2) "I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony..." Yes, it sounds Utopian, but it can work, in the right organisation, at the right time. Sometimes there are just a good bunch of people around and they make special things happen.

3) I don't think you can easily restructure by audience. The post-modern trend is towards overlapping, shifting audiences. You might need to restructure every week. Functions are also not completely defunct. [sic] Whilst we undertake "task-based communications" then they will still fit quite well into the functional structure, at least in terms of expertise needed.

What's my solution? Long term, there has to be more effort put into developing individuals who can manage communications holistically.

In the short term, I'd be looking at a variant of the techniques Enoptron uses for building greater co-operation between branches on different sides of the world.:

- Establish formal awareness (lists, etc.) of the remit of each group and the concerns they have about the actions of the others.

- Get the groups talking, informally where possible.

- Establish formal channels for them to get help/consult each other when they have an "overlap situation" on hand.

- Organise to remove barriers to teamwork in the performance management and other structures.

Obviously, this still hinges on building some notion that "co-operation is a good thing" which will need backing up from senior management along with careful fostering on the ground. That's why in the long term I don't think you can get away from the need for a leader with a holistic view.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,cultural translation,future of internal communications,law of leaky communications

The Law of Leaky Communications

2008-04-15T06:46:00.001-07:00

Today's formulation: "What plays in Mexico doesn't stay in Mexico."

Or, more formally, since this is the first time I've posted this:

"Any communication designed for a particular audience will find it's way to other audiences that have an interest in you."

Or:

"Targeting might let you speak to a specific group of people, but don't forget to consider how other people might react if they heard what you are saying."

Today's example comes from the blog "Strange Maps" which I highly recommend as regular reading if you like graphics and maps. It seems that Absolut Vodka tried to propel sales in Mexico with a clever ad about how an alternate history regarding the USA. Unfortunately of course, what "plays in Mexico doesn't stay in Mexico" and the ad moved from paid circulation to viral circulation in the USA, prompting some backlash there.

This is particularly germane to cross-cultural contexts in organisations. We've all seen the simple strangeness where HQ tells the Indian division "India is our most important market" whilst telling the Chinese division "China is our most important market." Or the notion that in some regions it's perfectly acceptable to tell the stock market about job cuts before you tell your employees, but not so acceptable elsewhere.

People used to get away with a lot of these risky behaviours because communications did not "leak" far beyond their intended audiences. This is no longer the case and it imposes new problems for communicators.

One reaction is simply to be better prepared for blowback, but I would urge everyone to think more clearly about the different cultures in their organisation and how different messages will affect them.

[The title is a homage to Joel Spolsky's excellent phrase "The Law of Leaky Abstractions", which I've loved since I read it and if you're in software or any kind of systems design and haven't heard of, I urge you to go and read about.]

Technorati Tags: cultural translation,law of leaky communications,multiple audiences

Business Texting?

2008-04-06T11:42:00.001-07:00

Over at IABC Cafe, Todd Hattori made a sort of odd post about an interesting subject: the use of text messages in business in Asia.

He starts off quite normally describing how he came across the phenomenon at an IABC event in the Philippines, his amazement at the fact of it and the explanations given to him about it by local colleagues.

His "amazement" rather rubbed me up the wrong way, along with his final two paragraphs:

So, I’m curious … I’m a fairly vocal critic of e-mail because very few people use it correctly … shouldn’t we be defining proper use rules for texting before it, like e-mail, gets out of control?

I fear the day when I have to manage the hundreds of e-mails that I receive each day AND endless, intrusive text messages. To add to my fear, my company is getting ready to implement instant messaging. Short of turning off my phone and computer, have any best practices emerged?

Fortunately, I didn't have time to comment or blog about it until now and Kristen Sukalac (who blogs at PR Conversations) weighed in with a great comment, covering some of the reasons why the text message is a useful medium (even if it hasn't caught on in the US thanks to the behaviour of the phone companies there) and I would urge you to go and read the comment in full.

What I would add is three things:

1) All the downsides that Todd seems to see with texting are already in force for a lot of people outside Asia through the medium of the "Crackberry." Push email is largely just text messages with a few extra bells and whistles. This isn't a new problem and we're not at some 'tipping point' where we can stem the tide of rudeness and time wasting from this medium before it gets started. We're already living in the middle of it.

2) The "disbelief" that a particular technology can be used for business communication was prompted in this case by travelling to another continent. However, one can see similar reactions to new technologies used by younger generations right at home. Social networking springs to mind. Not to pick on Todd, but it worries me quite often how few "professional communicators" are open-minded about different ways to get a message across.

3) Most importantly, Kristen makes a key cultural point at the end of her comment:

Text messaging has another appeal: its simplified, pidgeon version of English is much easier to master and to use across diverse groups of non-native English speakers.

This is to my mind, a key point. There's a clear level of discomfort in "professional communicators" with "text speak" and the varied informal ways people type out emails and IMs. This preference for clarity, formality and well, beauty in language is certainly admirable and just about justifiable amongst a homogenous set of native speakers.

However, as soon as you're communicating in English with a set of people for whom it is their second language, you're not talking to people who have any investment in the ways you have been taught to make things clear, to be formal or even well expressed. It should not surprise then if they find a simplified, constrained version of the language more useful. And it's worth remembering that not only when you read (as Todd was doing) some of their communications between themselves, but also when you sit down to communicate with them too.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,cultural translation,text speak

Corporate Communicators, BA and BAA

2008-03-30T14:09:00.001-07:00

It feels like a long time now (is a week a long time in blogging?) that I wrote about how some high-level Corporate Communicators have slipped into chasing the message cycle under pressure. [In fact it is only about 7 months.] I thought that was a bit worrying.

The customer service and PR mess at Terminal 5 however, seems to have been characterised by another reaction. Everyone in top management (including any communicators) spent the first few hours in hiding!

Eventually BA wheeled out the top man, Chief Executive, Willie Walsh to take a considerable amount of flak. That is, in PR terms at least, a positive communication step. BAA? Still nowhere to be seen overall. Of course, given the service we've been putting up with from them for years at airports around the country perhaps they felt they had no reputation to defend. Still, it seems that thanks to the fact that BA is the sole occupant at T5 it seems BAA has ducked the media storm and for them at least, lying low is working out.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators

Organisation of communication functions

2008-03-30T13:51:00.001-07:00

In a comment to this post about Mike Klein's ideas about how Internal Communications and Knowledge Management overlap, Kevin Keohane notes:

Indy, I posted on Mike's blog as well. I've almost taken it for granted that there are connections between IC, engagement and KM. I keep coming back to the way organisations manage and structure themselves... a world where the head of KM "owns" knowledge management, the head of IC "owns" internal communication, the head of HR "owns" the people development agenda, and the head of marketing "owns" the brand.
How stupid is that, yet how many organisations do it that way?

Which cuts to the heart of the issue in a lot of ways. It's not that the future will bring totally new things, but that the way we arrange things at the moment will look rather backward.

Shel Holtz broaches similar terrain recently, while questioning the specifics of having a "social media manager" in a company:

I have heard calls for companies to create a C-suite position called “Chief Conversation Officer,” someone to manage the various online social channels that produce conversation. Again, that misses the point. What companies need is a Chief Reputation Officer to ensure all communication with core publics is coordinated in the company’s best interests.

...

A social media manager is a fine idea, but if he says, “Our product is shipping late because of manufacturing issues” while a media relations manager tells a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Our product is shipping late because we’ve had to redesign a part,” that inconsistency will spread through the cycle-less media space—online and off—like wildfire. Whether it’s conversation or a traditional press release, the communication channel must be used to communicate honest, transparent, accurate information.

Few organizations have anybody in a position like this. [My emphasis - Indy]. Even if there’s a senior-level public affairs person, Human Resources and employee communications often don’t report to him, and both communicate to vital publics (employees and prospective employees). Community relations often reports elsewhere, as does investor relations and government relations. And all those employees with their individual blogs? Who’s providing them with the resources they need to represent the company accurately and fairly?

Technology is pushing a number of communication domains together and one important result will be a rearrangement of working practices to create an integrated response to those domains. Since actions speak as loud as words, this will doubtless take in some functions that involve more than communication (notably HR) and in my opinion, likely the technical side of communication as currently embodied by IT.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,future of internal communications,internal communications,organisation of the firm

Merlin Mann on Social Networks...

2008-03-21T06:15:00.001-07:00

So this embedded video is possibly the most important contribution to understanding what drives the creation of social networking sites at the moment.

What worries me is that I say that not only because it made me laugh but because of how much it reminded me of a recent event I attended, a gathering of new startups, VC types and some luminaries from various corners of the Web 2.0 world...

Technorati Tags: social networking,startups

Strategy and the coalface in IC

2008-03-21T04:47:00.001-07:00

So over at BBD, Liam asks "How very dare you?" leading specifically to a questioning of the concentration on all things strategy in a lot of the IC world these days.

Casey then says:

This is really just a place holder. It’s to remind me to carry on thinking about Liam’s question.

"Should you throw your hands up in horror and stalk out of the building crying “I can’t help you - you’re all doomed!”?

The answer to this, as Liam quite rightly points out, is very rarely going to be yes. But - what are the circumstances in which it might be yes?

All of which got me thinking...

In answer to Casey, the time when you walk out is where you can get a job at an equivalent salary in an organisation that actually has a strategy (preferably one that looks sound.)

Of course, that in itself tends to be fairly rare, all the more so as we appear to be hitting economically uncertain times.

I was going to suggest that if you really believe the organisation is doomed then you should walk out as well, but realistically in our society there's rarely any value to "walking out" unless you have a new job offer in hand. If you are going to move out of your job into unemployment because the company is going down, you may as well hold out for redundancy money.

The only other rationale for "walking out" is if you are genuinely a "high-flyer" with a "performance record" to maintain. Then it might be worth walking out to avoid having the stain of failure on your CV. However, as Liam is talking about "humble IC irchins" then this is not a factor.

So far, so good, I largely agree with Liam's premise.

I'd go even further in that the obsession with strategy in the glossy magazines and in the work and writing of various consultants is part of a wider trend to "worship the leaders of the organisation." This trend is driven by the commercial reality for consultants is that the people who sign the cheques to buy services are mostly those at the top. And we live in times where their role has been heavily mythologised and they have been surrounded by people and media telling them how important they are. As such, there's a lot of pressure to invest in the training, development and interests of top managers. And what is special about the managers at the top of the business? They set the strategy...

I suspect Liam, at heart, like me, wonders sometimes if this approach sets organisations up for failure, because it stunts investments in the skills and needs of the rest of the people in the organisation, who are, after all, vital to the execution of any strategy.

And when I step back to think about my time as an "umble IT manager" I have to agree all the more. Not only did some of the organisations I worked for not communicate their strategy down to my level, some didn't seem to have much strategy at all. And yes, what you do is roll up your sleeves and get on with the nuts and bolts of the job. There are things that need doing to keep things going smoothly. And when you have to take a decision that really should be guided by that nonexistent company strategy, you just make a guess as to what would be sensible and do it.

But of course, 4 months down the line, when the company elucidates a completely different strategy, it can be pretty hard to defend the spending decisions you took...

And to some degree I wonder if it's even harder for IC types. As an IT manager I could always say "well, I kept the email running and the internet access working and the accounts database online," nothing dramatic, but easily understood measures of competence.

For IC types Liam notes:

There's still a pretty good job to be done making sure people stick around, are happy to hand in great work or say nice things about you externally.

Which sounds a bit harder, because as good as you are in IC, if they are working to different priorities in HR or Operations (and remember, we're talking about a situation with a lack of overall strategy) then it might be pretty hard to do that "good job" as Liam defines it.

So, I'd like to ask Liam, if it's not commercially sensitive to blog about the parts of the Dojo where they teach people to deal with not having a strategy. That's not the skills to do "the pretty good job" that needs doing, but the skills to stay sane and cope with the ambiguity, uncertainty and negotiation of the situation.

Technorati Tags: business case,engagement,internal communications,strategy

Ask and ye shall receive...

2008-03-08T15:42:00.001-08:00

I wondered out aloud if Mike Klein might explain his insights a bit more and now, over at CommsOffensive325, he has done so...

I urge you to go and read it all, I largely agree with it all and I suppose should be kicking myself that I didn't blog about it first. But then, I don't think blogging has the same definitive status as publishing in a journal.

I came to similar conclusions using different language, Mike casts his argument using the language of knowledge management. For me, I simply observed in my work that "traditional internal communicators" largely have no view on what I called "information communication."

i.e. To do your job, you require information (which forms part of Mike's "knowledge" category) from others around you. It might be data on previous sales if you're building a marketing model, or the latest data on current product performance if you're on a project to design the next generation of your company's offering.

Up to now, the theory and practice of how this information is communicated has been left to the IT department and business process consultants. And yet, this is the most critical element of "internal communication" in any business. Yes, engagement matters and yes, communication of strategy matters, but a business whose communication of "business information" isn't working rarely survives.

Anyway, as I understand it, this is covered as part of the "knowledge" category in Mike's exposition. So he's got me behind him there, I think that integrating the "management" of various portions of communication in the business is definitely the way forward. And whoever wants to be in charge of "internal communication" needs to address all the categories in play, the old days of being a specialist department in just one are coming to an end.

On to some details of what Mike talked about (you probably need to read his piece for this to make sense):

He outlines three categories:

News/Direction: The information that tells people what to do and when. This flows mainly through formal internal communication and line management channels, and incorporates official definitions of the impacts of external news.
Opinion: This information is designed to influence the recipient and how he or she acts. It mainly comes informally from peers and colleagues but may also come from external stakeholders, or as embedded justification in official news and direction.

Knowledge: Knowledge is the information that tells an individual how to act effectively on the news and direction he/she receives. It is again generally found from peers and colleagues, though it can come as embedded instructions or can be harvested from databases and case studies.

First, it seems to me that "News" and "Direction" really deserve to be separate categories in a taxonomy. This resolves this issue about what employees like, because it's largely clear that "Direction" is the contentious category for employees and "News" is fairly welcome. (I must admit even this is not perfectly true, there are different personality types, some prefer to work independently, others prefer a greater degree of direction.)

Mike asserts that his three categories of "News/Direction, Opinion, and Knowledge" often flow together, through the same channels and as part of the same acts of communication. And again, I have to say, he's dead on. As soon as you get down into the nitty-gritty of how communication occurs (as I do in my work looking at "cultural blockages" on communication) it's very clear that any communication pipelines that exist or are set up are used for all three purposes. Those that are not frequently find themselves neglected in employees day to day priorities.

This becomes all the more important as new technologies arise which have more "bandwidth" and allow more room for informal communication to exist. Social media is the "example du jour" of this, but I'd suggest that we can learn a lot from the way email has developed in organisation too.

I like Mike's approach a lot and I'd urge everyone to give it some thought.

Technorati Tags: business case,future of internal communications,internal communications,IT,social media

Social networking in the enterprise (again...)

2008-03-02T07:11:00.001-08:00

So over at Talking IC, Lee Smith links (via Jim Berkowitz) to Jake Swearingen of CNet, who pours cold water on Kris Dunn's idea of experimenting with a social network for his company.

Jake isn't overly polite, so my first instinct is to note how interesting it is that some "technology experts" are very keen to draw distinctions within "Web 2.0" between wikis, blogs, social networks, etc. and yet at the same time think of social networks as this "stuff like Facebook" blob, rather than realising that Facebook et al. are bundles of technologies, which don't all have to come together and could be bundled up with other parts of "Web 2.0" (or even Web 1.0!) and that might well turn out to be the future.

However, I have to echo Lee, (and Kevin Keohane) when he makes the point that it'd be really nice to see some of the people who are always promoting "social networking in the business" actually involved in implementing some, rather than just talking about it.

And yet, that's another reason I find the reaction towards Kris Dunn a bit excessive. At least he's trying to do some empirical work. Maybe it will turn out just as Jake predicts, but at the same time where did we get so sniffy about people trying to "walk the talk"? I at least want to applaud Kris Dunn for trying to make his ideas real.

And as much as I share the general fatigue of Lee and Kevin about the fact that there are more people making money out of talking about social networking in IC than actually doing it, I think there are a number of barriers to current adoption:

Shel Holtz recently posted about JotSpot and in there discusses one of the barriers:

A typical IT response to the notion of introducing social media tools to the intranet focuses on the time and expense involved in testing new applications to ensure compatibility with existing software. If you suggest that the social media tools can be hosted offsite, the odds are pretty good that you’ll be told the information those sites would contain is too sensitive to risk maintaining it outside the firewall.

(This excuse is pretty lame, given that every single one of the US-based companies that has raised this concern in my experience also maintains its employee 401(k) data on a hosted server.)

Now, Shel points up with this last remark that the IT dept's fear of "hosted social networking" might not be wholly rational, but that doesn't mean to say it isn't real. Also, there's a world of difference between putting company data on a pension transaction company's hosted server and putting it on Facebook or even on Ning. There's nothing in the Facebook/Ning terms of service which give the IT Director any kind of job security in the event of a security breach.

So, Lee links to Ning, but fun as it is to experiment there (as Kris Dunn is doing) it's not really an enabler for experimentation in larger corporations. The "where is the data, is it safe?" remains a significant barrier.

To overcome this, you need a internally hosted solution. I don't know how many people have one of these for sale/use. Maybe I'm wrong, but I haven't seen one in an operational state. Without that, we're not going to see much happen. If anyone knows of a good one, let me know.

Other barriers include that fact that everyone thinks "Facebook" when someone says "social network" so there is a lack of other models for what it might look like in circulation. Hence people can't see some of the possibilities. I'll try to repair that in a post later this week, as this is already getting too long.

Reacting to the 3 specific problems Jake mentions:

1) Email is more efficient:

Well, it is now, but it didn't use to be, before Notes, Exchange, Outlook, etc. I remember a day when I did business over email but sent all the docs using a fax machine. Email didn't look that useful then, but it's day has since arrived.

It's easy to see that the messaging systems on social network sites can be improved a lot. Part of why they haven't yet is because social networks have been, up to now, universes-to-themselves for their teenage/college student main customers. Developing the user interface for multi-media communications (blog, email, IM, twitter, SMS) is the hardest part perhaps here. But it will happen.

2) Social networks lose engagement over time.

Complex one this. Studies I've seen suggest that youth communities who establish around social networking stick with it, but being youth communities, the communities lose engagement over time. The older people who rushed into things like Facebook rarely integrated it into their community and so naturally their interest waned. The tool cannot create links that are not really there. If you're married with kids, you have commitments to social networks that are stronger than your Facebook friends list, unless they happen to include the same people. But that's not a common condition.

Corporate social networks do need to be integrated with the rest of the intranet functions, in particular the corporate directory and communication technologies. If it's set up as just another optional site, it won't get much interest. If it's actually a proper part of people's work eco-system, it will, like email, get a lot more use. Especially once you integrate the internal VOIP system (and potentially videoconferencing too.)

3) Social networks are, well, social.

Jake claims that the workplace is not about selective connection. Interesting working life he must have led, connecting with everyone in his organisation equally, every day.

It's true that part of the power of social networks is to cement existing relations, but they also serve to create links, particularly about factual matters (here's where the workplace can really benefit) between people who would normally find it too much effort to stay in touch.

No corporation really wants people to spend all day socialising on the internal network. The value is in creating loose connections between people who would otherwise not have a way to find each other. Yes, everyone can blog about their projects, but how will you find interesting blogs, especially when people have less time to comment and trackbacks still don't work properly? RSS still requires you to know about the blog in question...

Social networking has the potential to answer that. It creates visible topologies which can be followed and human reasons to do so. (And yes, that adds a bunch of human, emotional pitfalls too, but that's always the case in human organisations.)

This of course raises the point that social networks only make sense inside larger communities. If your office is small enough that the "global listserv" email list isn't totally clogged all the time, you probably don't need social networking to help navigate the infospace of your organisation. This is another barrier to adoption.

The laugh is, I type all this and I'm not really a social networking zealot. I just see that blogs, wikis, podcasts etc. are mostly just extra content channels and to me, it's the various kinds of "social" technology that can help us navigate all this content and make it useful, in the end.

Finally, this isn't my area of business, so as interested as I am in it, I'm unlikely to make it happen any time soon. I guess another question for the readers, who do you know who is really working on this? After all, they are the ones I should be inflicting this discourse on...

Technorati Tags: future of internal communications,internal communications,social media,social networking,technology

Earthquakes and information travel

2008-02-27T08:22:00.001-08:00

So here in the north of England we felt some small earth tremors last night at about 1am. One man down the road from here actually had his chimney land on him. Fortunately, we seem to have escaped any real damage. It was an exciting few moments feeling the whole building shake around me, but after a quick check around the house (5 mins or so) I hit the net to see what I could find out. The British Geological Society website and the earthquake page at Edinburgh were both so overloaded that I couldn't even view the page. Any thoughts that this was a purely local event disappeared at that moment.

It reminded me of a couple of things:

1) If you weren't sure it was an earthquake (and I wasn't because we have a history of subsidence problems here) then the actions of the crowd alone, hammering these geological websites could tell you, well before the BBC reported it on their news pages. Score one for trend watching/wisdom of crowds approaches I suppose.

2) This is the speed that information spreads at in a modern, computer-filled organisation. So if you're in corporate/internal comms and there's an earthquake on the way - a statement to investors about job losses, perhaps - then you better have some quick response plans, because word will travel around your organisation quicker than you ever expect.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,earthquake,internal communications,quick response

Making Internal Comms a Profession?

2008-02-20T07:09:00.001-08:00

I wrote a long post on this topic, but I realised that it still wasn't anywhere near complete. There's essays to be written on the discussions going on. What I'll do instead is just link a few observations/concepts and maybe it'll trigger some interesting thoughts out there.

- Over on CommsOffensive325, Mike Klein notes that Ragan has some commentary on Mike's discussion with Liam Fitzpatrick about the future of IC.

- Reading the Ragan piece, they naturally come down in the middle, after all "more competence" (Liam) is like "more motherhood and apple pie" and "more transformational thinking" (Mike) is like, well, "more motherhood and apple pie" too.

They quote Liam explicitly talking about "the credibility of the profession," but this comes through even more clearly in further comments from Mike, Liam and others underneath the article. They are arguing about the form of "the profession." What, if you like, would a future "CIIC" (Chartered Institute of Internal Communications) be defined as being about?

Throw in the recent post by Ron Shewchuk about the lack of Masters level education programs in "employee comms", which reminds me that the majority of the things we all count as "IC competence" are skills that come out of PR, journalism, etc. I think there are few educational opportunities in IC because we've yet to create a truly distinctive notion of what it takes to be in IC and the truly distinctive skills that you won't learn in journalism or PR courses.

The Ragan writer (David Murray) notes that employee comms are more determined (in their opinion) by organisational structures than IC ideals.

However, it's at this point that it seems to me, Mike is maybe on to something.

Referencing my last post, I can see an argument that says in the long term, the technologies and practice of modern internal communications, as currently typified by social media, come into unavoidable conflict with the "structure of organisations." And, I don't think that "the structure" wins that battle. Structure is strongly static, but human nature is the irresistible force. And everyone knows I'm a structuralist at heart, so I don't say that lightly.

How does all this amount to a hill of beans for everyday practice? I can't deny the force of Liam's argument. Companies will want to communicate things with internal groups, that process is fairly well understood and will not disappear. Right now, if you want credibility in your organisation, your best bet is to invest in fulfilling this role with greater competence and success.

However, I think the number of people involved in a bunch of "traditional IC roles" is going to shrink and we are going to have to understand new roles that apply in more "community" situations. It also seems to me that this is the ground where you can plant seeds of a "distinctive profession" of IC.

Of course, whether IC should be a distinctive profession, or part of HR is a question to be considered.

Seth Godin's suggestion for rebranding HR as "Department of Talent" would appear to overlap with a lot of IC work. To be clear, I'm not advocating that IC should be part of HR, but I would be surprised to see it happen. There is a logic there. Likewise, there's a craft logic to the CIPR being the dominant association for IC people in the UK.

For myself, I think that there is room for IC as a strong, independent business function, but I think it will need to change if that is to happen. And that's a post for another day.

Technorati Tags: education,engagement,future of internal communications,professions,social media

Flare ups, power, frustration, social media and transparency

2008-02-19T15:48:00.001-08:00

Over at Black Belt Dojo, Sue has an interesting post about a big flare up in the comments to a blog on The Guardian travel site. She asks "Is this what we're afraid of?" with respect to unleashing social media in organisations. Mark Mazza made an insightful comment in reply about what the psychology of the "troublemakers" in this case might be.

That got me thinking...

What are the collective frustrations about "big media bloggers" that might lead to the kind of swarming, vitriolic responses that we occasionally see unleashed by the commenting public?

It strikes me that in part, blogging is about self-expression, not just in the sense of "here I am, this is me" but also "this is what I think about important issues in and around my life." When I was younger, there were no blogs and many thoughts I might have had about politics, economics etc. really had nowhere much to go. Newspaper letter pages were a tiny and well guarded resource. Yes, there are always deep conversations with good friends, but in a busy life, there's never enough of those.

Enter the blog, all of a sudden, insights can be pushed out. So many people prognosticated about important issues like Iraq and the toxic lending typified by the sub-prime debacle. And yet, as time passes, it becomes ever more apparent that however insightful these people were, very few of them gain much "blogging stardom" from it. And the same goes across all sorts of fields, from celebrity gossip to rugby commentary. The vast majority of ability to shape opinion and make a living writing accrue to those within big media institutions.

Now, that's not exactly news to anyone as such. All the same, the act of blogging and commenting rather lays the power relations out for everyone to see. Thus, I think part of the vitriol is not just "jealousy" in the sense of "they have a fun, easy life and I don't" but an acute awareness that for all the hype about the democratising power of blogs, the keys to the castle remain pretty much where they always have been.

Why might this matter for corporate blogging? I just wonder if in some organisations at least, the surfacing of this distinction between the powerful and the less so might need some extra thought to manage.

It can be said that Internal Communications has always existed in part to manage this kind of tension and it's not really a new problem. IC departments often walk a tightrope between encouraging greater communication from the bottom to the top and dealing with the reality that very often the top isn't listening that hard. However, the veneer of democracy that social media tend to present might heighten the disillusionment when the "democratic deficit" is made raw in a blog exchange.

Is this insurmountable? I don't think so, but it needs some thinking about. It also connects to my next post, on the professionalisation project for Internal Communications.

Technorati Tags: blogs,internal communications,online culture,social media

Visualising Social Networks

2008-02-17T14:21:00.001-08:00

Via the MindJet blog (MindManager is a great piece of mindmapping software) comes thoughts on Social Media Fatigue by Josh Catone and a great diagram, visualizing one person's online social network activities:

[Click on image for larger size version.]

Technorati Tags: overload,social networking,systems,visualisation

Belated Eurocomm Blogging

2008-02-17T14:15:00.001-08:00

Due to my work travel commitments I'm only just back at blog station central. (And yes, I can blog from the road, but it's been busy.)

Eurocomm was a great experience. Good speakers and a small but informed and thinking audience. Great opportunities to meet interesting people and have interesting discussions.

Jennifer Lewis reviews it on the Eurocomm blog, as does Audrey Scarff. It also makes an appearance on the FIR podcast. There's a collation of a few other blog posts about it here.

Of those, Kevin Keohane's is the most lyrical.

Most riveting speaker for me was (predictably) Ramon Olle Jr. Not only is he an effective and energetic presenter, who highlighted some local features of branding in Spain, but he also referenced "The Bull" in the tradition of an exhibition item I saw at MACBA later in the week:

ASPEN; Multimedia Magazine in a Box

The McLuhan Issue (Vol 1, No.4, Section 9)

If an ad has become so environmental as to be unperceived, that's when it's really doing its work. - Marshall McLuhan

I'd place the award for "most philsophical approach" as a tie between Kevin Keohane's piece on the fictional construct that is "the audience" and the presentation on "Values and Communication" by Josep Maria Esquirol (which I hope to have time to blog about a bit later.)

Best discussion fodder? Definitely the plenary on Social Media, which was also one of the best group presentations I've seen at a conference in a while. Credit to Yang-May Ooi; Mark Wright and Giles Colbourne.

Of course, all of the above were of great intellectual interest for me, but not the reason I was there: Presentations on cross-cultural issues by Charles Gancel (Inter Cultural Management Associates) and another by Hanna Kalla and Sam Berrisford (Hill and Knowlton).

Sam and Hanna concentrated on an overview of the field, which targeted the general listener but still had plenty of tidbits for those of us for whom it is the main event.

Charles put things into a bit more perspective, linking to issues around the knowledge economy and the coming "war for talent," concentrating on the development of culturally aware leaders.

Overall, a great conference, a real tonic for practitioners in the field, intellectually stimulating and a great body of peers to interact with.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators,EuroComm,IABC,internal communications,review

Advanced Internal Comms

2008-01-31T09:29:00.001-08:00

Over at CommsOffensive325, Mike Klein joins the debate started by Liam Fitzpatrick over on BlackBeltDojo about "Advanced Internal Comms" and whether there are any revolutions left to come in the field, or is it all about really implementing basics we already know about?

Mike poses the debate as one about concentrating on competency (the Liam suggestion) vs the prospect of "fundamentally reinventing" the field. Mike suggests that:

Liam’s view only really holds water if you accept a view that organisations are fundamentally hierarchical and that internal communication exists to support the smooth functioning of hierarchies. If you accept the notion that organisations are simultaneously hierarchical and networked in nature, then it is worth recognising that very little work has been done in developing an advanced approach to internal communication that harnesses and influences the social networks in and around organisations while supporting what necessary hierarchy is required to drive an organisation towards its strategic or commercial objectives.

While the Holy Grail still eludes us, the emergence of social network tools and social network thinking are likely to play a key role in propelling the Internal Communications profession as we continue on its quest. And with the challenges we are likely to face in the short term as the budget-cutters seek easy targets, I for one think this quest is well worth continuing.

I think I have some overlap with Mike's view but I'd like to take a moment to muse on the philosophical question of "fundamental reinvention."

In the comments on BBD, I mentioned that I felt Liam was having it both ways. I said this because depending on how you cut the definition it's easy to cast something as evolution or revolution.

For example, let's take small group (4 people or so) transport. Let's think of the bullock cart from the Indian village of my grandparents, the mail coach of the Napoleonic London to Portsmouth route, one of Daimler's earliest 4 wheel vehicles, the Honda on my drive and a concept car of tomorrow, environmentally friendly which uses technology to drive itself.

There are lots of axes upon which one can measure some kind of fundamental change, for society. The increase in speed makes a huge difference to what transport can do, we seem to go in a circle about the environment, from animal power to "clean hydrogen" or whatever. And the notion of a car that drives itself has something to it too.

But, from another point of view: 4 wheels, power plant, somewhere to sit, control interface... nothing has changed in 500 years at least...

[Another set of objects for consideration might be: portable gramaphone, boombox, walkman, ipod.]

And so to the debate on IC. I do think that there are large elements of current theory (and some elements of practice) that are not going to go away. There will still be a need for various existing forms of organisation communication. So, you can fast forward 30 years and I think Liam can easily expect to find people doing "the basics" and so it's easy to argue that "fundamental reinvention" just isn't happening.

Of course, I'm not sure that's the right way to look at it, particularly from the point of view of IC professionals, because I think there are changes on the horizon for the typical IC department in the next 30 years. Mark highlights how social media trends mesh with the notion of an organisation as a partly a network (rather than just a hierarchy) could radically change the kinds of communication needed in an organisation.

One analogy for this might be the change from "Managament Information Systems" (MIS) departments to "Information Technology" (IT) departments. In the 60s and 70s, companies had an MIS department, which served to use technology to gather information on those doing the work and present it to managers. In a modern organisation a group of similar people are still there, but their role is (to some degree) now to think much more about how information moves between those doing the work - IT. Of course that role is still evolving, but I think it has something to say about the coming change in Internal Comms, from a management focus to a whole organisation focus.

My own contribution for now would be to suggest that once you move into that "whole organisation focus" it becomes apparent that where "communication" currently stands as a proxy for moving around particular information sets, in the future that has to expand. IC will have to overlap more with IT and think more about all the different aspects of communication. But I'll say more about that another time.

Technorati Tags: business case,future of internal communications,internal communications,lateral communications,social networking,systems

Social Networking in the Business

2008-01-25T15:25:00.001-08:00

At the beginning of the month, Ron Shewchuck made some predictions about the year ahead for internal communications, including this section on social networking:

3. Facebook will launch a sister network designed for business (along the lines of Linkedin, but better) that will become extremely popular, but will prompt many companies to install clunky internal social networks in a vain attempt to keep their "walled gardens" closed to the outside world. In a related trend, employees will start bringing their own wirelessly connected personal laptops to work so they can stay hooked up to their social networks during the day. Some will get fired for this, making headlines and inspiring others to follow.

Now, I've been advocating Social Networks as a tool that could be useful in a business sense for promoting innovation networks (as an example) in larger technology companies. And worse, I've been one of those who have been talking in terms of internal solutions that don't violate the "walled garden."

So, I guess I better respond.

1) If Facebook actually develop a business arm, that could be very powerful. One of the flaws of LinkedIn is that there isn't really the same drive (for most people) to keep going back to their profile. It's fun to make contact with people from the past, but if you do have something to talk about, more than likely it's not work, most of the time and you'll end up either in email or on Facebook with them anyway.

I'd say the potential of a Facebook business arm is analogous to the way email used to work (when most people had just one address) or to bringing corporate issues into access through the TV. That is to say, alerts about business stuff can pop up alongside interesting leisure alerts, which could rather improve the likelihood of them being noticed.

As such, Ron is right that this will make internal solutions look much less attractive.

2) However, the quick use case I sketched out in a comment at Black Belt Dojo suggests that the business value of social networking is that it aids the spread of business information around the organisation. The problem is, the kind of business information you need to put on there to get that kind of value is very extensive.

It's easy to say that corporations should be more transparent, but when it comes to project work in firms, the open source model still has a lot of ground to make up. So, internal research projects on the business side of Facebook would seem to be a bit risky. Or to take another example, suppose you want internal feedback on entering a new market area or a new promotional scheme. There's a lot of value in discussing this in-house before you announce it to the world. Yes, you're unlikely to keep the intention a secret from your competitiors, but I do think that opening them to the details of your thinking isn't always wise in the current environment.

Of course, part of the problem is that none of the public sites like Facebook or LinkedIn have a proper privacy structure that allows you to control who sees particular discussions in an easy way. That's why you can't help but feel even if Facebook has a "business arm" the interface makes it likely that information can easily accidentally leak into someone's social circle and from there to the world.

Also, I have to point out that Facebook's design looks a lot like Emmental in security terms. So far, no-one has publicly exploited it, but it's a big risk to take with sensitve information. The problem is, if you restrict it to non-sensitive information, how much value can you really get out of it?

So that's why I think internal social networks, at least in larger corporations, do have a future.

[Just to note, I personally have no problem with employees being on Facebook and playing with it in working hours. If people are distracted and demotivated about their work, Facebook is a symptom, not a cause.]

Technorati Tags: business case,facebook,internal communications,linkedin,privacy,security,social networking,walled garden

Howard Rheingold, RSS, Knowledge Work

2008-01-18T08:32:00.001-08:00

It appears, searching through the blog, that I haven't talked about Howard Rheingold's new set of video presentations yet. Fortunately, he's only on to his second one so far, so it's easy to catch up. I've linked to the wiki page for him, so I'll just say he's been writing about the culture of work and leisure related to computers since the age of the PC began.

This edition of his vlog is titled "Introduction to RSS" and it is a fairly clear and useful description of why RSS might be useful. There are other good explanations out there however, particularly the video from Common Craft, but the first 3 minutes or so of Rheingold's musings form a very tight description of the concept of "knowledge work" and point to why it is difficult to manage in an industrial fashion. It's not explicitly about that, but in describing how he works, Rheingold points up what it means to be in one of the modern occupations which is all about the processing of diverse sets of information. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in what some parts of the "knowledge economy" look like.

Technorati Tags: howard rheingold,knowledge economy,RSS,vlog

Punching In: Further Thoughts (short)

2008-01-18T08:13:00.001-08:00

Getting further into the book, Punching In, which I mentioned in my previous post, I've come across an interesting comparison between two companies: The Container Store and Enterprise Car Rental. Both seek to amplify engagement through a careful hiring process, but in different ways.

From the experiences of the author, Alex Frankel, The Container Store makes very strong efforts to recruit employees who fit the culture of the company, whilst Enterprise focus much more on selecting recruits with the personality that allows them to be moulded into the culture of the organisation.

So which is better? Find people who fit your culture, or train them to become part of your culture? There is no simple answer and one obvious difference is that it is much easier for the relatively small Container Store to winnow through the applicant pool and pick out "our kind of people." Enterprise, perhaps has to work more at finding good people and then "teaching them the culture" because it needs to find so many more employees.

This aspect is perhaps amplified by the different features of the entry-level jobs in question. From Frankel's descriptions, working at The Container Store provides more positive customer feedback and a more obvious sense of job satisfaction than working behind the desk at Enterprise. As such, Enterprise's culture focuses on the company, rather than the work. Whilst the personality traits of "interested in organising things, likes talking to people, bit of a natural salesperson" (for Container Store) can be thought of as naturally occuring, the trait "attached to the goals and style of Enterprise Rent-A-Car" naturally need to be built up in the post-hire training process.

This is of course, more about engagement than communication, but it's important for Internal Communications types to consider. These mechanical details of HR practice set the frame for the IC function. Communications aimed at improving engagement will look very different in the two companies mentioned. Knowing what the HR strategy for engagement is makes for a much more effective IC program.

Technorati Tags: alex frankel,hiring,human resource strategy,internal communications,punching in

Punching In

2008-01-12T09:14:00.001-08:00

I've just started the book Punching In by Alex Frankel. It's subtitled "The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee" and it's a typical US-airport-business-book, lots of short chapters and personal anecdotes. However, the central premise is a very interesting one for internal communicators. It may not have the rigour of an academic book, but it is a rare example of someone taking the ethnographic approach to corporate culture. Frankel took front line jobs with some famous service companies (e.g. UPS, Starbucks) and lived the employee experience, attempting to understand the nature and power of the corporate culture and experience the employee engagement.

This is very important to internal communicators who often deal with the internal brand and justify communications programs in terms of employee engagement. We all talk about these things and there are measurements made and descriptions written for management, but I'm not aware of many descriptions of engagement from the point of view of the employee at the coalface.

As such, I would highly recommend this book, although I would point out a few caveats:

1) It's not just an ethnographic story, it's also about the author finding a deeper understanding of himself. He's quite a sympathetic character, but he does seem a bit spoiled in his life up to this point and his reactions to "life at the coalface" can feel a bit banal, especially for those of us who can remember working in such roles.

2) It is an American book about American companies and American people. Engagement isn't the same breed of bird in the UK, but I still think it's interesting.

3) If you read a lot about culture, you'll wish the author spent more time on details. This is a set of quick sketches more than a comprehensive expedition.

4) Frankel is relentlessly positive about culture and service work. It might be wise to balance the "boosterism" with a glance at Hochschild's book, The Managed Heart to remind yourself of the more difficult side to service work.

Technorati Tags: alex frankel,book,corporate culture,engagement,ethnography,internal communications,punching in,service industry

Foolish Blog Memes: Readability

2008-01-08T15:38:00.001-08:00

One page doing the rounds of a number of communication oriented blogs is this readability test. You give it a URL and it tells you the "reading level" required to understand the page in question.

On the one hand, perhaps you as readers will be glad to hear that if you're reading this and understanding it, you're reading at "Genius" level.

On the other hand, as the writer (with no comment, most days!) I have to suspect my New Year's Resolution should be to work a lot harder on writing more accessible material for this blog.

Technorati Tags: communication,memes,readability,writing

Main Website Update

2008-01-03T12:09:00.001-08:00

I've just put up a fairly large update of the main website:

http://www.enoptron.com

I've been doing a lot of networking lately and tried, in part to use it as a method of "real time market research." The changes to the website are largely a product of that. I've made an effort to explain what we do in a less jargon filled manner and to highlight what we can do for organisations of different sizes in more detail.

The new menu system is no prettier than the original one, but should make it easier to extend/maintain the website in the future.

Finally, I have to own up that the "Industry Focus" section remains "under construction" as it was in version one of the site. I hope to remedy this soon...

Technorati Tags: enoptron,internal communications,international communications,lateral communications,update,website

Intranets: the tech-head perspective

2007-12-27T11:04:00.001-08:00

This interesting post over at 37signals is effectively the company polling its universe of customers and friends over possibilities in the intranet software market. That's an interesting communications exercise in itself, but I link to it because it suggests (in line with a previous post here) that the concept of "an intranet" is not in good shape.

What comes out of the "tech-head" perspective is that no-one has come out with an earth-shaking software product as yet, but Microsoft Sharepoint seems to be edging into an industry lead.

Sharepoint's special value is in facilitating collaboration over documents (through the integration with MS Office apps.) It also includes things like RSS and blogs.

To me, the lessons for IC types are:

1) People will choose and stick with communication channels that make their life easier. There's a lot of talk about the possibilities around "new social media" in IC, but that will inevitably involve technology choices. The right medium is one that people will get some value (for them) out of using.

2) Point One highlights the potential for IC professionals to gain extra traction if they work to understand and influence the information management policies in their organisations. People are happy to find that Sharepoint has blogs and many become enthusiastic users of them, but the system lives or dies by it's usefulness in "information management" rather than "internal communication" per se. (That might not be a fun fact, but it is a financial reality at a lot of companies.) As such, it's important to make sure that these two agendas complement each other rather than conflict. That means both an interest in the widgets IT is buying to solve intranet problems and a wider interest in the connections between "information management" and "internal communication overall.

Technorati Tags: business processes,information managment,information technology,internal communications,intranets,IT

More pre-EuroComm blogging

2007-12-19T09:28:00.001-08:00

Over on the EuroComm 2008 blog, Ulrike Bleistein gives us a little sense of what she will be presenting to us:

Why IT needs communications

by Ulrike Bleistein

When they think of IT most people think of computer geeks who sit around in dark rooms, isolated from the rest of the world passionately investigating the inner landscape of computers. Of course, this is not the case. Today, Informatics in a pharmaceutical company is about the clever application of technology to business. Relationships with customers and understanding their needs are key. Communications has moved up the ranks and is today considered a critical capability for this new generation of IT professionals. However, coming from a technology environment, communications does not always come easily to them. As a former scientist with a strong interest in technology, I can bridge the gap. That’s where my job starts.

On joining Roche Pharma Informatics, I did an analysis to find out where communications are most needed to support the business effectively, where the biggest issues are, and I then decided on a step-wise approach as resources were limited.

I won't post more, go and read it all!

It's a nice, succinct description of the benefits of a communications department for a "back-office" division who might not naturally get the communications attention that more "external customer facing" divisions naturally receive.

Technorati Tags: business case,engineers,EuroComm,IABC,internal communications

The two worlds of business communication

2007-12-15T08:18:00.001-08:00

A newsletter from Mindjet (who make the excellent MindManager mind map software) reminds me again of the two ways people tend to talk about "communication" in business and my own uncertainties about where they join up:

1) There are those known as "Internal Communication" professionals and they focus largely on what might be termed "community communications issues." This ranges from the hardnosed business case models around communicating "brand values" in the organisation to created "engagement" to potentially softer strategies around more journalistic exercises which create and reinforce a sense of community and well-being within the organisation.

I've spent a fair amount of time writing about these aspects recently.

2) The other people who tend to work with "communication" are IT consultants and Business Process Re-engineers, who (like the Mindjet people) largely talk about communication in terms of the needed exchange of information to make a business process happen. If you're designing a new widget, then there has to be an exchange of information regarding costs, design parameters, market needs, etc.

It is my feeling that these two worlds, which have largely been long separate are now starting to touch at the edges. Two major reasons why spring to mind right now:

a) The rise of the "knowledge worker." This deserves a post on it's own, but in short, industries are changing. Service industries are often all about manipulating information and even traditional manufacturing industries are finding that competitive advantage depends more and more on how they do things and the design of the things they make. As a result, the "knowledge" of various businesses now sits more than ever with the people. Where processes used to assume that people were interchangeable parts who existed to facilitate the process, we're gradually learning that in real "knowledge roles" the process isn't so easy to institutionalise. As such, the technological/process imperative is now more about enabling communication than specifying it.

This has parallels with:

b) The rise of social media. It is social media technologies, as much as anything that have produced an awareness in internal communications types (not to mention marketing departments too) that "message management" is a dying proposition. Where previously IC might have felt it was the medium of community information exchange in a company, it's clear now that people can talk to each other in myriad ways. Forward thinking IC professionals recognise this and seek to work with it, and thus they are also looking more at enabling communication than specifying it.

Where I think a crucial confluence exists is that the existence of communication technologies does not mean that necessary communications are taking place.

As such, in knowledge work, there is a need to bring the two perspectives together. From the BPR angle there is an expertise about incentives and formal rules for promoting specific information exchange and from the IC side there's a much greater understanding about the human issues around communication, which becomes ever more critical as the information we seek to communicate becomes more human (less numeric, less precise, less quantifiable) as the task involved becomes more abstract and more creative.

Add that together and that's some sense of my gut feeling of how the two worlds can help each other a little.

Technorati Tags: business processes,communication,information exchange,internal communications,knowledge economy,lateral communications

Intranets in trouble

2007-12-10T07:00:00.001-08:00

Over at a shel of my former self, Shel Holtz has a post called Intranets in Trouble which references a study by the Irish Computer Society.

As someone who concentrates on the people side of communication, I tend to be the one asking sceptical questions about technological solutions, but even so, the key results are rather disappointing:

Nearly half say they don’t use the intranet to support their everyday work

Nearly one in three say the intranet does not help with daily work

Half find their intranets’ search engines to be ineffective and 80% think both navigation and search need to be improved

35% of respondents cannot access the information they need on their company intranet

Fixing these problems won't solve all your communication problems, but if a third of workers can't get the information they need through the company intranet, then that's a serious performance issue.

To me, the results highlight a couple of things:

1) Too often, "the intranet" is purchased in the manner of a telephone system. No-one is given the responsibility (or indeed the resources) to ensure that existing content is kept up to date and that new information is chased down and documented online.

2) One oddity of the internet is that it puts cutting edge tools in our hands for free. As a result, people develop a reliance on tools like Google for navigating complex information landscapes. If you have a lot of information on your intranet, you either need to invest in replicating these tools or if you have a bespoke tool, you have to train people to use it.

Failing to address these issues simply means you won't get much out of your initial investment in the intranet. Of course, some people don't see the business value in better information and communication. It's true that if your main business is an automated widget production facility, the intranet might not be all that important. If your business relies on people working with information, collaborating with each other and keeping track of complex projects, then the quality of information exchange may be the difference between success and failure.

Technorati Tags: internal communication,intranets,lateral communications,technology

Globish

2007-12-04T12:54:00.001-08:00

Sprechen vous Globish? asks Ian Andersen on the EuroComm 2008 Blog.

He mentions the primal urge driving the phenomenon:

All of us working in communications on an international level dream of the Holy Grail of campaigning: the one-size-fits-all messaging that plays equally well in Karlstad and Kuala Lumpur, the universal slogan that will bring in the punters from Shannon to Chamonix – and yet we are all stumped by culture, by habits, by mores and meaning, by ways of life. And so we adapt, we localise… The products as well as the selling.

And the downside (speaking from the context of his role with the EU):

It’s all very well that the Lithuanians discuss banking regulations or consumer protection in Lithuanian – with themselves, and that the Italians or the Finns do the same – with themselves, but that is not what we really think we need. How can we be one political entity if we are not able to say: we have one audience? And if we do not have that one audience, how can we go about creating it? And in what language? Do we have to accept that the true European language is what former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene dubbed “Le Bad English”? Or is there another solution – and I am not talking about Esperanto!

My reactions:

1) I eagerly await his presentation at EuroComm, I want to know what he thinks "another solution" might be.

2) I first came across the word "Globish" in an IHT article a couple of years ago (2005 in fact.) I really liked the concept, because in a lot of ways it expresses how I get by (sometimes even with good results!) despite not being fully au fait with all the languages of people I work with.

To me one of the valuable things about "Globish" is that it isn't reductive, it isn't there to standardise everyone on a single understanding of the world, but it's a way to begin to communicate the different understandings between people. Too often, straight translation services effectively associate concepts in different cultures that are similar but not the same, creating subtle (and not so subtle!) misunderstandings. Globish, simplistic as it can be, helps people explore some differences from a common starting point. The affordance from throwing words from different languages together and then discussing the meaning is very powerful. That discussion is particularly valuable because it has the potential to highlight some of the cultural assumptions, which are often the real points of difference between people from different places.

Away from conversation, however, I still weigh in on the side of translation. I can understand the political imperatives for the EU, after all how can you have a democracy split into 23 parts who cannot communicate with each other?

All the same, if you're producing one-way communication artefacts (leaflets, posters, TV spots, etc.) then you are spreading a message to everyone and Globish is far from spread enough to be a medium for that in most countries.

Technorati Tags: communication,culture,globish,international communications

IABC Event

2007-11-27T04:01:00.001-08:00

Well I'm in London today, so I'll be off to the IABC event this evening. Liam from Black Belt Dojo will be lecturing us on their work on generic competencies for internal communicators.

You can download a PDF summary here. I'm blogging this in advance to force myself to read their summary in advance. Having done so I have to say it's a very thorough piece of work and very valuable to anyone having to define the competencies for IC roles in their organisation (and of course the training and dev. work that needs to be done too.)

You can also download a summary article about the work that appeared in Strategic Communication Management magazine. That's also interesting, but when it moves on to organisational roles I think that's where you have to really stop and think about how IC operates in your firm.

I'm looking forward to the talk and meeting up with some communicators to chat. My work being consulting I don't get to talk shop very often and the IABC events are great for me from that point of view.

Addition 03/12/07:

Been busy, but I wanted to update this post because we had a great discussion on the evening and it's very clear that Liam is fully aware of the diversity of roles in IC and when he talks it's clear that he's put a lot of thought into how the competency framework adjusts around the different situations out there.

Technorati Tags: competencies , corporate communicators , IABC , internal communications

Melcrum Blog: Is I.C merely a cog in the propaganda wheel?

2007-11-19T13:26:00.001-08:00

As usual, I'm late on reading my RSS feeds, so I'm a few days behind the zeitgeist in noticing this post over at The Melcrum Blog:

Is I.C merely a cog in the propaganda wheel?

Key quote:

“People will always see the internal communication function as an internal propaganda machine”. This was a comment made at the recent CIPR Inside event held at Hill & Knowlton in London.

...

This point alone could no doubt have stimulated enough discussion for a whole other event. It certainly prompted me to think about the role of the internal comms function and the struggle that practitioners often face in getting employees to fully understand and appreciate the point of their existence beyond the cliché of arranging parties and writing newsletters. But is there any truth in what Katharina’s ex-colleague said? Is the struggle for authenticity ultimately futile? And is the internal comms department the place where truth can be sought or is it better to listen to news as it materializes on the company grapevine? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

My reaction:

Obviously, it depends. Generalising about the perception of the IC function in "a company" is like generalising about the culture of "a company" - there's so much variation there will always be counter-examples.

However, it does dovetail with some of the questions I've been asking on this blog and I think the quote points at a kernel of truth which needs thinking about.

The kernel of truth is that many IC professionals have made it their "business case" to "deliver employee engagement"; interpreted to be moving employees to a finer appreciation of the strategies, tactics and requirements of top management.

If you analyse such an undertaking from the point of view of an employee whose interests do not match perfectly with those of top management, it's hard not to see those aims as having some element of propaganda attached. Throw in the way that many corporate exercises seem to be much better at sending information out to employees than gathering it in and it should be easy to see how employees can feel harangued. Add the way that the legal department gets the last word over what may be revealed about an awful lot of important issues affecting people on the ground and you can see how IC starts to look like the "Ministry of Truth."

So, is authenticity doomed?

I'd say there is still hope on the horizon:

1) Talented communicators manage to bridge these and many other gaps, wherever they work. There may be contradictions inside corporate life, but personal integrity and honesty about the times when you're in a difficult position can help people's view of IC a lot.

2) In some organisations, company culture is better than this and where it isn't IC can be a hugely positive influence in working towards a better state of affairs. Trust might be in short supply at times in the transition period, but if communicators set out to be reliable, honest and committed to improving communication in both directions within the organisation, success will bring trust.

3) As I've been posting here, I do think that there are spaces for the IC function to position themselves in which do not rest so closely on "engagement" which to my mind is where the "propaganda feeling" starts to creep in. One possibility is to explore a focus on more process related communication questions, along with coaching people to communicate better, rather than being a "motivation unit." If your role in communication is to "do it better" rather than "do it with the aim of improving X Y Z" you've more chance of being trusted and are less likely to be asked to spin.

Of course, in all of these outlined situations, if company culture is not by nature transparent, then it has to be admitted that the grapevine will probably let employees know about "secrets" long before IC is allowed to do. If IC in turn bows to pressure from management to "massage" the news, then the battle is truly lost. However, where truthfulness is maintained, then accuracy at least will put you one step over the grapevine.

Is all this dilemma filled? Unfortunately yes, which is why I'm seeking to create a case for IC that doesn't make performance rest on the kind of metrics that propaganda was designed to address. It's the only sustainable way forward...

Technorati Tags: alternative ways of thinking , business case , commad and control , communication , corporate communicators , culture , engagement , internal communications , lateral communications , trust

Social Media, Facebook and Privacy

2007-11-09T07:44:00.001-08:00

This topic has been around a while and will doubtless rumble on for at least a generation. What brought it to mind recently was this post by David Murray over at Shades of Gray.

First of all, in the context of a "professional community webboard" then there's the obvious case for some kind of anonymity if you want to provide people an area for discussing ideas or difficulties related to potentially sensitive commercial matters. In the age of google, it's only a short step from a real name and a description of an episode from working life to full identification of the person and their employer.

Especially in an arena like communications, that kind of risk means that if you fully ID online postings, you won't get much discussion of real events from people who work in-house. It's the only safe approach for them. So it really is a practical issue of what kind of community discussion you hope to create.

The spammy, thread-jacking and obnoxious behaviour of some anonymous posters is of course a genuine problem in the same practical vein. One approach is to moderate anonymous comments, which can be onerous. Another is to have "anonymous registration" where you can only post if you register a pseudonym, but that discussion is also protected from anonymous readers and google. I've seen this second approach work in real online communities, but I don't know how well it stands up if everyone is working in the same field (which provides more clues to identity.) It does however allow people to be anonymous and yet have a "reputation" and thus a consistent community identity.

Moving on from the practical to the philosophical. I'm part of a generation who (thanks to my geeky past) grew up with online communications and has been typing to people across the other side of the world long before some excited communications consultant discovered AIM, let alone Facebook or Twitter.

One side effect of that is that I've accumulated a bunch of online identities almost by accident. Not all of them were kept intentionally separate, sometimes it was just an accident of technology. However, since it's been a natural development for me, I rather suspect lots of other people exist in that world too. Now that's not to say that you couldn't (with google and some hackery) connect up all my online identities and reveal all my secrets, of course you could. But, there are some clear divisions which I'd guess a random HR researcher would not cross. That's not because I have something particular to hide, as much as accidents of history of online technology, but I don't think it's all bad when it comes to letting me decide who I introduce from my personal network to my business one and vice versa.

It sometimes seems to me that the people who most breathlessly wish for absolute transparency and connection of business and personal networking online are those who've pretty much come to online activities through their business interests. As such, they've not really developed any personal connections online that didn't have them asking themselves "Am I happy for people at work to see this?"

That is of course, pretty farsighted of them, but:

1) It makes me a bit cynical about when they get on a high horse about "I've nothing to hide and neither should you have." [Not to mention that many of them, like myself are self-employed and thus a bit insulated from the whims of corporate bosses.]

2) I do wonder about the day they make an inevitable mistake in self-censorship. It's easy to talk about accepting consequences for your actions and views, but it gets more complicated as the memory and span of things like google allow a picture to be built up of you that goes far beyond what anyone outside spy land would have done in the past. I do think that it's true that newer generations will alter the boundaries of acceptability, but it's going to be slow and painful going. For now, corporate blackballing and retaliation is a reality and it is part of why privacy needs to be thought about seriously.

3) It's also observable that many of these commentators don't really use the internet in a private capacity or they do so in ways which have not yet easily leaked out for searching. I don't think there's anything to hide in my list of amazon.co.uk purchases, but it might not be fun discussing them all with a corporate client. For now, along with my google search history, these items are not easily available. But they will be one day and that's part of why privacy as a principle still has resonance.

3 a ) On that theme of private conversations, there are mediums like IM which might yet leak details out. Flirty conversations between single people have no moral or commercial relevance to a job opportunity. But once they leak out, how much fun is going to be to discuss them every time?

4) The critical implicit worry is that the more transparent your current online identities are, the easier it will be to connect them to information which should have remained private (due to contractual or personal obligations from the other party) but which technology and the increasing size of the surveillance society bring out into the open.

An extra example might be the question of private areas within a Facebook account. You might reserve an area for only friends to see photos, but if your Facebook account is connected to your boss, they may well end up seeing it one day. Now photos of you drunk at a Halloween party might not be the end of the world, but the possibility of your boss (and every future boss) seeing them is a quantum leap forward in accountability.

I suspect younger generations will wear this kind of embarrassment more easily and that's how they will deal with the problem. However, until that approach reaches critical mass, the rest of us are left with some difficulties. One can of course attempt to constrict the personal, by seeking blandness to avoid embarrassment, but that is a frighteningly anodyne life, especially when one considers just how disapproving some employers are. As such, perhaps our only option is to, like the young ones, be loud and proud and crusade, refusing to care about lost opportunities with those who hold unreasonable attitudes about various lifestyles.

I've been a pioneer a lot of my life, so I can't say I'm terrified to take that approach, but it's usually quite hard work. We're going to see a lot of opportunities fall into the laps of "bland suits" and it's not going to be fun to watch.

My personal advice on "personal" and "business" would be, put some effort into keeping them separate. Don't use your own name on myspace for recording fun times and weird bands. Sure it's a little extra effort to have a couple more email addresses and you have to stop and think sometimes about whether someone fits in the "personal" or "business" box, but the value is that you get to choose the pace of integration, rather than having google force it upon you. And isn't that choice a good thing?

Technorati Tags: facebook , identity , privacy , social networking

Communication and Innovation - Small Business

2007-11-03T16:20:00.001-07:00

Some notes from a recent presentation:

Innovation can be thought of on 4 levels (see Hamel – The Future of Management - a good book which I'll talk about more next week):

- Management innovation

- Strategic innovation

- Operational innovation

- Product/service innovation

These notes focus on product innovation, the principles all apply to the other kinds, you just have to juggle the category definitions around a bit.

From the point of view of communication, it makes sense (as will become clear) to break the process down into two parts:

1) Creativity – Finding the innovative idea.

2) Assessment/Implementation – turning the idea into a product.

Creation:

Where do ideas come from? Some ideas come out of the head of a talented designer, but most innovations come from people who have a direct experience of the product:

a) Users of the product and those who interact with them – so directly from customers, but also from those who get some sight of the buyer’s experiences: sales people and maintenance engineers (for example.)

b) People connected to the production of the item – designers, production workers – esp. the tinkerers who may be the people you least expect.

These are all people who might have ideas, or germs of ideas for changes to an existing product, or a new product that fits into the things the company does now.

Aspects of communication in creativity:

Who needs to hear the idea?

e.g. Designer, Marketing Director, R&D Dept.

Does someone have a responsibility to collate ideas and then take action?
Are there open communication channels for people to bring these ideas to them?

How will they get to hear about it?

Direct survey, either mediated (paper/email/etc.) or face to face.
Chain of communication; e.g. Customer tells sales rep, who then tells...

What are the incentives in place for this to happen?

Do people know who is next in the chain to tell?

Of course, if someone has the germ of an idea it might need some developing or extra information from someone else in the chain. The key process here is the same as in the next stage, so let’s move on:

Assessment/Implementation

Once there’s a steady stream of ideas coming in, they need sorting and assessing.

There can be all sorts of formal criteria and prototyping stages involved, but the key aspect from a communication point of view is that it’s at this point you need to start getting multi-disciplinary co-operation.

At a minimum, any innovation will have to satisfy three constituencies:

1) Production – is it practical to make this new product, is it within the company’s capabilities?

2) Sales – will the product actually solve customer problems well enough to persuade them to buy it?

3) Finance – Can the above occur in a way that makes enough money to be worth investing in?

Of course, all of those questions are actually interlinked; e.g. you can make anything if the money is available, etc.

So, you have to get everyone together to discuss it, which typically occurs in a meeting.

Now there’s hundreds of resources about “how to run a better meeting” so I won’t bang on about that too much.

What I would draw attention to is that assessing an idea is a delicate thing. Just about anyone in the room can kill it off, by declaring that their part in it just isn’t practical. So it’s an area where misunderstandings can jinx the whole process.

People from different parts of the business tend to communicate in different ways. There’s lots of stereotypes about aggressive salesmen, detail-obsessed engineers and tight financiers. Added to that, the more complex a product is, the more information will have to flow outside (before and after) the meetings. Some people respond better to verbal communication, others like things on paper.

Points to consider:

- Is there a central point for information about the project?

- Can the information be provided in different formats for different constituents?

- Do some people dominate the process (esp. at meetings) by virtue of their communication skills/tactics?

- If projects are never getting approved, or the wrong projects keep getting the go ahead, are various parties around the room really understanding all the information provided to them? If not, can ways be found to improve that communication?

Technorati Tags: communication , innovation , internal communications , lateral communications , small business , SME

Cultural adaptation

2007-10-29T05:09:00.001-07:00

Over at IABC Café, Julie Freeman remarks on the amazing adaptations that cartoon characters undergo to compete in new cultural markets.

Fictional characters are of course more pliable than corporate identities, but at the same time, companies like Disney and Marvel have a very strong sense of the core values of their characters. Those values cannot be thrown away for commercial convenience in a particular market because of the potential damage to the worldwide brand (e.g. Spiderman or Mickey Mouse.)

The lesson for those of us involved in "cultural translation"?

Look carefully at what the core message is, very often we cling to particular forms of expression or outward formulas too strongly. The behaviours and attitudes that the message create in the audience are more important (day to day) than creating a monolithic "image identity."

Technorati Tags: communication , cultural translation , internal communications , lateral communications

Measurement

2007-10-22T05:16:00.001-07:00

It's a little while ago now, but Liam from Black Belt Dojo asked Who really is measuring? He particularly wonders if "whether there is a silent majority out there that is in denial about the need to measure at all."

I would suggest that there is of course, a (sometimes) silent minority who are in denial about the need to measure. After all, communications is classically one of the fields where you can be comfortable if you don't like numbers (as opposed to engineering or finance, for example). Thus, we've all been part of conversations in the field where someone's visceral dislike of numbers shows through into a disdain of measurement.

However, I don't see this as a majority per se. What forms the majority is a coalition of these people with those who are wary of measurement for some other reasons, which in my view often stem from the fact that (if you'll allow the mangling of von Clausewitz):

Measurement is often a continuation of politics by other means.

That is to say, in the corporate setting, measurement is often as much about legitimation as real feedback. Measurement of communication is an exercise of putting numbers on human behaviours. That's not impossible, but there are a number of pitfalls. How well do your numbers represent a good summary of the behaviours in question? How well does your model of interpretation turn those numbers into meaningful conclusions?

This is of course not unique to communications, similar questions apply in process engineering too. But, the margins of error are clearly greater in communications and the body of knowledge is just a bit less developed. A lot of survey based techniques have flaws that we're all aware of (particularly in conditions where "organisational silence" is playing a part) but we don't discuss a lot. That's not to send us down a postmodernist rabbit hole about "objective reality" but if people don't believe that the measurement really works, then they won't be comfortable with it. I think that's also a big point for development in the profession as it plays into unease with identity that's already present.

One rule of politics is that you don't ask questions that you don't already know the answer to. As such I see a lot of reluctance to take on measurement of communications because communicators don't have confidence in the measurement process. If you don't think it's going to help your case, it's sometimes felt to be wise not to generate the numbers. If you generate the numbers it can be particularly hard to discuss their accuracy. Especially when that then puts you on the turf of arguing about numbers with the Finance Director. I also wonder in the light of my previous post if there isn't an identity based reluctance to seeing oneself in that role for a lot of communicators.

Likewise, if you don't feel that the measurement system is provably reliable, how wise is it to use as a feedback tool for improving your actions? We've all seen multiple cases where using numbers as feedback improves the numbers month on month, but doesn't actually get the job done. My work around the NHS has reminded me of that to a great degree.

Does all this amount to being "in denial about the need to measure at all"? I'm not sure. I think these subtle problems are real ones that are yet to be fully solved across the field and that is both disappointing and an opportunity to make some real improvements.

Technorati Tags: corporate communicators , identity , internal communications , measurement

More on Identity

2007-10-21T07:12:00.001-07:00

Over at Shades of Gray, David Murray has an post about a new film, Helvetica which has started an interesting discussion in the comments about the craft of communication and the relationship of various commenters to "management" and "strategy." It's a great conversation because you can see some of the tensions in identity that a move into management puts creative people through, right there in people's comments.

There's also an interesting tangent in the comments about "measurement" which I will talk about more in my next post.

Technorati Tags: business case , corporate communicators , identity , management , narrative , training

Corporate Communicators, Management and Identity

2007-10-18T07:17:00.001-07:00

As part of my travels this week I was privileged to get a small insight into a recent (not yet published study) of corporate communications managers that examined their actions in unexpected crisis situations. I won't identify any people or situations too closely because it would be unfair to preempt the study too much, but it did include managers at the top of the corporate communications tree in a number of prominent businesses, many in the FTSE100.

The fascinating part for me was a pattern of "regression under fire" where people who are very definitely managers, whose position is far above "copywriter" or "PR representative" slipped away from strategic thinking into what might be termed "chasing the message cycle." Of course, the message cycle shouldn't be ignored in a crisis, but presumably these people have whole departments to help them with that. Surely, their role is to think in a strategic manner and help the board look for opportunities to address the underlying issues, rather than engage unduly with day by day press and communications tasks.

I don't say this as a criticism, I think we've all turned in bad performances in a crisis at some point. If you haven't, then you probably haven't been in that many crises or you're failing to admit that someone else saved your bacon at one point. Rather, I see is as saying something about the state of the corporate and internal communications field. There's a deep seated insecurity about the value of the discipline and it seems to me that combines with the relative newness of these professions to leave some uncertainty of identity. In a crisis, we have a tendency to fall back on "what we're good at" which is, reasonably enough for people from that background the basics of crafting and disseminating a message.

However, these people are at the top of a management tree, they have been managers for a long time. Is it really appropriate that they react as craftsmen and craftswomen? And what does it say about "management" in the field?

It's perhaps unfair to overgeneralise from an unpublished study, but I think there are some important issues here. One is the question of how well communicators are relating to strategic, rather than tactical concerns. There are narratives of "communications strategy" alive and well within the profession, but it seems that we don't really have full confidence in them as yet. Another issue is the question of management. Communications is very definitely "knowledge work" and as such doesn't fit easily into the industrial traditions that shape a lot of "managment." All the same, it sometimes feels that there isn't a clear sense of what it means to be a manager in a communications function and certainly I think there are opportunities to improve the training and development of people who ascend into these communications management positions.

Technorati Tags: business case , corporate communicators , identity , management , narrative , training

IABC "Speedexperiencing" Event - Tues 9th Oct

2007-10-13T06:49:00.001-07:00

Just a few words about my first IABC event. Everyone was very friendly and the setup was interesting, with the opportunity to take part in three of five discussion groups.

I wanted to be in all five, but ended up choosing the group on engagement run by Kevin Keohane first. It was nice to meet someone in person that I've only had "blog contact" with in the past. He had some pointed questions to ask about the alignment of the "employee brand" with the aspirations of current and potential employees, but I won't attempt to reproduce his nifty diagram here. I felt this discussion was just getting going as the hooter went to move us on to the next one. I hope we at least laid some groundwork for the next group.

Nick Grant asked us "Can internal and external communication ever be aligned?" Again, time caught up with us, but (being the IABC) there was of course some consensus that they two perspectives have to be aligned overall, otherwise the mixed messages can cause serious problems.

Alas, I cannot recall the name of the final discussion leader, but the topic of "Can change be managed?" and the notion that it rather had to be "led," than "managed" made me think today once again about our approach to internal communications.

In particular, one idea in the "change leadership" discussion was that most people are most likely to change for a direct manager who they know and trust. It's largely only someone who they work with regularly, who understands their working life who has the credibility/trust to ask someone to undertake radical working change.

For me, there was a strong parallel with how internal communications "should" work. Statements from the top, or even just far flung regions of the company are unlikely to have as much credibility or trust as those from direct supervisors and colleagues. We instinctively know this, I think, but often give up on it because it's very hard to make practical use of. Rather, many people view "middle management" as the "big sponge" that soaks up all the information, but never passes it along.

As a result, we've invested in circumventing the traditional channels of communication. That has some exciting possibilities, especially in connection with new "social media," but at the same time (hobby horse alert!) I feel it has pushed "internal communications" into a "mass communications" or "marketing/advertising" mould, where the purpose and expertise of internal communicators is to create communications strategies and implement them.

What I see is that there is an important role for "internal communications" in helping people communicate, helping "the sponge" of middle management actually pass more information along. In effect, doing less communication and spending more time on helping people communicate, both by innovating technology/processes and the hard work of teaching people extra skills. Why? Because in the end, they will tend to have credibility that a distant communicator will struggle to have. Social media allows a narrowing of that kind of distance, but even there I think that "social business communication" is going to need a lot of experience and even training to get the best out of it and existing trust relationships will continue to dominate.

Technorati Tags: change management , IABC , internal communications , lateral communications , marketing the strategy , top down , training , trust

Everything is Communication?

2007-10-07T16:12:00.001-07:00

In my last post, I mentioned that in some ways, every act is an act of communication and as such, there is a real need for a communications viewpoint at the very top management table.

I also said I'm not sure how that should be implemented in reality, so I thought I'd begin by explaining the issue and justifying my statement a little.

Imagine a company which announces a renegotiated share options plan for the CEO at the same time as a pay and hiring freeze for ground-floor staff. There is a certain commercial logic to the action. The CEO is given greater incentive to improve the performance of the company and the pay and hiring freeze is part of a cost-cutting plan. Of course, anyone reading it laid out like this can immediately see what it says to ground-floor staff:

a) "Your contribution isn't valuable to the company."

b) "The CEO's contribution is."

c) "Despite this you will be expected to do increasing amounts of work for no extra reward."

d) "Any success this generates will help make the CEO rich beyond the dreams of avarice."

I'm not the first person to observe that this might explain why the many companies who have undertaken this kind of action have found employee performance reducing and problems getting worse, not better.

Still, it remains a popular course of action and whilst that is in part due to the powerful financial logic that drives it, it seems also to be in part because the fact of what the action is communicating is not recognised by decision makers.

Another example from an organisation I have worked with involved research scientists and managers who were payed roughly similar amounts. Seeing increasing competition for talented researchers, the company responded by increasing the pay of scientists. The predictable result was that over time, the best managers started leaving the company and without these managers the quality of research began to suffer.

Once again, this is not to suggest that financial and commercial logic should come below communication, just that a little more thought about what was communicated could have resulted in a different policy that didn't have as many side-effects.

My contention then is that while we assume that top managers have a grasp of the communications impact of their actions, the evidence is that in some organisations this is just not the case. As a result, all sorts of policies get handed down that communicate things which contradict the explicit communications statements made to employees.

It seems to me that within the typical hierarchy of many organisations, one way Internal Communications issues and the communications impact of various actions will be recognised is for IC to have a seat at the top table. But, that seems neither likely or even politically astute, so I'm definitely open to suggestions.

Technorati Tags: business case , employee loyalty , internal communications , narrative , reality , trust

Internal Communications: The Big Ideas

2007-10-02T10:41:00.001-07:00

2007 seems to be a year when people are asking questions about the direction of internal communications. My take on things first developed during 2005 in an MBA Marketing Communications class discussion of "current trends in corporate communications."

In the time it's taken me to get around to actually writing about it, a lot of other people have independently produced similar ideas, either directly about internal communications (e.g. Kevin Keohane) or more abstractly about organisation (e.g. James Surowiecki - Wisdom of Crowds) and marketing (e.g. Mark Earls - Herd.) At the same time, I've already linked recently to people like Sue Dewhurst at Black Belt Dojo and Ron Shewchuk who are posting interesting tidbits in this area on a regular basis.

Given that there are similar ideas around, it would be silly not to talk about them. To that end I'm going to quote quite a bit from Kevin Keohane's blog postings not because he's the only one posting, but because he's condensed his thoughts into three convenient posts...

In "Internal Marketing is..." Kevin starts by saying:

"The concept of internal marketing is based on a false premise that one can treat employees like external customers.

“Internal marketing” is back as an employee communication approach. The concept is simple: use basic marketing approaches to communicate to employees in the same way that these methods can raise awareness, interest, intent and action with consumers."

To me, however, "internal marketing" isn't "back" it never really went away. There are pockets of good practice and experimentation where different approaches have been adopted, but my experience in contact with a range of typical organisations of various sizes is that "internal marketing" logic remained the dominant mode of action, even as IC professionals like Kevin moved on to new and better approaches with those clients who had the required imagination.

Kevin continues:

"The explanation for the revival of internal marketing is also simple. Marketing Directors are increasingly delivering a range of internal communication tasks. The logic is that if an organisation is trying to deliver a differentiating customer experience, then who better to get employees lined up than the people responsible for defining the customer experience? The fact that the Marketing function often has greater influence than does Internal Communications adds weight to the idea. With the importance and power of brand rising rapidly on the corporate agenda, the case is compelling on its face."

I would add that there is an underlying structural issue that has kept "marketing techniques" in pole position in a lot of IC departments. The discipline of marketing was founded (if you'll forgive the stereotype) around the needs of the Marketing Department at a company like Proctor and Gamble. You have 50 to 100 people who need to explain the value of a new product to millions of current and potential customers. It's a process of very few to very many communication, or in shorthand a "one to many" process. Likewise, in many IC departments, you have a very small staff, expected to produce results that affect a very much larger number of employees in the rest of the organisation. It's a very natural step to look to the techniques of "mass communication" from the marketing discipline to make that happen.

I think this is important, because while Kevin goes on to identify that:

"... there’s a basic problem with the whole idea. The nature of the employment relationship is essentially different from a consumer relationship."

and

"Most marketing practice is based on crafting a message, packaging it and delivering it to an audience — and then gauging what happens and modifying the next round of activity accordingly. Internal communication, at its best, goes beyond so-called “two-way” communication models, and creates an ongoing dialogue that both reflects and shapes the place where this conversation occurs.

there's a basic pressure (as in every part of life) to do more with less. And less staff and less resources pushes you back towards "one to many" communication, which in my opinion always tends to look more like "two-way communication" than genuine dialogue.

Perhaps most importantly, if I was to identify one reason why so many organisations still indulge in "internal marketing" it would be that most people involved in "internal communications" have a background in Marketing or PR. We need to consider carefully the skills we prioritise in IC if we want the field to progress.

Having said this, it's important to remember that it's not all a bad thing. Sue Dewhurst corrected me on this in reply to one of my earlier posts and Kevin puts it well:

This is not to say that some of the methods, practices and tools that prove valuable in marketing don’t have an important place in an effective internal communication effort. In fact, internal communication people can learn a lot from marketing approaches such as developing “the big idea,” defining the essence of a brand or value proposition, identifying, prioritising and segmenting stakeholders, and being more creative and inspirational in their overall approach.

Finally, Kevin says that:

While internal marketing may well be based on a false premise, the emerging truth is that no organisational silo – marketing, human resources, internal communications or IT — owns the whole solution. Best practice engagement is about making sure that these disciplines work together in a complementary manner to deliver the right result for the organisation.

For me, of course, this is where things get really interesting. If there is going to be more to IC than "internal marketing" then maybe we need to think carefully what "internal communications" can do for an organisation. Is it all about creating a dialogue between the top of a company and the rest? Or is there more?

My answer is that there is more. If you're going to talk about "internal communications" then you should be involved in every aspect of people communicating with each other. That means not only dialogue between "leaders and followers" but also between "followers" and not just discussions around values and community, but also the kind of communications people need to get things done, day to day.

So, onto Kevin's post "The end of internal communications."

This is getting long, so I'm going to "quote and paste" less of Kevin's work. Go and read it (or re-read it, if that's the case) as it's really worthwhile.

First, he sets the scene:

"There have been the rumblings of a seismic shift in the employee engagement and internal communications arena for several years now. Digital technologies are expanding our opportunities, consumer power and influence grows apace, and traditional organisational structures and hierarchies creak under the strain of 21st century business velocities. The contract among employers, employees, investors, stakeholders and customers is being re-written."

He moves on to point out that whilst in the past "internal communications" has bounced around the corporation, sometimes being sited as part of HR, sometimes part of "corporate communications," sometimes an adjunct to PR and marketing, it has been managing relatively well understood and stable needs and relationships. However, with the "seismic shifts" from changes in technology and society, this is no longer the case.

He goes on to list all the people involved in different aspects of the "customer experience" and note that everyone is responsible and if you don't get organised, your competitors will.

I'll let Kevin's words make the key point:

"What does all this have to do with internal communications? And why is it “dead”?

Many functional internal communication leaders today have come from a publishing, journalism, or PR background (and increasingly from Marketing disciplines). And in general, internal communication functions have been managed – and often managed very effectively – as information and knowledge publishers. Of course, most internal communication operations are very good at managing “two way communication,” ensuring that employee surveys track how things are going and what drives the right results to the bottom line; supporting senior leaders and line managers in their communication roles; providing opportunities for the employee to be heard. “Best Practice” is well and truly bedded in, and blogs, wikis, and ‘MySpace for the corporation’ are all adding new approaches to the mix.

But internal communication people need to stop thinking about ourselves as internal communicators. Because we’re simply not anymore. And we shouldn’t be. Internal communicators should see themselves as business people with a specific communication, involvement and engagement business process focus."

Kevin carries on with more detail and following his natural style ends up with what sounds like a call for Internal Communications to be at the center of everything:

"But if we are truly to thrive and face the challenges of 2007 and beyond, as internal communicators, we need to become part management consultant, part HR professional, part IT consultant, part brand manager, part organisational psychologist, part executive coach, part media relations expert … and part accountant.

We need to get outside our box, without apology, and stick our noses into other peoples’ business. Because everybody in the organisation, and many of our stakeholders who aren’t necessarily on our distribution lists, helps us deliver our customer experience and our “brand” — which is, after all, our reputation."

Finally, in his third post on this topic Kevin assesses what this drive to be at the centre of everything in the organisation means for the average IC professional. It's not a completely optimistic picture, but it reinforces the notion that it has to be more than just the traditional skillset.

So what does all this mean to me?

First, I see that if Internal Communications is going to develop in this way, it needs to change a lot. The skillset has to broaden and critically, the focus has to broaden, from being "publishers of information" to "facilitators of dialogue." In time, this really means that IC professionals shouldn't really be writing so much at all.

What then should they be doing?

1) To pursue Kevin's grand vision, IC has to work it's way into the very fabric of corporate management. If you don't have contact with and credibility with all the people who contribute to the "customer experience" you're in trouble. And since every act, be it the institution of a new bonus system, or new rules for cost control in production is an act of communication (which often speak louder than all the traditional forums and dialogues) communicators need to be at least involved in the discussions before these decisions are made.

(N.B. I still see a role for a split between "internal" (workers, partners) and "external" (customers, regulators, media) specialisms, however.)

I think this is a long term project and I'm unsure how to put it into action at this stage. Thus for now, I'm concentrating on the second part of the equation.

2) It's time for IC to start taking on a real process focus. In particular, it needs to develop skills in process, rather than content, as I mention above.

The way I've chosen for my consultancy is to focus on lateral communications.

In my opinion, a key issue is to improve the quality of communication between various groups within the organisation. If we take the notions of the "Wisdom of Crowds" to heart, then enabling the "crowd" to solve problems themselves, without unduly putting a burden on the rest of the organisation has to be a good way to improve the quality of action.

As such, my aim is to offer problem solving in urgent cases and diagnosis and assessment to avoid problems for organisations under less stress. My expertise is all about getting different cultures to talk to each other, so I'm focusing on international situations and national ones that involve distinctive groups (e.g. engineering, production and marketing.)

One of my challenges is to prove that this specialisation is worth investing in, alongside more generic exercises in improving the quality of dialogue and information flow in the organisation.

The other is to develop more services in that more generic area.

And that will be some of the topics for future posts.

Technorati Tags: big ideas , business case , internal communications , lateral communications , systems

Black Belt Dojo: Nasty questions

2007-09-26T10:46:00.001-07:00

It seems like the way I'm justifying not quite writing that big post on "Life, the Universe and Internal Communications" is to keep reading Black Belt Dojo, and blogging about the interesting things there. At least it's not Sue this time. Liam Fitzpatrick posts Nasty questions that IC managers nominate as the ones they would least like to face:

I thought I'd share with you some of the recent suggestions - they are quite chilling...

What measurements do you have to show how you add value?
Why do we need an internal communication team when we can just buy in a toolkit and some training for our managers to be communicators?
Can you actually prove that you’re contributing to business revenues?
How does your communication plan fit into the business strategy?
Why do we need an in-house team?
If I chose a member of staff at random and asked them last year’s revenue figures, would they know?
How much money do you spend on internal communication?
How can you justify the cost? What’s your return on investment (ROI)?

And my favourite...

What would happen to the company if we shut down the internal communications department? Would anyone notice?

Nice.

Liam

It's a good post to help get one thinking about the "business case" for Internal Communications. Largely of course, there are answers for these questions, but some of them are not easy answers, particularly those that focus on quantitative measures. The value of improved internal communication can be measured, but not always easily in accounting terms.

That of course does not mean we should give up on all this intangible work, but I do suspect there is a case for adding some more tangible strings to the internal communications bow. I'll write some more about this next time...

Technorati Tags: business case , internal communications

In the words of Ezra Klein...

2007-09-22T03:54:00.001-07:00

"My commenter(s) are smarter than me."

Sue from Black Belt Dojo replies to my post on strategy:

Just wanted to say that I do think we should think more like marketing in the way that they really know their audience - i.e. they do the research to build up a decent demographic and attitudinal profile so they know who they're talking to.

But I'm not advocating the sell/persuade approach. These people know what it's really like to work in the business, so hyperbolic fluff fools nobody. I'm talking about real, practical communication about subjects that actually affect them everyday.

I'll leave it there or my comment will be even longer than your post! But just to say that I agree with your thoughts later about involving people and not over-selling what we can do. In our role plays on the Black Belt programme we've managed to lure people into promising to work miracles with sales results, attrition, motivation ... you name it.

A number of important issues here:

1) As Sue notes, whatever it's faults may be, the discipline of Marketing is far more developed than that of internal communications. As a result, my banging on about their failures can seem a bit rich, because we still have lots to learn from them, especially in "identifying the audience."

2) I have my own problems "identifying the audience."

- My views come out of my experiences working in "other departments" in various organisations and are coloured by those experiences.

- In a lot of ways I'm writing to try and move the people who created those experiences of "internal communications" on to better ways of doing things.

- In reality however, the people most likely to actually read my blog are "enlightened practitioners" like Sue, who are already doing the right things, advocating good approaches.

- So to Sue and any others out there, I may be talking to you, but understand I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the still existing organisations where things just haven't progressed much in the last 10 years. We all know there are plenty out there.

- Finally, I'm still finding a blogging voice, but in my hubris I do hope to tie my ideas to the good things people are doing and contribute to a better developed philosophy of internal communications, as I think that's another area (along with tools like audience analysis) where we lag more established disciplines like marketing. We don't yet have a consistent, coherent and solidly plausible narrative for the things we can do.

Technorati Tags: audience , enlightened practitioners , internal communications , marketing , marketing the strategy , narrative

Facebook/Social Networking

2007-09-16T03:43:00.001-07:00

Just recently there seems to have been a rash of posts (1,2,3) about Facebook/Social Networking.

So far I've steered away from getting involved in discussions of particular technologies, because as one of the posters (Valdis Krebs) says:

"IMHO, just putting social web technology into a strong culture, averse to sharing and connecting, will not change how things get done. MySpace and Facebook worked because the were dropped into cultures eager to connect. The IC needs to get the sociology right before they support a new culture with new technology."

Or, more briefly, if the human situation isn't good, technology can't save it, you need to work at the human level first.

But, as the drum beat goes on, I should talk about social networking a bit as I'm dedicated to promoting lateral communication and these technologies are largely about enabling this very concept.

Some quick thoughts on pros and cons then:

Pro: The technologies are largely based on letting the user choose their own connections. That's a welcome change from some of the control-freakery sometimes displayed in corporate environment.

Con: A lot of the links that will be created will be enforced by the culture of the company. Everyone will be signed up to be connected to the CEO's "publicity account" and cross connected to the department head and all the other people who work in the same room as them. (That's not all bad, but it's enough to make many people just stop at that point.)

Pro: It opens another channel for communication between people in disparate parts of the organisation.

Con: That channel may be insecure (e.g. public sites like Facebook) or potentially unwieldy (internal networking site that has no connection with the outside world.)

The list of course can go on and on. I would draw attention to the myriad issues around mixing personal and organisational networking tools on the internet, because I think too many "comms gurus" haven't thought all the privacy issues through, but that's a post for another day.

Overall, I'm well disposed to this technology, but I think the devil resides in the details. In particular, if you want people to connect more, are you giving them not just the technology, but also the time and space to do so? I don't think the business case for social networking is impossible to write, but it's not as clear cut as some commentators are making out. Generic increases in productivity and innovation through "connectedness" can be real, but they depend on very good implementations and socio-cultural grounding of the technology in the organisation. Without this, you'd be better off working on less complex and more focused programs to improve lateral communication in the organisation.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, lateral communication

Why just repeating the strategy doesn't work...

2007-09-13T11:04:00.001-07:00

Sue Dewhurst posting over at Black Belt Dojo has a pithy summary of some of the problems in internal communications today:

Then I asked people to imagine the sales assistant had joined in to persuade them to hand over the credit card. Here's what the sales assistant says: "We're operating in a very competitive environment right now and our revenues are under pressure, so we really need you to buy the jacket to help us increase sales." Not convinced yet? How about "We need to improve our cashflow, and we have to show quarter on quarter improvements to the markets. If you buy this jacket, you'll really help us improve our profits."

Ever heard a sales assistant try and persuade you to buy that way? Me neither. They go for the things they know you'll care about. But quite often inside organisations, we try to persuade people to buy in by talking about what's in it for the company - not what's in it for them. It's easy to throw together key messages. But if you really think about the people you're trying to connect with and try and look for an angle they'll actually care about, it gets a lot more tricky.

I agree with what Sue says, as far as it goes, but predictably I don't think it goes far enough. After all, she's really saying that internal communicators need to think more like marketers. There is the corporate strategy, but you need to sell it to the employees, you have to wow them a little, make a personal connection, show the link with their lives and aspirations.

The problem is, the audience is changing. Every new generation of workers has been bombarded with marketing from an ever earlier age. It's still possible to wow them on occasion and make things personal for them, especially in person, but in "mass communications" (which remain the staple of internal communications in many organisations) it's working less and less well.

Now Sue is on record with progressive views about employee involvement in strategy formulation and that's an important part of the story. It's a lot easier to talk to and inform someone if they have had a stake in creating what you are talking about. That's definitely progress.

However, in a lot of organisations, especially larger ones, this kind involvement remains limited. One answer is for internal communicators to campaign more aggressively for greater involvement for everyone in the co-creation of strategy.

There are organisations, unfortunately, where that just isn't going to happen soon and I think in those places in particular, internal communicators need to look long and hard at the business case they promote for themselves. I think the traditional approach of "we'll deliver employee engagement with your strategy" is a very dangerous way to sell the business case for internal communications, because it promises more than the tools can deliver.

Instead, I believe internal communicators need to look again at their role in communication, particularly communication from the bottom of the organisation to the top, and from side to side (lateral communication.) This is an approach that requires a greater engagement with the actual processes of the business. It's less about exercising individual creative communication on a daily basis and more about enabling others to communicate.

And now I'm largely caught up with my RSS feed of internal communicators, I hope to move from laying out the case for moving to a different approach to talking more about that approach itself in future posts.

Technorati Tags: internal communications, business case, marketing the strategy, lateral communications

Making internal communications relevant...

2007-09-10T06:22:00.001-07:00

Ron Shewchuk points us to an article by Barry Nelson on "The case for "workplace journalism."

It's a well argued piece that I'd recommend you all read. The critical point is that if all your output (and I would argue, communications channels too) are focused on content that directly addresses the usual business case for internal communications, you are not likely to get many eyeballs:

The result, though, is that employees looking at their internal media see a monotonous parade of stories with the same underlying message: what it takes to make the company a financial winner.

Nelson makes the case for restoring a traditional balance:

What’s the lesson?

For communicators, it ought to be to keep helpful information on these issues flowing, as a lubricant, to help our more strategic messages get through. It should be to balance our coverage with empathetic workplace journalism – dialing down, just a little, the volume of our call to battle stations, and giving at least some prominence to our employees’ human concerns (e.g., how and why to get along with the boss, make friends on the job, cope with stress, live the brand, be a good teammate, and other aspects of a satisfactory work life).

I'm in complete agreement that if you want people to engage with your internal publication you have to provide a balance of content. If none of it is relevant to their daily lives, they are unlikely to make time for it. Also, there is an engagement question at work:

An excellent review of decades of studies on this point appeared in the August, 2002, issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Its conclusion: Employees tend to see their organizations in human terms, so they interpret evidence of more-than-minimal support for their well-being as a sign that the organization cares. And they respond in kind.

Employers they perceive as strongly caring earn strong commitment, including support for company success, and a desire to stay, even when the money looks better elsewhere. By contrast, companies that seem obsessed with their own financial security mostly inspire workers to be likewise, about theirs. Loyalty fragments, and trust is lost.

To bring things back to my hobby horse, I would draw attention to the newer media. A paper newsletter does rather push you towards "workplace journalism" if you seek an antidote to being "Pravda of the Executive Board." As the company invests in newer forms of communication, a number of avenues open up for employees to talk amongst themselves. A critical element in gaining credibility for the "internal communications department" is facilitating that peer-to-peer talk, rather than trying to lock things down and keep people "on message."

Likewise, a communications channel or technology is most valuable to people when it helps them in their daily lives and that means it helps them communicate with the people in the organisation that they need to, to get their job done. Generic tips on common problems are nice, but a channel is most useful when it connects people to the help and support they need as individual employees. Then people will use it every day and just maybe read some of the other stuff there, now and then.

The critical question from a lateral communications angle is: how much of the internal communications business case should be about "selling strategy in the first place?" It's a necessary top-down function, but we ignore the role of lateral communication in successfully implementing strategy at our peril.

Technorati Tags: internal communications, relevance, lateral communications

Employee loyalty

2007-09-07T07:35:00.001-07:00

Over at For Your Approval, Ron Schewchuk points to some recent statistics on employee loyalty. This is evidence in line with my instinct that commitment is at an all time low.

As he says:

I think for the next few years these stats are going to continue to show a decline in loyalty as employers struggle to redefine their relationship with workers. It's a sobering reminder of the importance of our role as communicators in helping organizations make meaningful connections with their people.

In my recent posts I've been critical of some of the usual approaches to making the business case for internal communications and it's important to clarify that internal communications can make a vital difference in areas like employee commitment and loyalty.

My spin on the issue, of course, is that (to take the example of ethics, Ron mentions) you won't convince employees that you're an ethical organisation with a well crafted article on the intranet, or even a personal statement in a form letter from the CEO to every individual.

Why? Because we live in an age where trust needs to be earned. People are exposed to the marketing and PR of a hundred organisations every week. They have learned to treat official statements and explanations with scepticism. It is necessary to make people aware of the good (in this case ethical) things that the company does, but it is not sufficient.

People believe the evidence of their experiences and the experiences of those around them. If you want to persuade them you are an ethical organisation, you have to treat them in an ethical manner. Internal communicators cannot force the HR function and others to clean up their act, but they can approach any issues in a manner that will build trust. This includes breaking away (where possible) from just pushing a "management line" and creating the conditions for real dialogue. Aiding the transit of messages from the bottom to the top is vital.

Finally, to bring things around to my hobby-horse (lateral communications) acting as a neutral conduit of discussion between peers without undue censorship is a good way to start bringing credibility (and an ethical face) to the internal communications function.

Technorati Tags: business case, trust, internal communications, employee loyalty

Communications: Top down vs reality

2007-09-03T07:12:00.001-07:00

Catching up on the RSS feeds, Steve Crescenzo (what a great name) has written a post; Replacing "corporate" with "creative" on his blog Corporate Hallucinations (another great name, btw.)

He starts:

Is "corporate communication" an oxymoron?
It's easy to believe that when you see as many employee publications and press releases as I do.
They all look the same. Generic headlines, horrific leads, cliched photographs, boilerplate copy, acronyms and buzzwords galore, and terrible quotes.

later suggesting that:

So we concentrate on making deadlines and creating content that won't raise any red flags with executives, lawyers, sources, or anyone else who is going to see it before it goes "live."

And you know what? We win those battles. We make our deadlines (usually); stuff eventually gets through the approval process--scarred and changed, perhaps, but it gets through.

So we win those two battles . . . and by doing so we lose the war for readership. We create safe, sterile, generic "corporate" content that employees, reporters, and other audiences immediately dismiss, if they notice it at all.

But it doesn't have to be that way! There are communicators out there who are swimming upstream, fighting the good fight, raging against the corporate machine . . . and replacing the "corporate" in corporate communication with "creative."

They're challenging the "approvers." They're using techniques that work in the real world. They're throwing out the stuff that doesn't work and finding creative ways of reaching their audiences.

In my notably not very humble opinion, this whole battle is all about the conflict between a belief in the "top down" approach and the reality of how our organisations work.

I do have to concede that in our current world we'll never get rid of the lawyers, if you're writing things the public may possibly see then in the litigious society we've created we can't avoid having the legal department check things over.

Still, the big sterilising influence on communications is the desire for control from the top, the pressure to rewrite descriptions of the reality "on the ground" to fit desired strategic narratives. This fails on two counts:

1) People trust the evidence of their own experiences and like the citizens of the Soviet Union just start to completely ignore communications that seek to gloss over all the problems.

2) Clear, honest lateral communication about the problems and challenges in the organisation between various parties who need to co-operate is vital to implementing the strategic vision. Sacrificing this to a culture of "keeping everybody on message" is a route to slow and painful failure.

Is there still a place for top down communications? Of course! People need to be informed and engaged about the strategy of the organisation, but:

a) As soon as you drift away from an honest statement of realities, you've lost the chance to inform and engage.

b) Top down isn't enough. If you don't give equal time for lateral communication you're missing out on a vital element for internal communications success.

And yes, this message is as much for top management as for internal communications professionals, but it will fall to all of us in the internal communications field to really make the case with top management. Otherwise, as creative as you get in working around "the approvers" you're still just holding back the tide.

Technorati Tags: lateral communications, internal communications, improving communication

Are you a great communicator?

2007-08-30T02:34:00.001-07:00

I'm not.

That may sound odd given my role in helping improve communication, but it's actually important on a number of levels:

1) It's glib, but we all need to be aware of our personal strengths and weaknesses. I'm working on improving my communication, are you?

After all, if it's not a priority for you, why would it be for anyone else in your organisation?

2) Communication is too vital to be just left to the people who are good at it. Communications professionals sometimes focus too much on putting messages across (as I've mentioned, it tends to be a core part of their business case) and not enough time helping others communicate.

The grey financier, the quiet and mumbling engineer, (forgive the stereotypes for a moment) all have vital information they need to communicate with others for the good of the organisation.

What can we do?

On a personal level, if you're a good outward communicator, or your job is largely "putting messages across" you should ask yourself: "am I a good listener? Do I listen enough?"

Sometimes I see frustrated communications professionals who just want to get hold of the hiring process and make sure only good communicators get jobs here." It's a nice idea, but we have to live in the real world. Outside of the communication function we employ people primarily for their other skills. There isn't always a good communicator amongst the candidates and we can't always attract them even if there is.

Most vitally, we need to understand our role as helping the people who need to communicate. Part of this is offering support services, both in terms of communications training and development and acting as an "agency" for internal clients who wish to publicise larger projects etc.

On top of this, the new approach in internal communications needs to be about finding systematic ways to help the bulk of people (i.e. not naturally great communicators) in an organisation communicate with the people they need to. This requires an understanding of processes that people work with and the problems in communication between different groups.

Potential remedies range from programs to bridge cultural gaps, through new channels of communication to changing the incentive schemes around activities. (This is a topic I'll pick up again later.)

Technorati Tags: great communicator, systems, internal communication, improving communication

Moving away from Command and Control

2007-08-21T14:50:00.001-07:00

In my last post, I highlighted Lee Smith saying that "many of our current approaches to internal communication remain essentially about coercion, command and control."

I said then that I'd expand on the logic that links that statement to the approach I'm promoting, but first it's worth making a short detour through the history of internal communication.

In the beginning was the word...

and the word was written in the in-house newsletter. If one had to name an originating strand in the story of "internal communications" it would be in the organisational newsletter. Many of them were started without a clear purpose, just vague notions of "community building" or "enhancing shared identity" and production placed in the hands of whoever happened to be available.

Over time, people started thinking about that position more carefully. First we saw some journalists brought it to do the writing, which gave us a sense of "mass media," a subtle shift towards "few to many" communication and away from the "community odds and ends" that many newsletters began with.

Over time these internal communicators started to talk to each other and band together and work to define their role more carefully. There has been reams written about the "professionalisation projects" of various groups so I won't go into the mechanics here, except to observe that people who write in a journalistic style, but not for newspapers are often members of the Public Relations function. It's worth noting that in the UK, the "Chartered Institute" that encompasses most internal communicators is the CIPR.

PR and Marketing

Internal communications did have vague goals, as mentioned above, but the influence of PR practitioners was to begin to sharpen the notion that communications could alter the character of the community, reinforce the establishment of a particular identity. This isn't to say no one was doing this before, but it is from the field of Public Relations and the related discipline of Marketing that the philosophical impetus came. Whereas before the goals of internal communicators were loosely tied to the organisation, they were now becoming actively more engaged in "selling the values of the organisation" to the employees. The critical issue here is that this model of "few to many" and "selling" sits very comfortably in a world where the values of a the organisation are set by central/top management and the "ordinary worker" is persuaded (or as Lee put it, coerced) into compliance with that vision.

Strategy and Change Managment

The final strand in this short tour brings us to the present day. Despite the rush of conceptual ideas from PR and Marketing, the "internal communication department" remained a prisoner of it's roots, with a limited budget and often seen to be a "feel-good" item on the budget, ripe for cuts when recession hit. Now we all know that internal communication is vital to the health of the company, but it has taken time to construct a case for it and the tools for that case form the third strand of the history. It's from the field of change management that the "business case" for internal communication really took off. It has been observed that full communication and "selling the case" are vital for successful change. This established a business critical role for internal communicators in times of change. The Strategic Management types took this concept and ran further with it. They reasoned that a new strategy (or in some companies, the explication of an existing one) was also a matter that required full communication and case selling for success. Thus we reached a position where there was a continuing business case for internal communications, communicating the vision of the organisation to its members and persuading them to adopt it.

So what's the problem?

Internal communications is important, we all know and it's found a business case. What could cloud this sunny picture?

I will post in more detail on this when I talk about Mark Earls book, Herd, but in a nutshell, traditional marketing is not going to keep working. Internal communication has built a business case for itself, but it cannot deliver everything promised. The old notion of a vision and set of values, handed down from on high for the internal communicator to insert into the minds of masses sets those communicators up for a fall.

Alternatives?

What can an internal communications consultancy provide, if old style communication plans and "vision selling" aren't effective. What is the role for internal communications interventions?

I would say that developing corporate strategy requires the flow of communication up as well as down in the organisation and that one aspect is the development and nurturing of those upward flows. Of course, that is something that plenty of people already do. I have been remiss in not acknowledging that conscientious practitioners have sought to feed information back up the chain, especially with regard to changes and strategy.

What is perhaps newer is the understanding that implementing any strategy depends on the quality of cooperation inside the organisation and crucially the quality of lateral communication. One area I particularly concentrate on visible problems between different groups in the organisation, especially those who form different subcultures. However, there is serious work on the human side of lateral communication to be done in every organisation. We have many technological solutions in place, but we still need people to talk and sometimes they need help for that.

Technorati Tags: command and control, alternative ways of thinking, internal communications, history

Engagement and Culture

2007-08-17T14:26:00.001-07:00

Over at Talking IC, back in June, Lee Smith commented on Sue Dewhurst's post about engagement.

Sue says:

OK, I admit it, I hate the 'e' word. It's joined 'strategic' and 'culture' as one of those wibbly terms that gets bandied about constantly whilst half the time people don't really know what it means... but they manage to have an earnest-sounding conversation about it anyway.

Lee agrees that engagement is most often used as a buzzword and too often people mean different things by it anyway. I suspect we'd all say the same about "culture" too, but as he recommends a new book (CEO - the Chief Engagement Officer by John Smythe) that is a useful application of the "engagement" concept he also highlights an important facet of what "culture" is:

If you, like me, are getting irritated by the 'e' word, then I recommend John's book as an antidote. It'll convince you that engagement - as a management philosophy - is a no-brainer and that many of our current approaches to internal communication remain essentially about coercion, command and control.

Culture is, in part, those assumptions that are so deep rooted we do not usually notice them. And possible the part of "internal communication" culture I most want to help change is the cancer of "coercion, command and control."

Why do I want to change it? Not just because I don't believe that the centre of the organisation "always knows best" but because the evidence is that internal communication that relies on coercion, command and control just doesn't work.

It is worth saying that it's a few steps of logic from that statement to the philosophy I'm building Enoptron around, but I'll talk about that more in my next post.

Technorati Tags: engagement, culture, buzzwords, internal communication

On Jargon

2007-08-14T12:27:00.001-07:00

As I was clearing out some old piles of paper I came across an article in the Autumn 2005 edition of the now defunct MBA Business magazine. The title is "Start Making Sense" and it's about the jargon we all tend to use:

Read the packaging on any of Ronseal's products, be it Quick Drying Patio Paint or 5-Minute Fence Finish, and you'll find a very reassuring company motto: "Does exactly what it says on the tin".

If only all business communication was so straightforward.

I suppose the obvious thing to say is just: "Amen!"
Still, that's not a particularly new thought, so why I am writing about it in my new blog?

In part, to remind myself that I'm not writing academic papers any more. A certain kind of jargon is a useful shorthand when communicating with people who "know what you mean" but that isn't always appropriate on a blog.

And yet, in part, I have to say that the world will never be so simple. In the magazine article they note how often jargon is a substitute for real thought and knowledge and how many people and companies use it to avoid making tangible commitments. Still, even if we magically made everyone honest and diligent, I cannot see jargon disappearing completely.

I want to blog about communications, particularly internal communications and culture, so there's bound to be some fancy words used now and then. If you want to be precise about things that everyone has a bit of an idea about, then you need to use less common words sometimes, just to pinpoint what you really mean. And to state another obvious point, jargon is in part a cultural badge. Using the right words lets people know you are "one of them." Every subculture tends to create a shared language and that's part of how jargon comes about.

To aid communication we should try to follow these simple rules:

1) Avoid jargon where possible.

2) If you have to use it, be aware that you are excluding some audiences as well as including some. Ask yourself who those people are and if you mean to treat them in that way.

3) If you are going to use it, be sure you're willing and able to translate into plain English if required.

Technorati Tags: jargon, communication