Transcript Class 4 slides File

Communication
in Public
Organizations
MPA 632C
Class 4
Dr. Diane Hollems
Overview of Class Session
•Discussion about “How can we fix our managers?”
•“Learning to Live with Complexity” and “Embracing
Complexity” (these articles relate to decision making)
•Discussion on how dealing with complexity should be
interwoven into Problem Solving and Decision Making as
well as woven into crafting communication messages.
•Graber text chapter 4—Constructing Networks
•Draw your Network activity
•Garcia, chapter 6 –Goals, Strategies & Tactics Discussion led
by Claire
•Garcia, chapter 7—The Physicality of the Audience (more
on this in week 6) Discussion led by Jackie
•Powerful Presentations.
•Work with your team
How can we fix our manager(s)??
• If you supervise employees, get into one
group.
• Everyone else is the 2nd group.
How can we fix our manager(s)??
• Both groups will be given a list of the same
problems and challenges.
• Discuss in your groups for about 10 minutes.
• Then, group 2…..pose questions for group 1 to
answer.
• Group 1….give advice about solutions and
present “manager perspectives” to group 2.
Learning to Live with Complexity
• In just a short time, most businesses have gone
from complicated to complex: They contain
numerous diverse, interdependent parts. This
makes managers’ jobs more difficult.
• Two problems commonly faced by managers of
complex systems: unintended consequences and
difficulty making sense of a situation.
• It is very difficult, if not impossible, for an
individual decision maker to see an entire
complex system.
Learning to Live with Complexity
• Most executives believe they can take in and
make sense of more information than research
suggests they actually can. As a result, they often
act prematurely, making major decisions without
fully comprehending the likely consequences for
the system.
• Complex systems pose challenges in at least 3
areas of managerial activity: forecasting the
future, mitigating risks, and making tradeoffs.
• It would be foolhardy to base building codes [in
California] on the average earthquake when what
matters most is the big one.
Learning to Live with Complexity
• Divide data [used to make decisions] among 3
buckets: Lagging: data about what has already
happened; Current: data about where you stand
right now; and Leading: data about where things
could go and how the system might respond to a
range of possibilities.
• Sharing anecdotes about near misses and
rehearsing responses to a hypothesized negative
event can help focus attention on a possibly
significant future occurrence.
Learning to Live with Complexity
• Stories can give us great insights into complex
systems, partly because the storyteller’s reflections
are not restricted by the available data.
• Triangulation means attacking a problem from
various angles—using different methodologies,
making different assumptions, collecting different
data, or looking at the same data in different ways.
• Combining “soft” but flexible storytelling techniques
with “hard” but rigid quantitative analyses can be an
extremely powerful way to make sense of complex
systems.
Learning to Live with Complexity
• The idea isn’t to avoid making mistakes but to
make them cheaply and early, learning from them
and increasing your resilience as you go.
• Complex systems are organic, you need to make
sure your organization contains enough diverse
thinkers to deal with the changes and variations
that will inevitably occur.
Embracing Complexity
• We aggregate information poorly. Researchers
gave team members shared information about
the same 3 job candidates, but also gave each
member a unique piece of information about
one candidate. If team members shared all the
unique information, they would hire the best
candidate, but they selected a sub-optimum
person. Why? Because they chose to talk about
the shared information, but reserve the unique
information.
• Let’s discuss!
Embracing Complexity
• Cognitive diversity—intentionally putting
together different points of view that will
challenge one another—is essential for hiring
and for building teams.
• Leaders need to step back and let diverse views
surface.
• The key is to find smart people who think
differently.
• A good rule of thumb—no one can speak twice
until everyone has had a chance to speak once.
Embracing Complexity
• Create a set of decision rules, somewhere
between a half dozen and a dozen, that are
virtually immutable: These are the things the
organization stands for and that will guide your
decisions. Then you pretty much let people
decide on the fly in the field what they think
makes sense given what they see.
• Can you think of examples in your own
workplace?
Embracing Complexity
• In a complex adaptive system you can’t really
understand the whole system by simply looking
at its individual parts.
• One of the things that prevents us from dealing
effectively with complexity is that humans are
incredibly good at linking cause and effect—and
cause and effect are not comprehensible in that
kind of system.
Graber text chapter 4
• Networks most commonly are dictated by
functional needs and interpersonal chemistry.
• Information flow problems can often be
diminished or corrected through deliberate
network restructuring.
• There are various types of networks
(friendship, issue-related, etc.) Network
analysis focuses on patterns of relationships
among individuals.
• Let’s look at page 106, Figure 4-2.
Graber text chapter 4
• Even relatively minor variations in communication
network patterns can produce substantial
differences in information flows and in the
distribution of political (even internal political)
influence.
• Boundary spanners and gatekeepers. Those in
control of information become opinion leaders.
• Many gatekeeping decisions are made by people
who lack sufficient information to judge the
urgency of the messages.
• Unlike gatekeepers, liaisons or boundary spanners
are likely to be drawn from higher professional
levels.
Graber text chapter 4
• Four patterns of interaction among network
members have been identified in small groups:
the circle, wheel, chain and all-channel. Look at
Figure 4-2 and read the information on pg 106.
• Proponents of Exchange Theory argue that
control over information resources that are
valuable because others desire them is the
major source of power.
• Liaisons are likely to be drawn from higher
professional levels because decisions about
disseminating information to and from other
agencies or departments are difficult to
routinize.
Graber text chapter 4
• Boundary spanning occurs when duties of
various individuals cut across organizational
barriers. Boundary spanning networks may
arise from task forces created to solve
particular problems that overlap jurisdictional
borders.
• The media are important boundary spanners
because many governmental units, as well as
the general public, depend on media
monitoring and publicizing of governmental
actions.
Communication Networks
• Draw your communication network.
• Let’s discuss.
Garcia Chapter 6
Discussion led by Claire
Garcia, chapter 6
• Projecting thoughts forward is the key to
planning. As we project our thoughts forward,
we need to project our stakeholders’ thoughts
and likely reaction forward.
• All communication is a process of continuous
mutual adaptation, of give and take, of move
and countermove.
Garcia, chapter 6
• Rule of thumb for communicating bad news:
1.Tell it all.
2.Tell it fast.
3.Tell them what you’re doing about it.
4.Tell them when it’s over.
5.Get back to work.
• The very process of considering likely reactions
to proposed communications can reveal failures
of planning in the actual decision making (really
failures of strategy and execution).
Garcia, chapter 6
• If we do X, what will they do, and what will we
then need to do next?
• Shaping the communication agenda requires
considering more than what we may be
minimally required to say, but rather
identifying what we optimally should say in
order to maintain trust, confidence, and
loyalty.
• Communication strategy is subordinate to
organizational strategy. It can be thought of as
the art of winning in the marketplace and
securing trust and confidence.
Garcia, chapter 6
• Any communication goals or tactics conceived or
executed in the absence of clearly defined
[organizational] goals are likely to be ineffective.
• As a goal-oriented activity, all communication must be
directly supportive of a goal.
• The operational level is where we make choices…of
what to say, of when to say it, and how to say it.
• It is precisely at the operational level that many leaders
and leadership teams fall short. By failing to anticipate
and adapt, they end up speaking in ways that may
make them feel better, but aren’t going to move
stakeholders in the way they need them moved.
Garcia, chapter 6
• The tactical level is where communication actually
takes place.
• Most leaders default to the tactical as a first
resort.
• Unity of effort in the service of clearly defined
goals, with an operational framework that makes
smart choices about what to say, when, how and
to whom, is the key to effective leadership
communication.
• Communication planning serves as a leading
indicator that something is amiss, and the need to
explain something often calls attention to some
inconsistency in a leader’s thought process.
Garcia Chapter 7
Discussion led by Jackie
Garcia, chapter 7
• What Wharton Business School figured out is
that effective leaders need to be good at the
non-quantitative interpersonal skills.
• The higher one goes in a company, not-forprofit, or government agency, the more
success is measured in winning hearts and
minds rather than in the mastery of some
technical skill.
• [The author] has found a high correlation
between leaders seeing part of their work as
continually developing their communication
skills and their overall success.
Garcia, chapter 7
• A leader without either interest in or knowledge
of the persuasive art is a leader in appearance
only.
• Audience members ask…”What did you think of
him..or…her? They speak in the vocabulary of
personal judgments. They are assessing the
speaker as a whole, not merely the content.
• A speaker captures or loses the audience’s
attention in the first 15 seconds.
• Be steady…feet planted firmly.
• Use genuine gestures. Audiences retain more
when the speaker gestures.
Garcia, chapter 7
• Gestures help the speaker remember content.
• Increasing scientific consensus is emerging that
the part of the human brain that controls
gestures is connected to the part that controls
word choice.
• A speaker who habitually gestures is able to
speak extemporaneously far more effectively
than the speaker who does not.
• Effective speakers persistently make one-on-one
contact with many members of the audience,
regardless of the size of the audience.
Powerful Presentations
• Get into your Group Presentation
groups.
• Discuss the following:
1. What is a “presentation?”
2. What do you already know about
giving a “presentation?”
3. List the presentations you have
given.
Powerful Presentations
What have we learned from this exercise?
• There are “presentations” in all types of
settings,
• Giving a presentation can be
uncomfortable,
• Everyone has given some type of
presentation!
Powerful Presentations
Principles of great presentations were
developed by Aristotle…back in the
day!
• Logos—logical proof
• Ethos—appeals based on credibility
of the speaker
• Pathos—emotional appeals
Powerful Presentations
Logos— The logical aspect of making a
presentation consists of arguments made up
of evidence which end with a conclusion.
3 aspects of logos =
1. Recency –supporting arguments & evidence
must be as recent as possible.
2. Corroboration—evidence should be drawn
from numerous sources.
3. Fairness—how fair or biased are your
sources? Yourself?
Powerful Presentations
•
Pathos—Making an appeal to the audience’s
emotions.
• 3 aspects of pathos:
1. Appeal to physiological & safety needs.
2. Appeal to belonging and love needs.
3. Appeal to self-esteem and self-actualization
needs.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.
Powerful Presentations
• Ethos—How credible are you as a speaker?
--How believable are you apart from any
evidence or argument you make?
--What is it about you as a person that makes
others believe or not believe in you?
Credibility is a quality that a listener attributes
to a
speaker; it is a quality that the listener thinks
the
speaker possesses.
You are the message!
Powerful Presentations
Ethos has 3 major qualities:
1. Competence—how much knowledge and expertise the
speaker is thought to have.
2. Character—how does the audience perceive the
speaker’s moral character. Is the person perceived as
trustworthy?
3. Charisma—a combination of the speaker’s personality,
dynamism, and involvement.
Charisma is the ability to cause others to respond to you.
For the purposes of this course—ethos is the most
important for you to remember. Ethos can carry a
communication situation in the most fundamental sense.
Ethos is determined by the audience!
Work with your Groups
• We’ll spend the last part of the class working
in your groups.
• Please don’t leave until I have visited with
your group.
• Remember to run your final paper topic by
me.