Lucinda:
At 09:05 07/12/1995 -0800, you wrote:
>Usually when something cannot be discussed, it involves personality and/or
>behavior. Two things must happen: 1) Upper management must be made aware
>and agree upon the consequences of continuing to ignore the problem; 2)
>Fear of dealing with the problem must be reduced to the point that action
>can be taken.
Please allow me an observation and a solution path (OK, call it an
amelioration) that has worked for us. The observation is that people fail
to communicate for one of three reasons: they don't wish to be hurt; they
don't wish to cause hurt; or the combination of the two. These fears
(often accurate) suppress communication and allow the problem to drift --
and usually accumulate in size and impact -- until the ultimate
"correction" comes with more force and collateral damage than if the
issues had been treated incrementally. (We use the parable of the
pressure buildup in a geologic fault -- the slip-strike variety common to
California -- to get the quick idea across.)
Since organizations are merely amalgams of individuals; all with
one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships; we have a ready
made difficulty as fear of the consequence of accurate communication
distorts the both the "knowledge-base" and the "solutions" available to
the organization. Combine all this with the fact that all organizations
filter data as it moves up the hierarchy, and it is quite common to have
management rather in the dark.
The path that has worked for us (the outsider) to privately interview
stakeholders of a group (be it the management team or a shop floor team),
then merge the "predominate feelings and issues" that emerge (notice that
there is NO effort to secure a consensus that often doesn't exist) and
present it back to the group, asking them if we listened correctly. There
are often gasps at what is now up "on the screen" and we go through an
iterative, more politic, rendering, but in the main, we now have a group
of critical issues on the table stripped of the source that can draw
retribution. We then take this information up and down the chain of
command and do the same. You get the idea. It's simply our way of
becoming the white space on the org chart so as to reconnect failed lines
of communications.
P.S. I notice your address as the China Lake Naval Weapons Test Center, a
facility with which I had some experience in the past as head of
engineering for a CAD vendor whose products were then used at China Lake.
I found the facility an enormous distortion of interpersonal
relationships. First, it's isolated some 160 miles out in the desert (as
we frown on large, flying, exploding things moving about populated areas),
Second, it's a (or was a) brilliant, engineering-led culture where
engineers were promoted into management roles for which they had
absolutely no skills beyond their technical skills. These folks could not
have managed their way out of a wet sack with a hatchet.
Their failure in inter-personal relations extended into their families
which demonstrated all manner of family strife and had distortions of
alcohol, drugs, truant children, and the like. I had three colleagues who
were consulting psychologists to China Lake that drove in from LA on
Monday and drove out on Thursday evening. China Lake wanted them on site
full time, but they refused noting that they would soon be as crazy as the
residents if they stayed. I trust things have improved since.
-- Best regards, Gordon Housworth Intellectual Capital Group ghidra@mail.msen.com Tel: 810-626-1310