Over at SideraWorks we've been busy lately with trying to take the complexity of communicating what "Social Business" is and distill it down to more simple terms for the sake of clarity to our clients. If there's one thing my business partner Amber Naslund and I disagree over sometimes it is this exercise of distillation. From her point of view anything that can be stripped away for the goal of communicating more clearly and simply should be. She's right of course, it's just that it often goes against everything in my nature. The act of simplifying something necessarily means that you have to leave a lot on the cutting room floor. And those of you who've either met me in person, or taken the time over the years to read my writing know that I am not the most succinct person in the world. I *want* those cast-off snippets! It's the in-between bits that I love so much because they are nuanced. They seem absolutely critical to me. Eventually I succumb to the logic that you have to effectively 'summarize' something before diving into the details, but that activity and the book I'm currently reading* has me thinking about the power of nuance and the limitations of language.
Common Ground
When we talk about the 'soft' aspects of organizations, like corporate culture for example, language often falls short. We can communicate the gist of something, but typically it requires finding some common ground with the reader/listener. Some shared experience is generally the means by which true understanding takes place. Nuance is one of those things that lies just beneath the surface of language, we can intuit it, we can use analogies that people can more easily relate to, but describing a corporate culture is like trying to describe what love feels like. Culture is something that is felt, something that is experienced. Because of that the best we can really do is to describe outcomes of specific cultures. "The by-product of x type of culture is that y, and z occur".
Outcome Based Communications
Outcome based communications are great. They provide the incentive for change and they give you a yardstick to measure success, yet capturing the elusive descriptors that truly define the 'feeling' of a culture is an exercise in frustration and patience. We take for granted that that kind of nuance won't be communicated, we don't even expect it anymore, but I believe we should try harder. Traits are useful, and they are the most commonly used vehicle for this type of dialog but they are just another form of outcome based communications. It's like the Big 5 personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), we're describing how someone acts (an outcome of that personality) but not trying to capture what those personalities feel like.
"Why worry about even trying to communicate that level of nuance at all?" you might ask. A few reasons.
- It's difficult to implement effective change management if all parties don't truly grasp the experiential side of the desired culture. Those difficult to describe aspects that are so subtle you only catch them out of the corner of your eye, yet they are disproportionally felt.
- Culture initiatives can quickly dive headlong into a set of procedural 'hard' activities within an organization if the 'soft' aspects aren't both understood and given a high or higher priority. And when that happens the initiative *will* fail.
- Slight variations in these nuanced aspects can revolutionize an organization, foster innovation cycles, and help it evolve with its broader ecosystem of customers and partners. But if the nuanced aspects aren't well understood how can you introduce intelligent variation?
Variation Begets Nuance
In regards to variation and understanding the importance of nuance, you can think of how musical instruments have evolved. When is the last time you saw a harpsichord? The piano replaced it because it had something that the harpsichord did not…nuance. A note played on a harpsichord has one volume, period. The subtle variation of moving to padded hammers hitting the strings instead of being plucked as they are in a harpsichord allowed musicians to add nuance to their music. They could now increase or decrease the intensity that they pushed on a pianos keys and achieve variations in volume, thus adding nuances never before available. The guitar, unlike the piano, isn't bound to the rigid set of notes available (C, C#, D, etc). Why not? Because adding the variation of bending the string means they can add nuance and play the tones between the notes. Even the human voice has had this experience of introducing variation that leads to nuance. The microphone meant that instead of having to constantly project loudly to be heard in an audience the artist could now add subtlety and softly sung material and still have it projected clearly. In this same way businesses often see an initiative involving culture and view it as rigid set of processes to be done, instead of fostering an environment where subtle but important variations can be introduced to achieve the nuances desired.
Why The Hard Things Are Easier
'Hard' aspects of change are easy to measure, easy to check off of a list and say you've made progress. So we naturally gravitate towards them. 'Soft' aspects not so much. Without full buy in from the top, and the ability for everyone to comprehend and visualize what the desired change looks like, lower level managers are stuck with trying to explain what they are accomplishing. So they do what they think is safest and work on the 'hard' aspects, because they know that only saying things are 'feeling' better during a performance review will get them a ride on the express elevator out of the building.
In an ideal world we'd have immersion programs in organizations where the desired culture already exists and key team members would go and spend enough time there to experience it. But in the real world this doesn't happen, although to be fair I've run initiatives in organizations where we effectively built a startup within an enterprise, fostered the culture we wanted, and then used it as a seeding ground to spread into the larger enterprise. And while that's a great method, it's still not very common.
No Magic Bullet
So do I have a magic bullet for expressing the nuances of these kinds of initiatives so that they are fully grasped? I wish that were so. However, I do think it's important that we try, and an imperative that the key members understand why it's important to try. Do you have any methods that you've found successful in communicating highly nuanced 'soft' topics? I would love to hear about them in the comments below.
Cheers,
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