Communication - Breaching the Toughest Wall
Randall Daily, EMS-LA, CUSA, MBA
Daily Safety, Environmental & Quality, Inc.
“If we had only known earlier” or “I tried to tell them but they wouldn’t listen”, are some of the
most common words when failure occurs due to the lack of the timely communication of
relevant information.
The failure to achieve desired results or lack of success more often than not, can be
attributed to or directly linked to poor, ineffective or even at times to non-existent
communication within organizations, starting at the top.
Communication is commonly defined as the "exchange of information" and requires more
than single party involvement. With communication we have the output of information to a
receptor with the input and understanding of what it is being communicated. Within Business
Management Systems, whether they be based on ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001, ISO 9001, or
any other design requirement, communication is understood to be the internal and/or external
transfer of information which is "relevant" to that particular management system the
organization is following. The main issues in organizational communication are how to decide
on or how to define relevancy and the development of an accepted and usable
communication methodology. Some of the primary questions an organization needs to ask
itself are:
"What information do we need to exchange?"
"How can we exchange information?"
"What causes restriction to the information flow?"
“What can we do to allow information to flow?”
“How can we ensure the understanding of the communicated information?”
From these questions can be developed the "who's, what’s, when's, why's and how’s".
Communication within organizations has historically been a picture of the organizational
structure itself, vertically aligned by Functional Specific Area (FSA) with management placed
horizontally across the top. Communication within the FSA's routinely mirrors the
organizational structure. What arises out of this arrangement can be equated to a type of
"Communication Tunopia" or communication flow that is very short ranged and too narrowly
focused, not extending beyond the "wall" of the FSA. We need to break down the "wall"!
Breaching the "wall" starts at the top. Management has to set the example, beginning with
the way it communicates. This begins with opening up traditional barriers or "walls" that have
stymied the flow. There has never really been much trouble getting-the-message-out, it's the
understanding of the message that confounds organizations and the people in them. The
other side of this issue is in management's ability or inability to get-the-message.
In order to start breaching these walls management and organizations as a whole have to
identify what causes them to be built in the first place. Causation factors for communication
failure can be attributed to personal ego's, over compartmentalization of information,
organizational stagnation, the old knowledge-is-power syndrome, apathy, fear, lack of
understanding, refusal, and denial among potentially countless other reasons. The old
communication paradigm's of open door policies, suggestion boxes, and empowerment
among others never quite made things happen as planned.
Probably the first and biggest step is for management to truthfully seek and accept negative
information about and objective critique of the organization itself. The concept of this process
can be staggering to try to comprehend when one looks back at the carcasses of those who
have previously made the honest attempt to say “Houston, we have a problem!” If the
organization, in this context being management, does not allow the organization to be honest
of itself with respect to the internal communication process related to negative information, it
will develop a culture where no negative information, internal or external, will be conveyed.
Negative information is where success is found, because from it is where improvement is has
to be derived. Without improvement we have stagnation and from stagnation failure is an
absolute.
Moving on, personnel in Functional Specific Area's need to first understand that they are
working within a "system", a "system" of independent, operational processes that when
combined create a mechanism to achieve desired results. Business management systems
are no different than the systems you can find in an aircraft such as the fuel, flight control, or
electrical systems. Each of these aircraft systems is made up of individual components like
pumps, switches, linkage, lines and so on. Without a necessary component the aircraft
system will fail to function and without communication the management system will fail too.
Only when each FSA realizes its relationship to the system and successful system
functioning can their "wall" confounding effective internal communication start to be
breached.
Breaching the “wall” is the first step when establishing communication, and then hardest.
Physical tools like Intranet’s, emails, copiers, memo’s, meetings, virtual conferencing and so
on, are the easy part of the process. The most difficult task to overcome in the
communication process is to break down the people barrier. That’s the real “WALL.”