The Wall Street Journal
09-19-06
Cubicle Culture: What did the boss say? You can only imagine
By Jared Sandberg, The Wall Street Journal
The childhood diversion known as the Telephone Game, in which the details of a
sentence or phrase deteriorate with each retelling of it, is played the world over.
Sometimes called Whisper Down the Lane and Pass It Down, it's also played,
inadvertently, in almost every corporation on the planet.
George Franks, who runs a Bethesda, Md., management-consulting group,
witnessed it, appropriately enough, when he worked at a telephone company.
Years ago, when the company brought in an Italian executive to improve a
division, the executive suggested that the business become more international.
"Before long, staff and line managers were wearing double breasted continental
suits and using cigarette holders -- to emulate the executive and be more
'international,'" he says.
Miscommunication in corporate culture is so endemic that whenever
management consultants, industrial psychologists and executive coaches hear of
almost any problem, they prescribe "better communication," as if it were two
aspirins. But they're right on the money when it comes to lieutenants and staffers
relaying the boss's wishes, some of which the boss has no idea he had.
What may start as a passing mention, a simple question or some faint musing
gets layered with what people hope to hear, fear hearing, or never heard at all.
So as word of the boss's comments reaches the far corners of the hierarchy, a
question can become a directive, which can then mutate into an initiative,
contorted into a campaign, and ultimately memorialized in a mission statement.
A mere "yes" or "no" might have sufficed. The result may be a laugh riot,
provided you can ignore the heavy time and money spent.
Research suggests that "when we listen, we drop information because we can't
remember every word that someone has said," says Mark Redmond, associate
professor of communications studies at Iowa State University. "When we
retell it, we put information back in, adding elements that may completely change
the meaning of the original message."
There's a double-whammy. Not only might you recall it incorrectly, but the added
stuff reflects your own ideas, he says.
Bias was a problem that Claire Cardie, a professor of computer science at
Cornell University, ran into when she and associates were trying to write a
computer program to be used in industry to understand people's opinions of
products. They knew there might be a problem evaluating information from, say,
an article that quoted a report that quoted a person's opinion. They were hoping
they could work their way around it. "But we couldn't," she says.
What she also found was that in a chain of communication, "someone in that line
always messes up," she says, meaning the message is only as good as the
worst communicator who ever carried it. And they discovered a statistical
correlation that explains a lot: "When you hear someone say 'it is a fact,' in our
data what they are going to say is absolutely not going to be a fact," says Prof.
Cardie.
Sensitivity to a manager's commands isn't unlike the proverbial butterfly flapping
its wings in China, only to set off a tornado halfway around the world. When Rob
Steiner was a management consultant, he was hired by an auto-company
division that made pickup truck accessories. Word circulated that the chief
executive wanted the small division to increase its razor-thin margins by a factor
of 10 and somehow become a core part of the company's strategy. At least,
that's what they thought he wanted.
"I don't know how the broken-telephone game started, but I was the guy to pick
up the phone at the other end," he says, "and it made so little sense."
A team of consultants flew in each week for three months. They gathered data,
analyzed it and produced a "model," he says, "describing the impossible
operational contortions the unit would have to undertake in order to meet this
fictional target."
The bill for their services, he says, was headed for several hundred thousand
dollars. And no one could pull the plug tens of thousands of dollars earlier. "The
internal communication and trust was so broken down that you couldn't respond
properly," says Mr. Steiner.
Some have better luck. When Dick Nicholson was a sales manager, one
salesman was underperforming. At an annual sales reception, the chairman of
the company said to the vice president that Mr. Nicholson reported to, "Why is
so-and-so still a salesman?"
The vice president then told Mr. Nicholson that the chairman wanted to promote
the salesman. Stunned, Mr. Nicholson went into the chairman the next morning
and asked what he meant.
"Happily, he meant 'Why is the guy still on the payroll?'" When Mr. Nicholson
explained what had happened, the chairman "came out of his chair like a Saturn
rocket," he recalls.
Mr. Nicholson spent the next several months pressing the salesman for better
performance to no avail. But he had prevented the misunderstanding from
escalating into a catastrophe by employing an unusual but elegant tactic: "I
asked what he meant," he says.