In writing this blog, I have often found myself referring to the work of Peter Drucker. Much of his thinking still resonates strongly with me today, even though a lot of it originated more than 50 years ago.
And so it is with his insightful-as-ever comments on communication.
The context - communication from an informal coalitions perspective
As I've suggested in earlier posts (see Beyond Buzz- Lessons for leadership communication in organizational change, for example), communication is central to the way that change happens in organizations. Performance outcomes emerge from the myriad of conversations that take place everyday, both within the organization and beyond. These conversations form part of the formal, structured arrangements of the organization but, most importantly, they also arise spontaneously during informal interactions.
It is through the self-organizing interplay of these fragmented and dynamic networks of conversations that people make sense of what's going on and decide how to act. As the patterns and content of the conversations change, so does the organization.
At its core then, communication is a relational, participative and reflexive process of two (or more) people interacting with each other. It is not a linear activity, in which one person encodes a message and sends it to a recipient to be decoded ('noise willing') in a predictable, matter-of-fact sort of way.
From this perspective, the centre of gravity of leadership communication needs to shift from formal, structured message passing to joint sense making and relationship building (see Leadership communication in organizational change). This point is echoed strongly by Drucker in the "four fundamentals of communication" that he sets out in his book Technology, Management and Society. The chapter is based on a talk he originally gave in 1969, and the points he made are summarized below.
Communication is perception
Although there are hints of the sender-receiver model of communication in some of Drucker's language, he implicitly (and later explicitly) recognizes that communication is a relationship that requires mutual participation. His focus here is on what he calls the "percipient" of another's communication, rather than on the joint communication of people in interaction. But, that apart, the points he makes are equally valid. In particular:
- Perception is not logic, it is experience. By this he means that what one perceives is always part of a bigger picture - "a configuration", as he calls it - rather than a series of isolated specifics.
- The spoken language cannot be separated from gestures, tone of voice and the context set by, for example, the environment and the cultural backcloth. "In fact," he says, "without them, the spoken word has no meaning and cannot communicate."
- People can only perceive what they are capable of perceiving in the light of their experience: "There is no possibility of communication ... unless we first know what the recipient, the true communicator, can see and why."
Communication is expectations
- "We perceive, as a rule, what we expect to perceive. We see what we expect to see, and we hear largely what we expect to hear ... the unexpected is usually not received at all ... seen or heard but ignored ... mis-seen as the expected."
- The mind attempts to fit impressions and stimuli into a frame of expectations.
- Only if we seek to understand what others expect to hear, can we know whether communication "can utilize his expectations - and what they are - or whether there is a need for the 'shock of alienation' ..." to break this tendency for perception to continue in line with current expectations.
Communication is involvement
- Communication always makes demands on people, requiring them to "become somebody, do something, believe something."
- Communication is most powerful if it fits in to the recipient's aspirations, values and purposes.
- There is no communication, in any meaningful sense, unless the message appeals - at least partially - to the recipient's motivations and values.
Communication and information are different and largely opposite - yet interdependent
- Communication is perception whereas information is logic. That is, information is "purely formal and has no meaning."
- Communication is interpersonal whereas information is impersonal. Information becomes increasingly informative and more reliable the freer it is of emotions, values, expectations and perceptions.
- In communicating, we perceive a configuration of stimuli, whereas information is always specific. "Information is, above all, a principle of economy" - the fewer the data, the better the information.
- "An overload of information ... does not enrich, but impoverishes."
- Information presupposes communication. For information to be 'received' and used, there must be some prior agreement around meaning, that is, some communication.
- The more levels of meaning a communication has, and the less quantifiable it therefore is, the better it communicates.
- "Communications ... may not be dependent on information. Indeed, the most perfect communications may be purely shared experiences, without any logic whatever. Perception has primacy rather than information."
Communicative interaction
Sadly, the sender-receiver model still informs the bulk of 'internal communication' activity in organizations. Drucker's implicit recognition that communication is not like this - and that it is a mutual process of people in relationship - is made explicit in his final paragraph:
"There will be no communication ... if it is conceived as going from the 'I' to the 'thou'. Communication only works from one member of 'us' to another. Communications in organization - and this may be the true lesson of our communications failure and the true measure of our communications need - are not a means of organization. They are a mode of organization."
This view of communication sees it as a fundamental aspect of organization. As sitting at its core. It does not look at it simply as a way of dealing with other, notionally more important aspects of organization. As such, although Drucker talks in terms of "from-to" rather than "between", his comments sit four-square with those perspectives (such as informal coalitions), which see organizations as complex social (or responsive) processes.
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