by David Haynes
If we don't change direction soon,
we'll end up where we're going.
–“Professor” Irwin Corey
It seems that every time we pick up a newspaper or a business journal these days, we read about change: too much change, too little change, too fast change, too slow change. The message seems as clear as mud: Whatever you’re doing, it's the wrong thing.
Faced with a seemingly endless stream of advice on how to change, and an equally endless trail of frustration as we demonstrate our organizational, and individual, inability to really change our habits, what do we do? What is it, exactly, that makes it so difficult for us to change our organizations in predictable and planned ways?
Beneath the surface of our difficulties in motivating others to embrace strategic change, there are really two questions we might ask ourselves.
- How do I know people “get” what I’m saying?
- Am I saying the “right” things – the things that will allow us to discover and leverage the skills and experiences of all of our employees?
We’ll take a stab at the first question here and come back to the second one in a later article.
What’s that tapping noise?
Elizabeth Newton, at the time a graduate student in psychology at Stanford, studied a simple game in which people were divided into two groups: tappers and listeners. Each tapper picked out a simple, well-known song (such as “Happy Birthday” or “The Star-Spangled Banner”) and tapped out the rhythm on a table to see if the listener could guess the song. (Try this yourself with a co-worker.)
Over the course of the experiment, 120 songs were tapped out, and only three of the 120 were correctly guessed. But the interesting part of the study was that, after seeing the song list, the tappers had incorrectly predicted that about 50 percent of the songs would be guessed correctly. Where was the disconnect?
Elizabeth Newton deduced that the tappers had one huge advantage – and one huge disability: they could hear the song in their heads. In fact, it was impossible for them not to hear the song as they tapped it. As a result, they had virtually no chance to hear what the listeners were hearing: just the tapping. Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath called this “the curse of knowledge.”
“I know exactly what I mean, why don’t you?” lies at the heart of many of our most intractable communication issues, but Newton’s research seems to say that even being clear and precise about what you want to say doesn’t guarantee that your “tapping” will be understood the way you intended. To make matters worse, in a business environment you have no easy way to ask your listeners, “What song did I just tap out?”
The value of an outside perspective
There may be no single answer to this dilemma, but there are some things that you can do to recognize the dissonance and get everyone humming the same song in the same key.
Most importantly, you have to make sure that you know what song you’re trying to share. Any lack of clarity or unnecessary complexity on your part only makes the translation more difficult. A candid conversation with a trusted advisor can help you iron out ambiguity in your message before you begin to share it with a larger audience. Three or four whys in a row can signal messages that aren’t well organized or don’t have a clear purpose.
An outside perspective is invaluable in trying to bridge the gap between tapper and listener – someone who isn’t burdened with the biases of either group. That perspective may come from someone outside your normal sphere of interaction, or it may come from someone outside of your company altogether.
More techniques for rooting out ambiguity
Encouraging “dumb” questions is another technique for finding clues to where misunderstanding may be lurking. We often start brainstorming sessions by reading quotes of “dumb things” said by very smart and important people; it puts us all in good company. Whenever someone starts a sentence with, “This may be dumb, but…”, we immediately pull out the Dumbest Things Ever Said and read a quotation or two to put things in a more humorous context.
Any time someone asks you a question trying to clarify something you said, you should regard it as a big red flag that says “dangerous misunderstanding ahead.” Stop and try to find the source of the question and adjust your message accordingly. Everyone in your organization should adopt this perspective and improve their communication skills and insights.
Because the world you live and work in is always changing, your communication is always changing too. It’s not really a question of learning to hear your tapping without the music, since this is impossible. Rather, the key insight is that you need to talk regularly and continuously with the people who can help you understand not what you’re saying, but what your employees are hearing.
About the author
David Haynes is a senior process improvement consultant with Wipfli’s manufacturing practice. His experience spans over 30 years in manufacturing, IT, and sales/marketing, helping improve and integrate processes in all aspects of business, from customer service to the shop floor. David can be reached at 952.548.3400 or dhaynes@wipfli.com.