Recently in Communication Category

This is not the first time I've used this blog as a venue for my confessions and it probably won't be my last.  Looking back over my blog as well as the presentations and training I deliver, I see a habit emerge: my use of metaphor.

In the beginning, I tried to justify it.  In describing an abstract concept or complicated process, it's beneficial to provide a simpler image for comparison.  I taught for five years in the classroom, so I know that relating new learning to one's existing knowledge is good practice.  Conversely, from my experiences in IT and academia, I know that if we overload an unsuspecting audience with too much jargon, learning might not occur.

Yes, I justified myself as a medicinal metaphor user, someone using metaphor to help me present my topics.  I compared extracting a ZIP file with several nested ZIPs to performing a Caesarian section. I compared client-side XSLT and different browsers to how my two children assemble puzzle pieces.  I compared lack of needs assessment to contraception and delivery of training to Paper, Scissors, Rock.

Dressed as "Dr. Nikki", I compared reviewing your scheduled backup to having a checkup and compared email etiquette to personal safety.  With three partners in crime (and in the unfortunate position of sharing the same session time as Jared Spool), I compared Web best practices to a fashion show.  (My part was "Less is More: How to Strip Down Your Content".)

I keep telling myself, I can quit anytime, but I know that's not true.  I'm in the planning stages of many projects like "Instant Trainer--Just Add Water!" with Katharine Strenko, "Oracle Calendar Etiquette: A Tea Party" with Shannon Malkowski, and "Self-Help: The Stuart Smalley Approach to Troubleshooting" (another "Dr. Nikki" presentation).

And that's not bad enough.  Using metaphor means that with each one you use, you need to make a more striking comparison to get the same effect next time.  You need to keep reinventing yourself, coming up with new highs (or lows).  If "stripping down content" in front of the Penn State Web Conference gets us an audience, what do we do next time that is just as good, yet original?  Ask the audience to strip?  (I'm not kidding, metaphorically speaking.  More on this in upcoming posts.)

Metaphor is a gateway literary device.  It leads to apostrophe, allusion, alliteration, and who-knows-what next? Iambic pentameter?  Personification?  Haiku?

But the real threat of metaphor is when we rely on it as a coping mechanism to negotiate organizational politics.  It's like the Star Trek episodes that tried to make a political statement to people who may not have been as receptive to an open conversation about controversial topics.  We dress our real feeling, motives, and intents in metaphor because we expect our audience will not be open to a direct discussion.

We may know the truths at work and want to reveal them, but use metaphor or subtlety to try be as honest as safely possible.  We may also have our own personal motives, so hidden in "for the good of the organization" rhetoric that we don't even realize the truth ourselves.

I've been reading Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work by Samuel A. Culbert, which talks about the rhetoric we use to advance personal agendas or to dance around someone else's.  When is speaking directly actually possible?  When is it not?

It's made me think about my use of language.  When am I facilitating understanding?  When am I impeding?  When am I enabling all of us (including myself) to hide personal agendas?  When am I just going for the cheap-attention-grabbing blogger version of a clipshow, disguised as a new post?

Rather than Chronicle HighEdWeb 2008 in minute-by-minute accounts, I thought I'd extract two themes relevant to me from my entire experience.  Today, in part to continue with my previous post comparing "Lost @ Penn State" to "Sesame Street Simple", my theme is simplicity.

I attended a variety of sessions across Applications & Standards; Marketing, Management, and Professional Development; Social Applications and Content; Technical: Propeller Hats Required; and Usability, Accessibility and Design.  One message that popped up across several of these, from presenters of all backgrounds, was the message that less is more.

Jeff Veen's Keynote, talked about the power of visualizing data, "to stop thinking about the numbers and see the patterns".  Data has real impact on us, not when we relay all the complexity of raw figures, but when we find a story we want to tell and "remove everything that isn't telling the story."  He talks about filtering our content for clarity.

In "Colors on the Web: Few Things, Great Results", Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel, Professor, University Anhembi Morumbi noted that "perfection is taking away".

In "Getting Them to The Table and Keeping Them There: Campus Web Redesigns", the presenters, Susan T. Evans and Joel W. Pattison of William and Mary, discussed how authors become attached to their content want to include everything noting that very few people know how to communicate effectively.  Their advice was to remind people who needed to improve an existing site was to keep reminding existing authors that this clutter is why users were critical of navigating the site in the first place.

Even one of the books recommended in "Get a Clue: Shift Happens" (presented by Gordy Pace, Director of IT Communications, The University of Montana) advocates simplicity.  "Made to Stick" suggests the following for making a message stick: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story.

These lessons in simplicity go beyond Web content, Web Design and data visualization. In any process that faces a customer, internal or external, your goal is to find your central message and remove everything that distracts from it.  Your work is done when there is nothing else you can take away.

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:

Those who know me as a multitasker, know I am reading four books right now:

• Dave Balter's Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II;
• Evan Rosen's Culture of Collaboration;
• David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous; and
  
• Bill Taylor and Polly LaBarre's Mavericks at Work.

It is the last of these that keeps drawing me back, and the one that I'd really like to talk about, even though everyone else will be talking about the third one on the list for our Brainstorming Bookclub.

Mavericks & the Use of Strategic Vocabulary

In Mavericks at Work's "What You Think Shapes How You Talk—Creating a Strategic Vocabulary", LaBarre and Taylor talk about how language itself can help create an innovative culture.  One example they cite is how Cranium does has it's own unique language, right down to official titles.  There is no C.F.O; Cranium has a "Professor Profit" instead.

Because of my former life as an English teacher, and my current time in IT, I am absolutely fascinated with how language shapes behavior.  You may have even read a blog post about it from time to time here.  We IT folk may withhold communication as a defense mechanism or use over-technical language to establish our status.  I find similar behavior, intentional or unintentional throughout academia.

True, some level of familiarity with or reference to the terminology or theory is necessary, but at times, heavy dependence on such Jargon Monoxide, can have adverse affects on certain audiences.  Additionally, if our language is a reflection of our thoughts and all we do is parrot the language of others, are we really innovating?

Where's Waldo? How to Care for Your Maverick

I came to University Libraries because I sensed from its behavior that it might foster a culture of mavericks.  And I am lucky to be in my department—I-Tech—with it's strategic vocabulary, a maverick within a maverick.  But what if your organization is not a maverick like Cranium (or I-Tech)?  What if your group is cautious, but always asking what you can do to catch up with the cool kids and innovators?  What if?

If you are not a maverick culture, you probably have only one or two mavericks that stand out like Where's Waldo in his stripey shirt among the shirt-sleeved types in your group.  You are probably hoping sooner or later your mavericks, or Waldos, will get the hint and figure or that they, and your organization would be better off if they found a workplace where they fit in better.

Sure, they might be happier at a place like Cranium (or I-Tech), and we might be happy to have them.  But, you're wrong about your organization being better off.  You'd be contributing to your on innovation brain-drain.  Look, you've already got plenty of shirt-sleeved people who've given you what you already do and know, and as the saying goes, "If you always do what you always did, then you always get what you've always got."

If you want real change, look to your mavericks, your Waldos, your renegades.  If they don't fit in the place you put them, make a special place or swat team or project team for them.  If you don't, somewhere more innovative will be happy to take them off your hands...

My Twitter pals and I got caught up in a semantic debate today on the differences between "pedagogy" and "andragogy". Some highlights:

bpanulla: So why does the learning design community around here use the term "pedagogy" instead of "andragogy"? Habit? Conscious choice? Philosophy?
agyorke (@bpanulla): Andragogy is used in the field of adult education, specifically in reference to Malcolm Knowles and his work.
DanaCK (@bpanulla): Pedagogy is a commonly accepted terminology for all age groups - in my field and in education as well. Androgogy=semantics.

This got me thinking about an article my colleague Alisha Swaggerty shared with me about a year ago (The Value of Diversity: Diversity involves more than celebrating differences) and several recent posts about invitations, including the Chris Stubbs post that started it all.

On Diversity

The diversity article talks about making assumptions about our students' diversity and missing things that are not on the surface.  Anong others, example included a 20-year-old student who, on the surface appeared to be a traditional student, but was an Iraq War veteran with life experiences that differed from traditional students.

Additonally we may have students who may have enrolled immediately after high school, but have the added responisibility of being a parent.  On the flip side, many people write off gaming as an activity for kids and young adults, when there are adult students who have grown up with games since the days of Pong.

On Invitations

Chris Stubbs' "No Invitation Required" was in response to many people wanting to be explicitly invited before they would participate in the Web 2.0 world.  I made the comment that sometimes defining your audience too well may be an anti-invitation; it could make others feel they are not welcome in to participate in such a niche group.

Up for Discussion: No Jargon Required

So here's where I stir the pot...

• Why are we still making such distinctions between adult learners and traditional learners? 
  
• Who is an adult learner and who is traditional learner? 
  
• Are we underserving our students by making assumptions and trying to fit them into neat little categories?  What other audiences do we underserve this way?
  
• Aren't these distinctions as arbitrary as racial/ethnic categories, and, frankly, just as off-putting to the people who fall outside standard definitions?
  
• How does implying a certain audience affect the level of engagement for your audience?  Does feeling the course, program, discussion, group, or whatever was defined for someone other than you make you feel less likely to participate?
• Are semantic alpha-geek argmuents like ours just Jargon Monoxide? Do they poison they environment and make you not even want to participate in my discussion here? Thus, proving my point that you can alienate people by defining one's audience too rigidly. ;)