I'm pretty sure I was the only reader of Roger Cohen's op-ed in the Monday New York Times who thought of Roger D'Aprix's book, Communicating Change.
Cohen argues that American cable networks should start offering us—and we should start watching—Al Jazeera English.
"... America can say to heck with an ungrateful world. It can mutter about third, even fourth, world wars. Therein lies a downward spiral. Or it can try to grasp the new, multinetworked world as it is. To this world Al Jazeera English offers a useful primer. ..."
D'Aprix argued more than 10 years ago in Communicating Change that communicators' first responsibility was to "turn all eyes outward," familiarizing employees with the realities of the marketplace—the competition, the customers, the economic forces at work on the organization.
Why? Two reasons, D'Aprix argued: To give employees a fighting chance of responding intelligently and helping the company weather the storm. And at the very least, to eliminate the surprise when the merger comes or the sell-off begins or the axe falls.
I think a lot of us have a sense that there's something fundamental that we're missing in our understanding of the Middle East, and we've had that sense for so long that it's starting to turn into: Maybe we'll never really know what's happening over there.
The same feeling in the workplace is translated to the old cartoon that shows two guys pushing levers around a spindle, around and around. The spindle disappears into the ceiling, and one of the guys says to the other dismally, "I think they got a merry-go-round up there."
Has anybody had decent success at turning all eyes outward? I'd love to hear how you did it.
Comments (1)
This is a very small scale example of it, but maybe it'll start things off. I work in the IT department as a communicator, and my IT companions come up with all kinds of ways to protect our systems from attacks or abuses of various sorts. But their methods often seem, from the regular old user's perspective, to be heavy-handed and restrictive. So it's my job to turn a perceived loss of freedom into a perceived opportunity to be responsible for communal good.
I do this through honest education. I describe why the action is being taken, and what threat it's in response to.
For example, we don't let employees access web-based email or instant messaging anymore. That was a real pain for parents who use IM to keep in touch with their kids after they get home from school. But by explaining how IM can bypass every filter we put in place when it comes to virus/worm protection, and then by further relating how to take steps to protect their home computers as well, it lessened the blow. Even if people didn't like the new restriction, they understood that it wasn't arbitrary, and the complaints were minimal.
I use the same technique for pretty much everything. When we increased the length and complexity of passwords, I explained why, and then gave tips on how to create memorable passwords that were also extremely secure. In the email I'm drafting today, I'll explain why we're going to have a number of systems down for several days, for those who would have been doing some work from home on the long holiday, and let staff know what the benefit will be after enduring this data blackout.
Once people get the big picture, I find that there's more encouragement than dismay from those affected. Plus our workforce becomes better educated all the time, and between IT's excellent work and what we've been teaching employees about how to protect yourself in the world of the web and its malicious spawn, we've had near zero incidents of intrusions into our computer systems. People WANT to be a part of a solution. They want information, and want to be treated as responsible adults. I use a lot of humor in my messages (goofy examples, off-color stuff sometimes), but I never send a message that doesn't acknowledge the intelligence and abilities of the people I contact.
So maybe that's a wee example of what you're talking about; an internal one, to a limited audience, but it works.
Posted by Joan | November 15, 2007 4:28 PM
Posted on November 15, 2007 16:28