Dissemination
Increasingly my experience confirms that you cannot simply tell people information and it will be heard, let alone understood.
This wasn't my own revelation, not a lesson I learned the hard way. I studied marketing, it was handed to me on a platter by Al Ries and Jack Trout, who's book 'Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind' I would still say is better than actually doing a marketing degree, because that's the signal, and the rest of a marketing degree is noise.
But just as the Titans gave birth to the Gods of Olympus and were overtaken by them, it seems Marketing's struggling progenator - Psychology has also caught up, in the form of cognitive distortion and nueroscience even suggests that when confronted with information we don't want to believe blood drains from the parts of our brain necessary to comprehend it.
There's also the question of competence - communication as a process starts with the sender having some meaning in their mind, that they encode into a message (which requires competence) the message is sent to a recipient who has to decode the message into meaning in their own mind, and communication is successful only when there's a shared understanding of meaning.
If you think apple and you say 'shiny fruit that fits that can be carried in one hand' and the person hears this and thinks orange, then the communication has failed. There are fairly boring board games built around this concept.
But yes, there are mundane challenges in the way of anyone being understood ever, like how much knowledge to presume and so forth.
How to be understood is a skill, a process that few people learn and fewer apply. Partly because empiricism is rare, many of us walk around not really confirming whether people understand us, simply that they say what we need them to say.
Consider how many people believe that money doesn't buy happiness, and better yet, have come to understand that money can't buy them happiness?
More than zero, even though its pretty easy to recall a sad story involving a rich person - the current President of the United States is one very public example that disproves the rule.
There's a lot of people that don't want to believe that winning the lottery will in the long run leave them no happier (and probably no richer) than they are now. They don't want to believe it.
Less extremely, how many people want to hear that they are not good at their job?
Now consider the plight of a CEO, no need to break out the sarcastic violin just yet, this plight doesn't involve getting fired for exposing his penis. In fact there's no need to assume she has a penis.
She just wants to not only communicate, but disseminate a message about organisational values to the entire organisation.
In one relative sense, her task is easy as the CEO much easier than trying to disseminate a message through the organisation from the bottom of the hierarchy. She has the current of the river flowing for her.
But consider first that she needs to encode her message so it will be as meaningful to her CFO and to the receptionist on the front desk that greets members of the public.
So the message needs to be meaningful regardless of the spot an individual holds within the organization. So a lot of exposition, clarifying is gone, it is delegated to the decoding process. So she is railroaded into speaking generally.
This CEO has been sitting around thinking about the whole value chain, and reconciling it with the fact that they have 10,000 daily interactions with customers. She's thinking that consumers are far more likely to tell their friends about a negative experience with the company than they are to talk about a positive experience with the organisation and how if just 5% of customer interactions are handled poorly, it could be enough to seriously damage the business.
So she wants to give everyone the message to 'be fucking professional and courteous to customers, even if they are difficult.' but she can't encode the message that way - because she has to be consistent with the very professionalism she is trying to communicate.
So she might say something like 'Here at WidgetCorp we value professionalism, it's important to be professional at all times in every interaction with a customer. Not only the customers we engage with outside our organization but the internal customers between departments. Ultimately it's the customers that provide the money that constitutes our paychecks, and the impression we give them will determine how long we all will stay employed. So think about how you can apply professionalism in your role and especially in your interactions.'
This message is disseminated. Most won't even see it. It'll shoot right over the top of their heads. Some will look at it and perceive no real content. But the CEO makes the reception of this message her hobby horse, she makes sure that the managers that report to her pay attention and draw attention to the message in the weekly team briefings etc.
So let's say she gets 30% of the organization to eventually through around 6 repetitions to hear the message. Now what? Now the message has to contend against other pressures. What if an employees incentives are not aligned with this organizational value of professional conduct.
Firstly, they may be front line staff - they may, have a shitty job. They are not likely to think big picture and thus interpret how they interact with a customer as being something personal to them, rather than of consequence to the organization at large through the aggregate.
So this front line staff may consider their emotional states as roughly equal in consequence to the customers they deal with on a daily basis. It might be hard to understand that the last interaction with a customer should not predispose them towards the next customer (positively or negatively) but should instead have a standard professional disposition because they are performing for the company that employs them.
Higher up, the Manager of the IT department may not want to believe that the people from the sales and the accounts departments are in fact their customers rather than their equal, given that they hold equivalent titles, earn equivalent salaries etc. just the value chain doesn't go that way. IT is there to serve the needs of the other departments. Logistics is there to serve the sales department etc. This may come up against people's egos. They don't want to see themselves as servants but equals.
Throughout the organisation there will be people who don't think of themselves as individuals that have sold their time to the organisation in exchange for an income, but see the organisation as a means to achieving their personal ambitions. They will act in a self serving manner and disregard the performance they actually owe in exchange for their salary, for better or worse.
And some people will just be straight up too stupid to supply the necessary imagination to decode the message into their own conduct.
Others will resent the implication that they are anything less than professional currently and see the message as redundant even though they could improve with applied thought and effort.
In this regard disseminating a message from one to many, is a bit like using a pool cue to hit a pool cue to hit a pool cue to hit a pool cue to sink a ball in a designated pocket. A plausible but improbable undertaking, and at the very least hugely inefficient. I don't hold high hopes that the solution is technological because the hardware we are dealing with is the human brain and the human brain comes with a bunch of built in defense measures for preserving existing beliefs.
This is of course bad news if your belief is that problems can be solved by simply educating people with the facts through a speech or art-piece that goes viral.
This wasn't my own revelation, not a lesson I learned the hard way. I studied marketing, it was handed to me on a platter by Al Ries and Jack Trout, who's book 'Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind' I would still say is better than actually doing a marketing degree, because that's the signal, and the rest of a marketing degree is noise.
But just as the Titans gave birth to the Gods of Olympus and were overtaken by them, it seems Marketing's struggling progenator - Psychology has also caught up, in the form of cognitive distortion and nueroscience even suggests that when confronted with information we don't want to believe blood drains from the parts of our brain necessary to comprehend it.
There's also the question of competence - communication as a process starts with the sender having some meaning in their mind, that they encode into a message (which requires competence) the message is sent to a recipient who has to decode the message into meaning in their own mind, and communication is successful only when there's a shared understanding of meaning.
If you think apple and you say 'shiny fruit that fits that can be carried in one hand' and the person hears this and thinks orange, then the communication has failed. There are fairly boring board games built around this concept.
But yes, there are mundane challenges in the way of anyone being understood ever, like how much knowledge to presume and so forth.
How to be understood is a skill, a process that few people learn and fewer apply. Partly because empiricism is rare, many of us walk around not really confirming whether people understand us, simply that they say what we need them to say.
Consider how many people believe that money doesn't buy happiness, and better yet, have come to understand that money can't buy them happiness?
More than zero, even though its pretty easy to recall a sad story involving a rich person - the current President of the United States is one very public example that disproves the rule.
There's a lot of people that don't want to believe that winning the lottery will in the long run leave them no happier (and probably no richer) than they are now. They don't want to believe it.
Less extremely, how many people want to hear that they are not good at their job?
Now consider the plight of a CEO, no need to break out the sarcastic violin just yet, this plight doesn't involve getting fired for exposing his penis. In fact there's no need to assume she has a penis.
She just wants to not only communicate, but disseminate a message about organisational values to the entire organisation.
In one relative sense, her task is easy as the CEO much easier than trying to disseminate a message through the organisation from the bottom of the hierarchy. She has the current of the river flowing for her.
But consider first that she needs to encode her message so it will be as meaningful to her CFO and to the receptionist on the front desk that greets members of the public.
So the message needs to be meaningful regardless of the spot an individual holds within the organization. So a lot of exposition, clarifying is gone, it is delegated to the decoding process. So she is railroaded into speaking generally.
This CEO has been sitting around thinking about the whole value chain, and reconciling it with the fact that they have 10,000 daily interactions with customers. She's thinking that consumers are far more likely to tell their friends about a negative experience with the company than they are to talk about a positive experience with the organisation and how if just 5% of customer interactions are handled poorly, it could be enough to seriously damage the business.
So she wants to give everyone the message to 'be fucking professional and courteous to customers, even if they are difficult.' but she can't encode the message that way - because she has to be consistent with the very professionalism she is trying to communicate.
So she might say something like 'Here at WidgetCorp we value professionalism, it's important to be professional at all times in every interaction with a customer. Not only the customers we engage with outside our organization but the internal customers between departments. Ultimately it's the customers that provide the money that constitutes our paychecks, and the impression we give them will determine how long we all will stay employed. So think about how you can apply professionalism in your role and especially in your interactions.'
This message is disseminated. Most won't even see it. It'll shoot right over the top of their heads. Some will look at it and perceive no real content. But the CEO makes the reception of this message her hobby horse, she makes sure that the managers that report to her pay attention and draw attention to the message in the weekly team briefings etc.
So let's say she gets 30% of the organization to eventually through around 6 repetitions to hear the message. Now what? Now the message has to contend against other pressures. What if an employees incentives are not aligned with this organizational value of professional conduct.
Firstly, they may be front line staff - they may, have a shitty job. They are not likely to think big picture and thus interpret how they interact with a customer as being something personal to them, rather than of consequence to the organization at large through the aggregate.
So this front line staff may consider their emotional states as roughly equal in consequence to the customers they deal with on a daily basis. It might be hard to understand that the last interaction with a customer should not predispose them towards the next customer (positively or negatively) but should instead have a standard professional disposition because they are performing for the company that employs them.
Higher up, the Manager of the IT department may not want to believe that the people from the sales and the accounts departments are in fact their customers rather than their equal, given that they hold equivalent titles, earn equivalent salaries etc. just the value chain doesn't go that way. IT is there to serve the needs of the other departments. Logistics is there to serve the sales department etc. This may come up against people's egos. They don't want to see themselves as servants but equals.
Throughout the organisation there will be people who don't think of themselves as individuals that have sold their time to the organisation in exchange for an income, but see the organisation as a means to achieving their personal ambitions. They will act in a self serving manner and disregard the performance they actually owe in exchange for their salary, for better or worse.
And some people will just be straight up too stupid to supply the necessary imagination to decode the message into their own conduct.
Others will resent the implication that they are anything less than professional currently and see the message as redundant even though they could improve with applied thought and effort.
In this regard disseminating a message from one to many, is a bit like using a pool cue to hit a pool cue to hit a pool cue to hit a pool cue to sink a ball in a designated pocket. A plausible but improbable undertaking, and at the very least hugely inefficient. I don't hold high hopes that the solution is technological because the hardware we are dealing with is the human brain and the human brain comes with a bunch of built in defense measures for preserving existing beliefs.
This is of course bad news if your belief is that problems can be solved by simply educating people with the facts through a speech or art-piece that goes viral.
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