Wed, Mar 31, 2004
Talk: Cheap, but Necessary
#
JohnStafford had an interesting
response to my recent blog entry,
"Million
Dollar Dialog." John said, "The problem with dialogue is that talk
is cheap," and then proceeded to tell an anecdote about a series of
town hall meetings on education that led absolutely nowhere. (19U)
Before I respond, I want to share TomMunnecke's
thoughts,
which I liked a lot. Tom wrote: (19V)
It strikes me that we could have a lot more talk in many circumstances: (19W)
Physicians could take more time to communicate with their patients (and be given it in their schedules) (19X)
Parents could talk more with their children. (19Y)
Americans could talk more with Europeans, instead of letting their leaders or the media do the communicating for them. (19Z)
Muslims, Christians, and Jews could talk more. (1A0)
... (1A1)
Seems to me that we should be talking about the quality of the communication and the "rightness" of the action, not simply trying to pump up "action" at the expense of "talk." (1A2)
I agree with both John and Tom. Talk is cheap, but it's also
necessary. Talk leads to SharedUnderstanding, which is an absolute
prerequisite to effective collaboration. One of the biggest mistakes
people make when trying to collaborate is confusing talk with lack of
action. The two are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are highly
complementary. (1A3)
I've suggested in
other posts
that collaboration requires shared, bounded goals. Those goals
generally manifest themselves as action. However, action that does
not emerge from a SharedUnderstanding of ideas is not collaboration.
That doesn't mean it's not valuable, but in many cases, its
effectiveness is limited. Consider organizational mission statements.
Suppose a CEO spent a week writing a mission statement for his or her
company. Compare this to a CEO leading a six-month,
organization-wide, facilitated dialog for collectively developing a
mission statement. Even if the two statements were exactly the same,
the latter would be far more meaningful than the former. (1A4)
Action is important in two ways. First, it signifies progress -- the
achievement of shared, bounded goals. Second, action itself is a form
of communication that helps strengthen SharedUnderstanding. (1A5)
How do we facilitate action from talk? Representation, as John
suggests, is vital. You need to have the right set of people, people
who are capable and motivated. JayCross recently
wrote about
the ParetoPrinciple, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. 20
percent of a group is usually responsible for 80 percent of the work.
It only takes a small number of folks to get things done, but you need
to make sure you have the right people in the first place. (1A6)
Still, talk plays an important role here, because it gets ideas out
there. When you ThinkOutLoud, there's a possibility that someone who
is action-oriented will hear and will do something about it. One of
the explicit goals of our CollaborationCollaboratory is to capture the
good ideas that emerge from our dialog. Even if nobody in our
collaboratory decides to do anything about them, by capturing them and
making them accessible, we increase the likelihood that someone else
will. It's a phenomenon I've seen
time and
again. (1A7)
/collaboration |
Posted at 12:33am
EEK Speaks
A blog about collaboration, community-building, and the various
goings-on at Blue Oxen
Associates, with occasional digressions on food and other vital
matters.
Subscribe
Comments
Comments disabled until future notice. If you'd like to contact me, use my i-name (=eekim).