Copyright: 2002
Publisher: Dorset House
ISBN: 0-932633-53-6
Naomi Karten has written a very comprehensive book dealing with a wide range of issues relating to communication within an organization. While she touches from time to time on personal communication issues, her primary focus is on organizational communication with an emphasis on the information technology field. As with most speakers who also write, her writing style reflects the fact that she is more comfortable with the spoken word and from time to time you get the impression that her humor or even her serious points would come across better if she were reading the book to you in person! That said, this book is very well researched, so much so in fact that at times you feel as though you are reading an extensive term paper. I would still very strongly recommend this book if you are interested in learning more about communication issues in your organization.
Meyers-Briggs
Karten spends a lot of time incorporating the work of other people into her book. One entire section is devoted to the MBTI material that is covered in detail in other places. Her specific focus on communication issues surrounding the various type indicators makes this section worth reading.
Of particular relevance I felt was her discussion on the difference between sensors and intuitors. Sensors are people who take in information primarily through their senses. They tend to be detail oriented. Intuitors on the other hand tend to pick up information almost by osmosis... they see new information in the context of a much larger picture.
This hit home in the software shop that I work in because I am very much the "sensor" and one of my co-workers is the intuitor. Whenever we start working on, or even talking about a new feature, he immediately begins to imagine all the possible scenarios where things might go wrong or what customers might want in addition to or as a complement to the feature at hand. On the flip side, I tend to immediately zone in on what steps it will take us in the development lab to get things done. I want to start writing lists and narrowing things down, he wants to take a step back and see how it all fits into the big picture.
Since we practice Lean Software development (specifically XP) we talked about using this difference to our advantage. When we are doing our iteration planning (weekly) with the customer, we want to see the big picture. We need to step back and make sure we understand what the customer is asking us to to. More importantly, we need to communicate to the customer what we think they want us to do so they have the opportunity to correct us if we got it wrong. At this point, focusing on the details is wasteful since we can't possbly know what it will take to complete a story before we know how the story ends and what all it entails from the customer's perspective.
Once we have established this set of "what it means to be done" however, then it is time for us to bring our sensor powers to bear on the story. We need to be able to focus on the steps necessary to completing what we told the customer we would do. That means if some aspect comes up that we didn't think about in the planning meeting, we have to decide if we should jump into that bit of work or not.
For us that decision comes down to whether the added work is customer scope creep or implementation scope creep. Again it takes a bit of both the sensor and the intuitor to be able to make these decisions. You need to be able to see the big picture of where the added work fits. In addition you need to be able to see the big picture of whether or not the added work is better tacked now than later. If it is customer scope creep however, that decision should be taken back to the customer since taking it on may affect the delivery of promised functionality.
Appreciation
Another area of communication that Karten touches on that I felt was particularly appropriate was the idea of showing appreciation. She points out that when you express gratitude to people there are good ways and bad ways of doing it! In short she reminds us that express appreciation should be personal, direct and specific. Generalized "thank you for all your hard work" tends to come across more as a lack of true appreciation than anything. Take the time to think it through and direct your thanks to an individual for a specific thing and express it to that person. It will go a long ways towards building communication bridges if done right.
Temperature Reading
I am not a big fan of buzz words and "Dr Phil" names for techniques, however I found some of Karten's thoughts on the concept of Temperature Reading to be useful. Specifically she mentioned that some of the techniques could be applied to the ubiquitous retrospective. As an Agile software shop, we have a retrospective once a month (whether we need it or not!) since continuous flow doesn't lend itself to project start and end dates. We recently tried answering these five questions as a format for our retrospective:
- What worked well?
- What information was lacking?
- What was puzzling?
- What improvements will help in the future?
- What are our hopes for the future?
These questions, as recommended by Karten, were useful in sparking some good conversations. In particular the first one forced us to think first about things that were not problems as opposed to things that were problems. Many times in a Lean environment there is a tendency to look for waste and bottle-necks and the focus becomes on the negative things that you can find. Obviously fixing them is a good thing but sometimes good things happen independently of fixing a problem and it is good to stop and take notice of those things from time to time.
Also that last point, focusing on hopes for the future, might seem at first glance to be redundant with question 4, what can be improved in the future. The subtle difference however is that once again, you want to find things to do that aren't a reaction to something bad. Improvements of course don't always imply "bad" however there are some things that a team should strive for that are completely unrelated to ongoing processes. This question opens the doors for new processes and new ideas that haven't been approached yet.
Black Holes
An entire section of the book is devoted to communicating with customers. While I personally would have liked to have seen a separate book about these issues, Karten chose to stuff all the information in one book! While reading this material on communicating with customers, I gleaned a great number of ideas and thoughts on how to improve relations with our customers.
Karten talks about the "Black Hole" effect wherein a request for something in certain organizations simply disappears forever, never to be heard from or seen again. She stresses that even if you can't do anything to satisfy a request, you owe it to the customer to at least communicate that much information to the customer.
Simply communicating something to the customer however is not enough. Response time is as critical as the information itself. Clearly defining up front, both for your organization and your customers, what your response times will be is crucial in maintaining their trust and building a strong relationship. For each type of request, be it a feature request, a bug report, or a request for support, an organization should decide on and define several response times. These include (but are not limited to) how long before you acknowledge the request, how long before you inform the customer of what actions you might take, and how much variation in a promised schedule before you inform the customer of the variation. Making sure that all employees and customers know and understand these communication deadlines up front will ensure open and honest communication between you and your customers.
Conclusion
When I first picked up this book, it fooled me. I assumed that any book that used a comic sans font in the title and had a cartoon illustration on the cover would be a light read and I would buzz through the book and be done by dinner. I was wrong, there is a lot of very good information in this book. I wasn't impressed by the author's style, especially the "research paper" feel to the book, however the material is all excellent and relevant and I would recommend it to anyone wishing to improve their organizations communication.