jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #74 on 14 May 2021 and has tags Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools, Strategy: Change Management
Prattfalls: Better Communication - Roy Rapoport
The Art of the Tick Tock - Lara Hogan, Wherewithall
It’s too easy for us as manager to say things to a team member one-on-one or to the team as a group and for it to seemingly not register, or for it to be understood in a different way we intended.
Rapoport has a useful model for those of us in tech of how to think about these misfires. In Rapoport’s model, the purpose of communication is to successfully transmit (or receive) an idea or mental model, and in doing so update someone’s internal state. This is certainly true for important communications where what you’re trying to get something significant across and are willing to put some thought into how to do that. Whether you’re trying to keep someone informed of something, teach them something new, have them look at something in a new way - or to receive those same things from someone else - he distills his approach into four points:
What’s useful about this is that it reminds you, as ever, of the audience, and that they have a whole lot of complex state in there you don’t even know about. So it’s crucial to validate that the idea got across!
I’d add that another purpose for communication is to build relationships, which is sort of a mutation of state but slowly over time, and so probably doesn’t lend itself to this approach, but that’s easy enough to think about in other ways.
Hogan takes that same deliberate approach in the construction of a communications roll-out model for a new important message to a larger audience. That could be some significant change in focus being communicated within a big organization, or it could be something like a new software project or conference being communicated out to a research community at large.
Having a plan, and rolling out the communications slowly (first one-on-one or one-on-few, then onwards to increasingly broadcast modes of communication) gives you a chance to think critically about the audiences and the strategy - focussing on the mutations you’re trying to accomplish and being thoughtful of it. It also gives you the chance to get feedback on what is being communicated (validating that the mutation is occurring) early on, letting you clear up misunderstandings, gaps, and ambiguities early on in the process.
