Sticking to What’s Known is Refreshing, and Responsible

Posted on April 26, 2008
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Congratulations to Lt. Stephanie Murdoch, a spokesperson for the U.S. Fifth Fleet after an incident in which a U.S. cargo vessel fired warning shots at two unidentified small boats that approached it Thursday in the Persian Gulf.

Rather than contribute to speculation by some U.S. defense officials that the boats were Iranian bent on harassment, Lt. Murdoch said, “We cannot speculate on who they are. We just don’t know. We have no proof of who they were.”

That’s risk communication at it’s best – not going beyond what’s known despite a setting in which others are apparently trying to fan tensions. Sticking to what’s known – and being careful to establish what’s known – should be cardinal principles of international discourse. And other forms of communication as well.

Rev. Wright Heard, and Applauded, ‘In Context’

Posted on April 25, 2008
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I wrote in my last blog item about the importance of context in organizational meetings. Tonight Bill Moyers and the Rev. Jeremiam Wright provided a far more significant example of the importance of context – of being willing to listen as people describe the experience of others, really listen.

Bill Moyers gave Rev. Wright his entire hour, unusual on the Bill Moyers Journal, to explain the context in which he preached the sermons from which seemingly incendiary “sound bites” were taken to hound the presidential candidacy of Senator Barack Obama. It was, as it turned out, an ages-long context of angry and oppressed people seeking justice, a Biblical context. The excerpts seemed abrasive, and in themselves they were, but in the deeper context of a people’s history, a people trying to fathom a God of peace and justice, they fit well. They were in context.

Here’s another sound bite: Nobody’s perfect, not black people, white people, nor the United States of America, which is an assemblage of us all, led sometimes by misguided leaders.

Rev. Wright came across to me as a gentle but keen-eyed man, faithful to the experience of his people and tremendously knowledgeable of the scriptures that have prompted his ministry. His personal context is an admirable one, and he’s been faithful to it. His works have been good, his church has grown and his city, Chicago, and now, hopefully, his nation, after hearing him, is stronger for his ministry.

“The window through which you’re looking is your hermeneutic,” the Rev. Wright said. For a long time, he has been looking and calling people to faithfulness and reform, as the Biblical prophets and Jesus did. An admirable ministry, indeed.

—–

Clearly the Rev. Wright is not being helpful to Barack Obama’s candidacy. He is feisty, even glib and reckless, at some points, as he demonstrated in his appearance at the National Press Club – http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp. But Senator Obama is not being helpful to his own cause in, most recently, seeming surprised at Jeremiah Wright’s feisty style. Too much is being made of a situation in which many Americans are uninformed – the black church and black liberation theology – and therefor open to misunderstanding and distortion. For Barack Obama to fall in with this cacophony is doing him little credit. Rev. Wright says he and his church are basically about reconciliation; that’s what we should all be about.

It may be that in the morass of race and righteousness we are all caught up in, it’s still not possible for somebody like Obama to be politically successful. Sad, truly.

Context Counts (a Lot)

Posted on April 18, 2008
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Instead of being pegged almost entirely to news stories, I’d like this blog to offer some items on general communication principles – organizational communication and public relations principles. That might move me into a community of practice in these two areas, which would be great.

Here’s a starter principle – The Importance of Context. Context became a big deal for me (again) at a meeting this morning at which I was a new member. No effort was made to provide anyone at the meeting with a sense of why we were there or what we wanted to accomplish, beyond a dutiful agenda with a few bullet items (labels). It was assumed we knew. A mistake and a missed opportunity.

What would an initial focus on context have included? Well, the leader should have been mindful of:

• There should be a distinct start to the meeting, not just a lapse in initial conversation around the table. The meeting is the next context.

• What is this place about? What is this meeting about? He should have made some explicit statement of that. (How many others at the meeting were new? I don’t know – none of us were introduced as new.)

• The leader should be mindful of: “What do I want to accomplish at this meeting?” Just get through the agenda and get it over? No. What’s our larger, basic purpose, our vision (indeed)? Worth restating every time. The actual purpose may have been established several meetings ago, at the start-up meeting, in fact, however far back that might have occurred. This is, simply (or maybe not so simply), keeping on track, hewing to the vision and purpose.

• What’s the agenda? Not in terms of bullet items, but of what we want to accomplish (as bullet items maybe)?

• The leader should ask himself/herself: “What do I want to remind folks of?”

• And, “What do I want to hand out? Have them take away?”

• And, “How do I elicit input?” Ask for it and prompt it, if necessary. Find out what’s on peoples’ minds, get a sense of why they came.

• In wrapping up, preserve the context. “What have we decided? What happens next (to advance those items)?”

• Finally, and this should be first, actually – “Who are these people? Have them introduce themselves, their business or department, and their reason/interest for being at the meeting. Don’t assume everyone knows everyone. Don’t assume anything, in fact.

Paying this sort of explicit attention to context might actually get something important accomplished and advance the purpose/vision of the convening organization. Context counts a lot!

Couldn’t American’s Groundings Have Been Avoided? A Question for the FAA and the Airline Together

Posted on April 10, 2008
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Tens of thousands of stranded American Airlines passengers can certainly be pardoned for wondering in the most exasperated terms what caused the airline safety system to crash this week.

The rest of us, whether we fly regularly or only occasionally, are justifiably curious about how government, in the person(s) of the Federal Aviation Administration, and industry, as represented by stumbling American, allowed the inspection situation to get to the point it did. Certainly, here was an opportunity for early and effective communication on behalf of (as it turned out) more than 100,000 passengers who were booked on the temporarily grounded MD-80 jets.

The FAA can say all it wants to that American was given every opportunity on the safety procedure in question, but that doesn’t excuse a government failure to maintain safety without marooning all those folks. It’s another example of the kind of situation that gives government, sadly, a bad name.

American says its mechanics “are absolutely not to blame.” And Americans’ mechanics say the compliance rules kept changing on them. We have no idea how these rules are in fact developed, but couldn’t a systematic procedure for working effectively together on compliance be developed by the FAA and the airlines? Nobody wants planes to crash.

“These airworthiness directives are not black and white,” says Gerard Arpey, American’s chairman and chief executive. “This is 38 pages of airworthiness directive that has been interpreted by our engineering staff and ultimately implemented by our mechanics.” Sounds like another important interpreter, the FAA, wasn’t around – and should have been.

In nuclear power plants, inspectors for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, dialogue with plant operators and technicians. That system may not be foolproof, none perhaps are. But it seems a heck of a lot better than what was being practiced by American and the FAA in determining whether bundled wiring was secured properly in MD-80 wheel wells.

Slowing Down Google (It’s Really Necessary)

Posted on April 6, 2008
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Thoughts that occurred on reading William J. Barrett’s highly stimulating book, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (1967):

Are we talking about meaning in terms of actions that can be described, or ultimate meaning that can be felt, but not readily talked about? The latter meaning, unspoken but available for distilling, is certainly the higher form.

Forty years after Barrett’s book appeared, we have a greatly extended reach in accessing information (computers, the Internet), but an obligation as well. Now we can go to Google to see if Barrett is still living – he died in 1992 – and, in surfing, be taken to The Philosophers Magazine site, where you find, among many others, articles on Hobbesian America and Theology for Physicists. You have the freedom and the technology to find these sources – a great possiibility for insight. But the technology provides only the opportunity for learning and integration. It delivers these new sources, but doesn’t unfold them. We have to do that.

Fulfilling the technology requires an act of will and intention – slowing down, rather than speeding up, a trenchant timeout. Technology, we find, requires deliberation before integration and advancing. The cycle becomes: Discovery (technology-assisted), Intervening (setting aside), Reading/Annotating/Abstracting, Saving and Mulling. Note-taking becomes a higher form of activity than surfing.

Only after integrating for learning and recall do we have an addition to our personal store of knowledge, not simply an enhanced computer supply (which can be limitness).

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