Astromanager LLC

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Month: September 2010

  • There’s more than one set of reasons for not communicating well…

    There are some other topics I’ve been wanting to write about lately, but this one just keeps on giving…
    I received an anonymous private reply to my previous post here on communications and the recent lunch meeting suggesting there are often other reasons people don’t communicate with each other besides not having an efficient infrastructure for distributing information. In these cases, we can develop the finest new tools to make sending and accessing information as easy as possible, get everyone trained on how to use them and communicate more effectively, etc., and nothing will change. We must first look in the mirror and ask ourselves why aren’t we communicating. Some possible non-communication responses to that question might be:

    1) Information is power, a foundation for authority we don’t want to lose.

    2) We are afraid of conflict and aim to slip things past people in hopes that no one who might disagree notices.

    3) We are afraid someone will question our information and demand even more work from us, which we’d rather avoid.

    I’m sure there are countless others, but I’m also convinced that a careful analysis behind these reasons for purposefully not communicating will reveal that they are, in fact, flawed. In this day and age, authority vested in the ownership of privileged information is doomed to fail. People lose authority and respect when hidden information is inevitably later revealed. If people disagree with your information/decision, better to get that disagreement out at the start than when you’re trying to get people involved to implement a plan. If a single person constantly creates discord in response to new information, then you have a management issue of that person, not a reason to stop communicating. Yes, you may get asked more questions and have to do more work, but if the result is better information, or a better decision, isn’t that work worthwhile? Furthermore, if you open your information to others, you will just as likely get support back from people with offers to help who would not have known to do so otherwise.

    So, in addition to doing the experiments, and seeing what communication schemes might work better for us, I propose we need to first look seriously inward and see if there are other reasons we choose not to communicate. For if we don’t heed the latter, all the new tools and good intentions in the world will not fix the problem.

  • To fix a problem, first look in the mirror, define it, and own it

    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.

  • VWs in China and building relationships

    Combining my interests in German cars, international relations, and general management, I recently read the book, 1000 Days in Shanghai, by Martin Posth.  The book is about Volkswagen’s initial journey to become the first international automobile manufacturing partner in China.  I found several interesting themes in the book, particularly the patience and vision which the VW crew exhibited when things didn’t go as planned.  When factory workers appropriated factory supplies shipped in from Germany meant for the new joint venture factory and instead used them in their own Chinese car factory, for example, Posth philosophizes (and it was probably easier doing so years later in his book than it was at the time) that when the Chinese workers saw the potential success of their new company, these kinds of behaviors would stop.  Time after time, the Germans felt the Chinese violated the terms of their contract agreement while the Chinese felt the Germans weren’t living up to their word and doing what they could to improvise in a changing environment. Yet both side persevered and the VW/Audi story in China is a huge success.

    Then, in a recent airplane ride, I read a brief article in the in-flight magazine that was offering advice about doing business in China. The article echoed a theme I’ve also uncovered in working with the Japanese astronomy community:  the Japanese/Chinese business relation is built first on personal relationships (giri on / guanxi), then on the written agreement, whereas in the West/USA, the contract is the basis of the business relationships.  The people may change, but the contract remains. Our contracts are often very detailed and precisely worded.  Their contracts are broader and talk more about intentions and partnerships.  We use contracts to tell us what to do when conditions change. Our Eastern partners view changing conditions as natural reasons to renegotiate the contract.  Both approaches make sense, but both are fundamentally different and ripe for misunderstandings if these differences aren’t recognized up front.

    So, besides knowing a bit more to expect when partnering with some of our Eastern colleagues (something increasingly common these days), this situation reminds me of another simple, obvious, yet valuable point.  Any time you’re interacting with another person, whether from your own culture or one very different, it’s important to understand their environment; it’s important to state and understand each other’s expectations and assumptions.  Without this understanding, there would never be a Volkswagen in China. Without this understanding, it is much harder to reach true harmony and agreement in any of your human relations.


    When negotiating one international agreement, Scot remembers being frustrated while his negotiating partners complained they didn’t understand a certain passage of text. After failing at multiple attempts to figure out what wording was confusing and getting maybe just a little bit frustrated, Scot remembered that not everyone is as direct as Americans. What “we don’t understand” really meant was “we don’t like”. He could have spent all day going through the text word by word without addressing the real issue at all. With that bit understood, the problem was recognized and then fairly quickly dealt with and resolved. International negotiations are full of such fun opportunities to learn how others think.

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