I Can Hear You Just Fine … But You’re Still Wrong

 

Some schools of Communications Management thought hold that a significant contributor to the conflicts in personal relationships, business, foreign affairs, etc. is simple misunderstandings. When transmitting, we are told to be careful about the words we choose, monitor body language, and spend energy to understand where the intended receivers of our transmission are coming from. Similarly, when acting as receivers, we’re taught to, again, understand the motives and feelings (!) of the transmitter(s), watch their body language, and take in not just the denotative meaning, but any connotations that may be transmitted as well.  All of which reminds me of my early days in programming.

After I Tied My Horse To The Hitching Post…

When I was a junior in High School, I took a semester of computer programming. Half of it was in BASIC, the other half in FORTRAN (if those names don’t mean anything to you, I don’t want to hear about it). The mainframe computer wasn’t located on campus – we had to create a stack of punched cards that were loaded into a “hopper,” which would scan the cards, one by one, and transmit them over the land line via a modem to the mainframe’s location. Needless to say, much could (and did) go wrong with just the transmission phase (see where I’m going with this?). Even if there were no typographical errors in the punched cards, some of the cards could become dog-eared if they had been sent more than once, and this would cause a fatal interrupt of the transmission phase. Only after the entire deck – remember, there was one card per line of instruction – was successfully transmitted would your program run. If there were errors in the code itself, the real task of debugging began.

Which brings us back to the art of far-flung communications within the far-flung project team. Using the analogy of my pre-historic programming days, the so-called communications experts would have us believe that the majority of times your code didn’t execute as planned, it was because of typos in the punched cards, or a problem with the card hopper. It rarely seems to enter their lexicon that the program being transmitted has errors in it, and that’s the reason it won’t execute.

What Are We Communicating, Exactly?

One of the basic precepts of one of my favorite targets, the risk managers, is that such a thing as “upside risk,” exists, and it is the exact same thing as opportunity. The first time I encountered this bizarre notion was when I was writing the Variance Threshold column for PMNetwork magazine, and I dared to reference the commonly-held definition of the word “risk.” E-mailed complaints poured in from the risk management community. When I responded with the Webster’s, Oxford English Dictionary, and Wikipedia definitions of the word “risk,” pointing out that nowhere in those references did anything positive appear, much less the nominal antonym “opportunity,” the RM-types merely cranked up their vitriol. It turns out that they had successfully lobbied to have the term “risk” include this “upside risk/opportunity” aspect in the glossary section of the (then) version of the PMBOK Guide®, and they weren’t about to allow a mere columnist to challenge their definition.

In other words, their program didn’t work, so they sought to obfuscate this fact by blaming the card-hopper. It was my pointing out the obvious fact that, previous to their finagling, the word “risk” had nothing but negative terms associated with it, which had set them off. In fact, the methods for managing opportunity have nothing at all to do with Monte Carlo simulations, Decision-Tree analysis, or any of the other RM techniques, and no valid proposal management system is predicated on those techniques. But, in order to support the assertion that RM covers all potential occurrences to a project, both negative and positive, the risk management-types simply had to attempt to change the plain meaning of a commonly-known word in order for them to maintain their invalid concepts.

I’m Good With New Stuff – Really!

I’m well aware that it’s considered a significant step forward in project management space to take advantage of improvements in telecommunications technology that allows cross-continental project team meetings to occur easily and cheaply. I have no problem with that. What does cause me heartburn are the attempts to change the denotative meanings of commonly-known words in order to buttress dubious project management precepts and force them into a more prominent position within the PM codex. Being able to conduct teleconferences across the globe means little if the participants’ knowledge of the definitions of the words and terms being used are being incrementally altered away from their original meanings.

In short, the communications fail here isn’t that I can’t hear you. I can hear the words you are using just fine. You’re still wrong in the way you risk management-types (and others of your ilk) are using them.

Lagniappe

I'm doing a webinar this Thursday, March 16, at 1:00 EDT, sponsored by ProjectManagement.com. It's on basic Game Theory, and I'm giving away five of my overpriced books (Amazon has them for around $100). Hope to hear from my readers then!