Communicate^3

I hate these shallow cliches emphasizing a single idea: "Location, Location, Location" or "Communicate, Communicate, Communicate." But a shallow reality calls for shallow cliches. They have much truth in them.

By definition, an organization organizes many people. For the people to act in an organized fashion, they communicate. This is where the problem begins. Many years ago, a manager told me that whenever information is passed from one layer of management to the next, 50% is lost. I thought he was joking. He wasn't. Peter Drucker adds to the 50% loss of information, a 50% gain in noise. This shouldn't come as a surprise: Children all over the world play Chinese Whispers, which illustrate the fallibility of human communication. One may think that the fact that information is whispered rather than stated aloud makes it very different, but I beg to differ: The listener in any conversation sometimes misses a word, and fills up the gap with a guess. Often, the words are understood, but the emotional intention is lost. For example, a superior may think they gave a order, while the underling thinks it was a suggestion.

Part of the problem is misinterpretation of non-verbal communication, or complete lack of it. Body language researchers can argue whether non-verbal communication is in charge of 80% of the meaning or just 50%. Either way, it's a lot. Often we miss it in face-to-face conversation, and with the prevalence of the telephone - and now email - we are often deprived of this channel of information altogether. But this is only part of the problem. My favorite personal horror story is of a project that I was discussing with a consultant over a few months. We spoke on the phone, and emailed and met and waved our hands at each other to our hearts' delight. Then, after a few months, we discovered we had in our minds totally different conceptions of what we were talking about. I can't communicate the shock I experienced without waving my hands a lot. Yelling, too.

Philosophically considering the issue, we can see that words - and even gestures - are just the shadow of the thoughts and ideas. Different ideas may have the same shadow – same words pointing to them. Stating an idea, an order or information just once gives the listener an opportunity to understand... something. But not necessarily what the speaker meant. That’s why we need to communicate the same idea repeatedly, using different words, and in different states of mind of the speaker and listener, to improve the chance that the idea being built together is the same idea and not different ideas.

Education involved a lot of communication on many different levels. On the most general level, the education establishment is a huge organization in almost any country. Orders and reports flow among several levels of management. On a level specific to education, as opposed to any other large organization, there are the beliefs and opinions as to what we want from an education system, and even if we want a "system." Then there are ideas and theories for how to get where we want. Then we need to check some of the ideas and communicate the results of our tests and research. On a grass root level, students communicate with each other ("what did we get as homework?"); teachers communicate with students; teachers communicate with principals and their training organization; teachers communicate among themselves; Parents, school-boards, politiciansn tax-payers have much to say, and sometimes they they are even inclined to listen. The different levels of discourse should interact constructively with each other to retain and develop knowledge, to enable the individual students to do their best, and to enable the individual teacher to develop. It's next to impossible to do a good job in such a complex environment.

So, much attention is to be devoted to making sure everybody talks to each other effectively. The first thing is to make sure that everybody is on the same page in terms of the goals of the organization, the strategies to be followed, the specific objectives, the more specific tasks, etc. Communicate, communicate, communicate - that must be the foundation of the culture. Opportunities for verbal and non-verbal communication must be created and maintained: Meetings and discussions on every level and inter-level. Time allocated (with pay or another reward) for teachers to talk with individual students, for teachers to talk shop among themselves, etc. All the earthly details such as a room to sit and talk: quiet, well lit and supplied with coffee, tea or water. Maybe something to eat - it's hard to think without any glucose in one's brain. Lots of administrative attention.

Good communication within a group creates a common understanding, built with commonly understood concepts. But there's a pitfall here: Common understanding tends to express itself with jargon. In some contexts, jargon prevents communication. It does create cohesion within the group that’s “in the know”, but it prevents others from understanding, and may even create strata within the group. Education is an extreme case where communication outside the organization is at least as important as communication within the organization. The pupils are outsiders, so are the parents and the whole public. Part of the alienation between the public and the education establishment, is the fact that the establishment speaks its own language. It uses words not found in a layman's vocabulary. The temptation to use jargon must be resisted. For example, since the word "communication" appears dozens of times in this text, the thought had occurred to me to abbreviate it to "comm" or something. But that's already jargon, so I resisted.

Some people are said to be "great communicators." They can get ideas across to others. There aren't many, and we can't get a big group of them to form a considerable organization. An organization with tens of thousands of officials - teachers etc. - that serves millions of customers - pupils etc. - can't rely on the heroic abilities of the few. Not in terms of management, not in terms of administration, not in terms of research, and not in terms of communication. These capacities need to be built into the culture, into the fabric of the organization. Also, the ability to maintain these capacities has to be built into the organization.

Building repeatable, defined, managed and optimizing capabilities is deeply discussed and developed as Capability Maturity Model in the context of software engineering. We need to develop a parallel model for the more human field of education.