Once again, I'm going to pull a James Burke on my readership (or lack thereof, since I am a slacker-blogger), and pull together some theme from throughout my readings and experiences of late.
Let's start with Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. I've been wanting to read this book for some time and will be blogging much more about it in future.
But for now, this: Shirky notes that the complexity of any organization increases at a rate greater than the organization's size. And, that hierarchical organizational structures can reach a ceiling where they can no longer function efficiently as other groups because of the amount of administrative overhead (meetings, paperwork, etc.) involved with a large number managing people through so many layers of management on an org chart.
What that means for us is that for those of us working in a large organization there are challenges to getting things done, because the size of the organization itself creates layers of complexity that smaller groups do not have to contend with.
On top of that, add our natural inclination in higher education and IT to use buzzwords and jargon. Sometimes it's our isolation within a community of like-minded people that makes us forget how to communicate with the people we serve who may be outside our realm of experience. Experience can, after all, play tricks on us. Polly LaBarre cites an example of how Google and other companies tries to overcome the experience trap and "how to cultivate inexperience" on the Mavericks at Work blog.
Enter Bob Sutton's latest blog post. While most of us are familiar with the vagaries of jargon-heavy goals, Sutton talks about a Procter and Gamble CEO who attributes his success to making his message "Sesame Street Simple".
Why does he choose to "dumb down" his message? If your goal changes with the latest trend or if the language is too complex or vague for everyone in the organization to follow, it's easy for everyone (from managers on down) to "play along" and look like they are working towards it while accomplishing very little. If you can define your priorities in short, simple terms that easily translate to staff at all levels and across language barriers, it becomes starkly obvious who is not on board with the mission.
Sometimes it helps to have a fresh set of eyes question how we present things. When I have a project that needs to reach an audience, I typically go
to Robin Smail or Sylvia MacKinnon, people who have a talent in seeing
through the jargon and complexities we attach to our efforts.
What does Sesame Street Simple have to do with you? Good IT, good teaching/training, and good leadership are all about good communication. And good communication means getting your message to your audience. Find people brave enough to ask questions. Survey the projects that are within your control (and the ones outside of it, if you'd like). Are they Sesame Street Simple or would the people you serve feel like they have been dropped into a midseason plot of Lost? Feel free to post your comments, or examples of projects and processes that are Sesame Street Simple or just plain Lost below:
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