COMMUNICATION
YOU GOTTA KEEP ‘EM IN THE LOOP
The story of the race to see who would be the first person to stand at the South Pole at the beginning of the twentieth century is absolutely thrilling. Even if you have no interest in travel or history or exploration, I’d really recommend that get your hands on Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth.11
Huntford’s book describes the contest between the British explorer, Robert Scott, and the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, to be first at the South Pole. It’s a fascinating story, not least because it’s about two teams carrying out the same project and achieving drastically different results – one team succeeding in reaching the South Pole and getting back safely, the other failing.
One of the ways that the two expeditions were managed very differently was in the area of communication. Indeed it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that communication was probably the key reason why one expedition was so dramatically successful and the other such a complete catastrophe.
Amundsen had a simple plan which he wrote out and then shared with all his team. He did this early in the project – while they were still on their voyage from Norway to Antarctica. His colleagues could study the plan, get to know it, make suggestions, offer improvements.
Scott, by comparison, had a plan in his head, which he really didn’t share with anybody except on a need-to-know basis. His view seems to have been that since he was the leader, the plan was his – to build and to guard.
Scott changed the plan numerous times. One of the results of this was that his team were unclear about when exactly he would be returning from the South Pole. The result of this – a disastrous one, as it turned out – was that they were unsure if he was running late and whether a rescue expedition needed to be mounted. In the end, the rescue expedition was launched too late and Scott’s expedition ended in disaster.
There’s a message there for all of us.
If I asked you the question, ‘What constitutes a successful project?’ what would you say? ‘Hits the deadline’. ‘Comes in within the budget’. ‘Meets the requirements of the customer’.
Sure – these are all aspects of a successful project, but if you want it in two words, a successful project is ‘happy stakeholders’. To explain:
The stakeholders are the people who have a stake in the project. More precisely, they’re the individuals or groups of people who are affected by the project in some way. Every stakeholder has ‘win conditions’, that is, what the stakeholder would regard as the best possible outcome to the project. To get happy stakeholders you have to deliver the win conditions.
The key to doing this is communication.
Make sure you communicate at the beginning of the project
You have to:
- Find out who the stakeholders are.
- Ask them what their win conditions are. (Don’t assume that you know or that they’re the same for every stakeholder.)
- Get it in writing.
You may discover that not all win conditions are achievable. For example, for the budget you’re giving us, we’re not going to be able to deliver that particular win condition. Or, with this number of people on our team, that target date simply isn’t achievable. Then you need to communicate these facts to the stakeholders. You can’t tell them lies. You can’t commit to doing things you know aren’t possible.
Make sure you communicate throughout the project
Once you’ve made an agreement with the stakeholders about what is and is not going to be done, you need to keep them in the loop. You need to tell them how things are going. Are you making progress towards their win conditions? Are you making the progress you expected? If you are, that’s great. If not and there’s a bad surprise looming, you need to tell them. Then they can do something about it.
Maybe you know the Dilbert cartoons – about life in the office. I have a little book of such cartoons called Telling It Like It Isn’t.12 In one of them, they’re having a meeting – Dilbert, his boss and his colleagues.
The boss says, ‘Let’s go round the table and give an update on each of our projects’. It’s the start of every project status meeting you’ve ever been at.
Dilbert says, ‘My project is a pathetic series of poorly planned, near random acts’.
The boss then says, ‘It’s more or less customary to say that things are going fine’.
And it is more or less customary to say that things are going fine. You don’t want to fall into that trap. If there’s bad news, you’ve got to come out with your hands up. It won’t be easy but the alternative – waiting until they find out – is no alternative at all. Forewarned, the stakeholders can do something about it. If your objective is happy stakeholders, you can’t dump them in it.
A project could go badly wrong and you might still be able to recover happy stakeholders from the wreckage, if you handle them properly. Obviously they wouldn’t be whoopee-doo happy but you might be able to have them saying, ‘Well, that was pretty awful and we’d never want to do that again. But let’s learn from our mistakes now and push on’.
And the key to handling them properly is communication. We could all do a whole lot more and it wouldn’t hurt a bit.
Make sure you communicate the right thing
Finally, when you are communicating, whether face to face, by phone or by email or any other way – say what it is you want the other party to do. Too often – and this is particularly true of email – we’re just moving information around. How many times have you cc’d something to somebody? Why did you do that? What did you want them to do with the information you sent them? Should you, in fact, have cc’d them at all?
Say what it is you want.
Do you want them to take some action(s)? If so, then say what it is you want them to do.
If there’s nothing you want them to do other than be aware of the information, then say that – and say it early on, so that they realize it. This may well stop them wasting time on something that isn’t particularly high priority.
And if there’s nothing at all you want them to do, then why are you wasting time communicating with them anyway? You want to socialize with them? No problem. Go socialize – I’m all for socializing at work. But be clear to yourself that that’s what you’re doing.
In conclusion, there is an old story of two bricklayers who are asked what they are doing.
One says, ‘I’m building a wall’.
The second one says, ‘I’m building a cathedral’.
Communication is about everybody – bosses, colleagues, peers, your team, whoever is involved in the undertaking – seeing the big picture and their part in it.
This was perhaps the key way that Amundsen was very different from Scott.
A different view on communication can be found in a commencement speech by Maria Shriver.13 It’s called ‘The Power of the Pause’.
I’ll leave you with a short extract: