The missing piece of communications training

Trust me, this isn't the kind of blog post that just comments on another person's blog post, although it starts with not one, but two.

First, there's the ever-amazing Seth Godin's "The relentless search for 'Tell me what to do.'" Right click and read it now. It's really short--shorter than this post will be, and if you can sit through that much no-name-brand bloggage here, you can manage a handful of A-list sentences. Go--read--this can wait.

Back? Good. You didn't, by any chance, happen to have a reaction similar to mine, did you? Which was something like, "Great point, Mr. Godin, but...betting your job on self-determined outcomes is only viable when you know what the organization's priorities actually are."

Now, Mr. Godin--as well he should be--is his own boss. So he has not only the overall vision, but the immediate goals mapped out. Some folks are smart enough to grasp grand strategy even while dodging bullets the fox-holes. I'm not one of them. To the point where I'm seriously considering scratching the phrase "communication skills" from my resume. Why? Because I've come to realize that it is sort of a lie. Sure, I can probably regain my public speaking skills with a little practice, and my ability to write so as not to be misunderstood is probably as honed as it's ever been. But I'm a mediocre listener, and (far, far worse), I put so little work into the fine art of knowing whom to talk to, particularly to triage long-term substance from ephemeral buzz. Good old-fashioned networking, in other words. (And, pointedly, not in the sense of the term that programmers and system administrators understand.)

Which is where the other linked item comes into play. It's rather longer than Mr. Godin's work, but Joel Spolsky's column for Inc. magazine ("A Little Less Conversation") nails the essential problem--and in terms anyone inclined toward math will grok. If you don't have time to read the entire thing, brand this simple algebraic formula into your synapses: n times n-minus-1, all divided by two, where n = the number of people in your organization. Ditch "e equals m times c squared." (When are you likely to need to compute Special Relativity anyway?) It's important because the result of "n(n - 1)/2" is the maximum number of connections that can be formed in a group of people with n members.

This formula, Janus-like, has two faces: For what we'll call "outgoing" communication, it equals the number of connections that could--emphasis on "could"--spread word-of-mouth originating from just one single person within that n-sized group. Pretty darned powerful (at least in potential), no? I can virtually guarantee you that this is the number that the self-appointed social media snake-oil peddlers are pitching...and the social media snake-oil buyers are salivating over.

However, its flip-side (for the person scanning for "incoming" communication about the organization) is that those connections are all places that useful information could--again, emphasis on "could"--go to die or be corrupted---with or without intent--before it ever reaches those who might be most affected by it. And maintaining n-minus-one relationships, while possibly rewarding in other aspects, ultimately just does not scale.

And that's where communications training (be it in college courses or seminars or what-have-you) ultimately falls down. In the "outgoing" sense, how do you locate the people most likely to spread your word? In the "incoming" sense, how do you develop the sense for maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio that filters out baseless rumor and useless chatter?

In fairness to Academia, I haven't had a Communications course in over two decades; thus, I could be slandering it. Yet, curricula tend to be reactive. And with the internet explosion of communication mechanisms, I would (were I the gambling sort) be willing to bet that CommSci departments are too busy coping with those phenomena to address the basic questions of network efficiencies. Presumably that's left to Marketing courses on demographics...and even then only in the most oblique sense. Or maybe a single course in Organizational Psychology that has several prerequisites not likely to be taken by Comp. Sci. majors. I do sincerely hope that I'm doing the Liberal Arts a disservice here, but I'm not willing to gamble so much as a semester of Communications coursework on it.

Thus, like most things that pertain to my career--beyond even my present job--this is something I'll have to pick up on the fly. As ever, acknowledging the deficiency is the first step toward correcting it. Who knows? Perhaps casting it in terms of simple mathematics--rather than of office politics--will make it seem less daunting. After all, figuring out who the idle gossipers are (and thus factoring them out of "n") has a powerful impact on the formula, which is cheering: Booyah for math.