There is an interesting discussion starting from a post I made on an internal work blog. So, I thought I’d repost a slightly edited version of it here.
I attended a rather disheartening informal lunchtime meeting recently at work. One of the issues that came up involved a recent communication lapse where one group of stakeholders was not informed about a decision made by another. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it is of course instructive to evaluate what happened after the fact and see what changes can be made to help prevent future repeats.
It took me a little while to realize, but what I found so disheartening from the meeting was an apparent lack of desire to really work together to learn to communicate better. What I saw were people establishing how they were victims of someone else’s poor communications and people looking for the solution that would get the other guys to behave. In that kind of environment, it is impossible to explore solutions. That didn’t prevent many people from proposing solutions, but fault was found with all of them and the meeting ended, I thought, with general bad feelings about the apparent inaction to correcting our problems. No proposed solution solved all the identified problems, so why try any of them?
I will grant that there is no single solution to improving communications. There are tools that can be used, procedures that can be changed, attitudes and actions that can be rewarded and condoned, but no single one of these is a cure-all (yes, even archived mailing lists). Some of them will even fail, or make things worse. But what bothered me the most at this meeting was that there was no desire or commitment to try these things at all. True – each attempt might not work and nothing we can do on its own will solve all our problems, but if we try something new and learn a bit about what works and what does not, about how we communicate and expect to be communicated with, then we gain and we are more likely to eventually arrive at a package of solutions which does work. If we are too busy blaming each other, we will never be open to exploring what each of us can do to create an environment where communications and information flow freely and easily.
This image represents the result of a lot of dedicated, cross-disciplinary work in a cooperation between HIA, Gemini, and ARC. It may not look like much, but it's one of the first full three-CCD images of our new CCDs from our new controller for GMOS-N. The one dark column is a known, separate problem we are also resolving. We expect to have these CCDs available for our community to use some time in 2011.
If we had a detector controller where data were not flowing well from one channel to the other, we’d be actively debugging, swapping boards, adding ground connections, hooking up the oscilloscope to see what’s really being transmitted, etc. Why do we apply this experimental approach to our technical problems, but not our cutural ones? Why do we involve people from different disciplines to debug a detector controller, but not our communications? Learning to take shared responsibility for our communications and our communication needs is a big project, but we have ways to handle big projects. Why aren’t we applying these ways and methods to one of the most important underlying issues affecting everyone here?
(Standard disclaimer: we are making progress and our problems are a lot better ones than at many other places; it’s just that we still have a ways to go….)
Here’s an addendum I made in addressing one posted comment on the internal site:
…there are plenty of unpleasant problems that are being addressed here, but not this one. Perhaps because it is larger than the others, perhaps because it involves people and not technology, perhaps because the solutions are unknown and success not assured. It’s almost as if (which in my experience usually means it is) we are trying to outsource the solution to these problems through training, consultants, working groups, before really taking the internal look in the mirror at honestly confronting what we are doing right and wrong and owning the problem ourselves. Only after we all make an honest self-appraisal, I suspect, can we gain much benefit from these outsourced solutions. This is not something “they” need to do, but something we all need to do.
Scot realizes that no matter how good things are, there is always a biggest problem. Keeping the absolute, as well as the relative size of a problem in mind is important to maintaining perspective.