Archive for the ‘Audience’ Category
Lou Gelfand: No More Complaints
How do you love an impossible task?
In darker moments I wonder what good lies in all the words produced, day after day—especially my own words. But if words serve only to remind or tell again the story of a bright spot someone saw, then maybe that is enough. Because bright spots shine a bit of hope.
Lou Gelfand was a bright spot for me.
I am a casual newspaper reader. I read the StarTribune and various news sources on-line. But the StarTribune has been my go-to, privileged (and sometimes angering) source for many years. Lou Gelfand was the long-suffering ombudsman/readers’ representative. For nearly 23 years he listened to complaints and reader’s rants and charges of bias (a countless number, surely). And then he calmly worked it out with words on paper.
Mr. Gelfand’s “If You Ran the Newspaper” columns were a must-read for me because he seemed fearless in taking colleagues and readers and the process itself to task. He aimed for resolution and made everyone mad as he did it. But there was something satisfying in his assessments. His words produced a sort of end-game where conflict and anger were addressed, if not always resolved.
Here’s Mike Meyers, former Strib reporter and friend of Gelfand, on the mood created by Mr. Gelfand’s assessments:
“He was a guy who often ate alone in the cafeteria because reporters were so damned thin-skinned,” Meyers said.
Mr. Gelfand was a kind of pivot point between audience and the communication machinery that was the daily newspaper. It was a no-win position from the beginning—an impossible assignment—which Mr. Gelfand moved forward with aplomb, sympathy and spirit.
His son called him “relentlessly fair” and Gelfand surveyed his own columns and found he split about evenly between backing the paper and the complaining readers.
Read Mr. Gelfand’s obituary here.
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Image Credit: via Frank T Zumbachs Mysterious World
Tell Me What You Know. Wait: Mime It Instead.
Nancy Dixon & Is there a best way to transfer knowledge?
Lecture is not effective.
As one who has lectured and been lectured unto, I’ll insist that listening is hard work when seated before a droning human. Sermons are the same species. Occasionally sermons are more spirited than lectures but both have roughly the same effect. Maybe there is a continuum for lecturing: previous generations felt ripped-off if the person in front did not speak at length and without interruption. For the generations I teach, 15 minutes is the absolute maximum before reengaging with questions or activities or just standing and moving chairs around the room.
Working alongside someone is amazingly effective at transferring knowledge. To have a common task with a colleague or mentor bypasses much of the resistance and passivity that comes with the classroom “listen-to-me-I’m-the-expert” experience. The focus is on the doing and learning takes care of itself.
Nancy Dixon in her Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), breaks the transfer of knowledge into manageable buckets as she shows how organizations do the work of helping teams and individuals learn. She starts by making a distinction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge: tacit knowledge is what we just sort of know. It’s the multiple bits of knowledge that would be difficult/impossible to write down. Explicit knowledge is written: it’s explicit in the sense that someone could pick it up, read it and know. Dixon cites five ways teams have successfully transferred what they know:
- Serial Transfer: team does a task and then does the same task again in a different location/venue. The team collects and discusses what they learned between, so each time they do the task a bit more efficiently.
- Near Transfer: Transferring knowledge from a source team to a receiving team doing a similar (routine) task.
- Far Transfer: Transferring tacit knowledge from a source team to a receiving team doing a non-routine task.
- Strategic Transfer: Knowledge transferred impacts an entire organization rather than just a team. Maybe that knowledge comes from the entire organization.
- Expert Transfer: Team facing problem beyond scope of its knowledge reaches out to an expert or expert team.
I like how Dixon positions the expert as a sort of higher-order transfer: where the audience is engaged and invested and eager for the solution. I also like Dixon’s discussion of knowledge as both dynamic (knowledge is less of a warehouse and more of a river) and also becoming more of a group phenomenon.
Working alongside learners and experts is a great benefit of day-to-day work, though we don’t always appreciate it.
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Op-Ed Wars: Putin on Obama. McCain on Putin. Rouhani on Conversation
Words are The Best Kind of War
As far as wars go, this one is easily sustainable. And we all have a vested interest in sustaining it, because when we’re talking (even combatively), we’re, well, talking.
Just talking. Not bombing. Not spying (well, OK, probably still spying). Not releasing nerve gas on civilians (well, OK. Some of us can talk and still gas/butcher/jail civilian populations). But talking directly to our various populations is at least different than cold-warring it. Talking is the opposite of the silent treatment.
Talking accomplishes stuff: McCain’s sharp criticism of Putin comes on the heels of Putin’s criticism of Obama’s Syria plan. And Obama’s Syrian plan floated out with words and met all sorts of ridicule and resistance and ire and…success (or at least the beginning of movement toward success).
What if more of our conflicts started in our enemies op ed pages, long before we took action?
What I like most about all this talk is the corollary comments that come out when McCain or Putin or Rouhani poke their sharp sticks in the eyes of the audience. The audience responds bringing up all sorts of truth and innuendo and implications that may apply or may not apply, but all of which allows us to think together. All this talk allows us to stay engaged. Engaged audiences are a good thing.
Keep talking Mr. Putin. Say on, Mr. McCain. Let’s grab a chai, Mr. Rouhani. You are right: “constructive dialogue” is a great win for everyone. Even if Iran is on a PR spree with their new reasonable-sounding president. Let’s jump on this bandwagon. We’ll need to move to the next step, of course: if Iran’s nuclear program is truly for fuel only, then allowing third-party inspections will be not big deal, right? Inspections could begin to put the rest of the world at ease about Iran’s seeming bomb-making proclivities. On the other hand, the US also needs to offer movement toward transparency: we’ve certainly hid plenty. Being a superpower should not make us bullies—we need to play by the same rules.
Yes. Let’s chat.
We may not believe everything each other says, but talking is a start.
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Image credit: Times of India
Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #9: Say it Out Loud To Get It
A pastor friend once wondered why the congregation didn’t know this certain fact he had mentioned in a sermon. My friend was under the notion that people listen closely to every word of a sermon. I am convinced people do listen—just not to every word.
I know this because I have taught college students and mistakenly thought that the wide-open eyes and direct eye contact meant they were listening. It took me until my first test to realize how mistaken I was. Direct eye contact is as much an act as appearing to type notes while facebooking friends. Students and all of us easily adopt the outward behaviors that allow us to escape miles away to play on the beach while the person in front persists in boring monologue.
But a conversation is a different environment than a lecture or sermon. Don’t let your conversation partner bore you with abstractions. Challenge them. Question. Ask. This is the very nature of conversation and it fits with how we understand anything: we need to try an idea on for size to sort out whether it fits us or the situation.
Trying an idea on for size looks like talking.
We must turn something over verbally to begin to understand it. It’s just how the will is connected to the brain—through the voicebox. Not exclusively, sometimes we get it without saying it or asking. And sometimes writing a note helps in understanding (that’s often how it works for me). But make peace that people need to respond in one way or another to truly begin to understand something.
This is part of the reason lectures can be so ineffective.
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Ownership Begets Engagement
Is it busy-work when you steer your car?
Still hard to beat the old Soviet work posters for sheer motivational energy
My client needs to keep operators engaged over an entire eight-hour shift. Steve explained how training goes: the first part of the shift passes with new operators entirely engaged. All the moving parts are fascinating and mesmerizing. But after the first three hours, or the first five hours, when the process seems trouble-free, boredom sets in. Nothing unusual happens. Operators start to look away.
It’s when the boredom sets in that danger starts to rise.
Despite redundant built-in safeguards and automated alarms, the process could easily suck in a digit (for instance) and then an arm and then well, it can quickly become a nasty business. Or more likely, a small knot escalates very swiftly to ruined product.
So: vigilance. But how to help employees stay engaged?
It turns out there are all sorts of small tasks required to run the machine. Routine checks performed on schedule, walking up and down the football-pitch sized machine can help ward off those nasty moments. Those nasty moments are not inevitable.
Keeping people engaged is a challenge because it is a much broader topic than just for operators at a manufacturing plant. We all deal with it.
When I teach I try to change things every 15 minutes. From discussion to exercise to small groups to video. “Let’s move our desks together for this next section,” I might say. And just getting up and moving is sufficient to bring to get a college student’s mind back from the Bahamas (if only for a moment).
There are certainly tricks that can seem to encourage engagement. But longer-term, I would argue that ownership is the best secret-sauce for building engagement. When the operator feels she owns the process, that it is hers, she watches very carefully. Same with any employee: let them own their process from inception to outcome, and they become very engaged. Take away their ownership with micro-managed short orders, and you lose the engagement. My most engaged students are those who understand how the assignments and class discussions mirror the real process outside of class. Their understanding and perspective on the small tasks helps them own the process.
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Image credit: via Copyranter
A Stage for Prince and a Grave for Tiny Tim: What Music Says About Minneapolis/St. Paul
Minnesota Theology of Place: Live Performance Matters in the Twin Cities
If one were rooting around trying to sort what values and practices make a place unique, music would be a good start. Jon Bream, music critic for the StarTribune recently wrote about why Minneapolis/St. Paul has become a home away from home for many rising musical stars. Bream cited four very different artists/bands (Dawes, Brandi Carlisle, Eric Hutchinson and JD McPherson) and noted how audience turn-out in the Twin Cities fuels these artists. Mr. Bream commented:
The key factors are open-minded audiences who love live music; a variety of venues that help artists build a career, and support from radio and other media.
The Current, of course, is a vocal apologist for the new music that grows outside the mainstream (and often, eventually, moves mainstream). I would argue the Cedar Cultural Center has been doing that same good work for years and years. Then there are the high profile, historied venues like First Avenue that have helped audiences and artists form connections. There are many more, of course.
A few days back I wondered aloud what a theology of place might look like for Minnesota. I cited all sorts of influences that would speak to that question. 
Developing a theology of place is to look at a community from a perspective unfamiliar to most of us. It is a perspective that begins with a commitment to belief in God and then wonders what God is doing in that place, among those people, through their history. It’s a deeply rooted sort of activity: digging down and back to find out who did what and asking what they thought when they did it. And then asking how what they did affected others. And also asking how their belief structure enabled the outcomes before us.
To be intensely local for a moment, what would a theology of place look like for the Twin Cities—just starting with music? Bream’s observation of how audiences love live music fits with the general interest in theater in the cities. Apart from the Guthrie, there are dozens of small theaters in the cities that are producing memorable performances. Does a population that welcomes new music and new artists and helps support dozens of very small theaters mean we like the notion of “live performance” and see it as a way to connect with each other? Maybe we like to see our meaning made right before us—because we know that an audience is part of the meaning making.
Maybe the notion of a fondness for live performance accounts for the 20,000 people who showed up in St. Paul’s Lowertown last weekend for Northern Spark. And maybe our love for live performance accounts for the bike and craft beer cultures that are all about connecting (this year’s Artcrank pulled in an overflowing crowd).
Not that we’re unique in these things—but there’s something happening. As a curious person and one with belief in God, I cannot help but wonder what it means—even as I rejoice in the vibrant commitment to connection.
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Bending HIPAA Toward Spontaneity—Just for the Health of It
What if our propensity for over-sharing helped us get healthy?
Writing for Fast Company, Jennifer Miller reported on a study that showed the amazing stickiness of Facebook status feeds over other literature. Miller queued up the notion as “mind-ready content,” which is a pithy way of getting at the heart of the study. It seems the immediacy and poor spelling and bad grammar we expect in status updates all have a way of indicating spontaneity. And one of the study experiments suggested:
…the remarkable memory for microblogs is also not due to their completeness or simply their topic, but may be a more general phenomenon of their being the largely spontaneous and natural emanations of the human mind. (Major memory for microblogs abstract: Mickes L, Darby RS, Hwe V, et al.)
We’ve been witnessing the rise of social media to help people lose weight, get exercise, eat right, among a sea of many other activities. It is the telling and the reading—all on a fairly spontaneous level—that has great persuasive powers. Not to belabor this point, but it is not just reading about others’ success that can motivate behavior change. It is when we ourselves record our progress (and lack thereof) (in public and not) that also motivates change. If you’ve ever recorded the calories you eat in a day or the money you spent in a day, you know how awareness jumps to high alert.
Can these facts about human motivation and memory be harnessed by physicians? Should healthcare have a social component…generally? Privacy on the web—always a moving target—would seem to have hit the immovable object of what the US considers protected health information: those rules the medical community follows to ensure medical records stay private. But encouraging patients to share what they are comfortable sharing, is there a possible positive health outcome in that? Maybe. Maybe not. Who is itching to read about their friend’s infection (sorry: bad word choice)? I have no desire to read colonoscopy stories. But on the other side, will we start to see spontaneous-ish declarations from our friend the corporate doctor/robot that encourage us toward healthful habits—based on our Facebook feeds?
One wonders.
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Image credit: Ben Giles via 2headedsnake
Ten Ways Fulfillment Mingles with Professional Writing (Shop Talk #4)
Life’s not about poetry. Or is it?
I’ve been posting in response to a query from an English student who wondered about finding fulfillment as a professional writer. How can we compare writing poems and short stories and novels to writing for companies or ad agencies or other firms or organizations seeking help to communicate? She asks a good question which we all struggle to answer all our lives. See a few responses here: Shop Talk: The Collision of Craft, Faith and Service
When I teach professional writing classes at Northwestern College, I like to invite Rich Bosshardt, who writes for a well-known local manufacturer, to talk with the class. Like many of us, Rich’s route to writing was circuitous: from mover of boxes to telemarketer to carpenter to chemical compounder to university research lab technician—plus about ten other jobs. Along the way he earned a Master’s in New Testament, so his thoughts about work and writing have a theological bent, which I appreciate. In response to my request, Rich rattled off ten things about writing for a living and offered to explicate one more:
- We could learn a lesson on career fulfillment from Joseph, the son of Jacob and the great administrator in Genesis.
- How do you work through when the honeymoon of being hired is over and passion for the work is long gone, but the bills keep coming?
- My career has been an unintentional path; I didn’t enjoy writing and knew nothing about technical writing until I was over 30 years old.
- Why shouldn’t we be passionate about what we do for a living? Whom would you rather hire—the passionate worker or the dispassionate one? You can raise the competence of a mediocre worker who is passionate about the work and therefore wants to improve, but the dispassionate worker? Let him or her go; you’re doing both of you a favor.
- Luther had great insights about one’s vocation, raising the legitimacy and importance of “common” work and sparking the Protestant work ethic.
- There is joy in doing work of the best quality that you can and in a manner that marks you as a person who has character, thereby earning the respect and admiration (stated or unstated) by others. Good (both competent and ethical) workers do eventually get noticed by those who work with them, and these good workers will find themselves happily employed.
- I thank God for the “little things” at work, e. g., that I’m working inside in a temperature-controlled environment on a frigid winter day or a hot, humid summer day.
- Relationships can make all the difference; being part of a caring and talented team can turn drudgery into joy because you enjoy the relationship regardless of the circumstances.
- There is a psychology to technical writing; good writers should think about at least two things: (1) how people will use the product that they are writing about; and (2) how people will interact with the instructions and illustrations that you create.
- “And God saw that it was very good.” There is a satisfaction (and fulfillment) in a job well done, no matter what job it is, great or small.
I like Rich’s list and think it gets at the tensions of creating versus making a living versus making meaning every day. Rich’s vocational path also reminds me of Parker Palmer’s wonderful “Let Your Life Speak,” which is all about taking the time to notice what you enjoy. Palmer’s book is one to own and read annually.
I’d like to hear more from Rich on Number 9: the psychology of technical writing.
What would you like to hear more about? What would you add or subtract?
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Image credit: 2headedsnake
Don’t Bother Me, I’m Busy Talking to Myself
Just because you have a budget doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about
I just finished with a client who refused to take direction.
What’s that? You think a consultant should not give direction to a client? You could not be more wrong. That’s exactly what a good consultant does. It’s just that a consultant’s direction doesn’t look like orders or demands. A consultant’s direction looks like alternatives to the usual and invisible way of doing things.
Sometimes we need help seeing what is right before us. We are soaked in teams that are steeped in detail that is loaded with the talk that just circulates between people in the know. This adds up to a set of increasingly narrow word choices that are interesting only to the team. Those words sound like gibberish to anyone on the outside.
My client continued to talk in the insider terms only they understood. And they would not be dissuaded. In the end, they approved copy that ensured no one outside their little circle would understand.
Which feels like failure to me.
This doesn’t happen often, but it’s a bummer when it does. And it makes me think again about how complicated communication is, and why it is so important to start talking earlier rather than later. And why it is critically important that we pull our head out of the huddle from time to time.
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conversation is an engine 