Over the course of a day, I constantly find myself wondering why things are the way they are or wishing that I could share my ideas on how I think things should/could be. The wealth of information and availability of social and collaboration environments on the internet typically provide me with eventual, if not immediate, satisfaction of these needs. In some cases, however, this satisfaction cannot be had, and that can be frustrating. While sometimes this is because the answers simply do not exist or that nobody is having a discussion on the topic, it is the times when the information/communication exists but is not shared that are the most frustrating. I tend to get a bad feeling about the parties involved in this exclusion.

The IT department I currently work in doesn’t provide a means to understand why things are the way they are. I’m a software developer. It is part of my nature to constantly question, to seek an understanding of how things work and why, and to look for ways to improve. There are several policies, processes and solutions in place in my organization, but I have a limited understanding why and a limited ability to question or participate (with the arguable exception of the subgroup I’m part of). Without any understanding of the needs driving the decision making behind these efforts, I have no inclination to endorse them, unless they are of clear benefit to me (not a common case). If I, an employee of the very organization driving the policy, can’t embrace it, I wonder what the perception is of our clients?

Jeff Kuhns observes that there are primarily three main causes of such resistance. Policies receive resistance because they are formulated with a:

– difficulty in thinking broadly.
- difficulty in thinking long term.
- the ambiguity of many words and phrases.

When reflecting on my own resistance to policy and mandated/provided solutions, it primarily falls into one or both of the top two categories. In particular, decisions generally seem to favor redundant, proprietary, vendor-driven solutions targeted at specific environments, put in place to solve problems I don’t necessarily have. Of course, this may not be the case at all, or may be driven by factors of which I am not aware. Without an exposure to the decision-making process, however, how can I do anything but remain skeptical?

Jeff continues on the importance of sharing in policy formulation:

The schools with the most success have developed a collaborative approach to discussing and resolving questions, and from that approach a sense of trust has developed among the people who must approve and follow policy. This often requires more time than some desire for any one policy but over time provides for a better and more efficient policy process.

I agree and would stress that the result is not only a more efficient policy process, but one that is more widely endorsed because more individuals have contributed to its success. People are more apt to participate when they are involved in the process. The cost of this involvement is far outweighed by the cost of resistance and ineffeciency when such involvement is not enabled and/or solicited.

There has been some discussion, or at least some acknowledgment, in my organization recently regarding communication barriers. The organization is large and consists of a hierarchy of groups, subgroups and small project teams, each focused on a particular business aspect. My guess is that this organizational structure is fairly typical. Over the past several years, the organization has had to research, implement, support and maintain an increasing number of solutions for our clients, resulting in a steady rise in complexity and workload.

Communication in the organization, from my perspective, is generally localized and private, existing in some of the following forms:

• Closed door conversations
• Direct emails
• Phone calls
• Meetings
• Announcements
• Wiki (not necessarily a forum for conversational-style communication, but that use has been suggested)

The result is a lack of awareness between teams and groups of what other groups are doing. What problems are they working on? What do they do? How can I help? Who can help me? This lack of awareness can be remedied by an effective means of communicating and sharing of processes and information internally and externally to groups at each level. Essentially, there is a need for increased organizational transparency.

I think there are four critical aspects to an effective communication medium for increasing transparency in an organization:

• Easy to use – The barrier to adoption must be minimal.
• Accessible – Users need to be able to participate and/or contribute freely.
• Archivable – Communications need to be archived for reference.
• Searchable – Quickly pinpointing specific communication is essential for usability.

In my participation in the Sakai community and exposure to various other open source projects, if have found that the e-mail discussion list (or mailing list) is an effective, arguably essential, method of communication between project participants and fulfills each of these aspects. While this may be driven by the distributed nature of the projects, I feel that such a solution can similarly be applied to an organization like mine. The distribution, in this case, is not geographical but organizational. Since every organization already uses email for communication to some extent, it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement a communication solution using mailing lists.

As staff become increasingly overwhelmed with project related activities and requirements, overhead resulting from inefficient communication needs to be eliminated. This overhead currently exists in the form of meetings and duplication of effort. How often do we spend time in meetings where the majority of the communication is irrelevant or inapplicable? Couldn’t this time be better spent elsewhere? Are we trying to solve a problem that another group has already solved?

Creating topical discussion lists of reasonable granularity, possibly in addition to project and team based lists, allows for communication to flow across channels on which any interested party can listen and contribute to the discussion. Establishing the best practice that all relevant project and/or process related discussion be held in these lists and encouraging staff to subscribe to lists of particular interest helps to establish a dialogue across group or project boundaries. This dialogue of shared knowledge and interest can, at least in my experience, create a feeling of camaraderie, enhance the shared knowledge/understanding of participating individuals, and, hopefully, increase overall communication efficiency throughout the organization.