Changeworksblog.com

EVERY ONE of today’s major industries had to emerge and evolve.  However, some have stopped growing.  Others have the shadow of decline looming menacingly.  Wherever growth is threatened, slowed or stopped it is not because the market is saturated.  Probably, it is because there has been a failure in customer relations and understanding: failure from the top.

   It is nigh on impossible to select a single major business category of today that did not go through a burgeoning era of being a so-called growth industry.  In each case, its assumed strength was attributed to apparently unchallenged superiority, with, it seemed, no feasible alternative available.  Yet one after another of such celebrated industries have retreated into decline.  More will follow, ad infinitum.

   In fact, there is no such thing as a growth industry.  Those that assume themselves to be riding an automatic growth stallion invariably fall off.  The history of the dying and dead shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.  It shows a disregard, or ignorance, of the need to mount markets and hold on tightly through innovation, change, choice and captured customer loyalty.

   Management, reaching out, must provide the customer-creating drive and customer-retention added value.  It must push this tightly focused awareness and action into every nook and cranny, exciting and stimulating colleagues each step of the way, rather than running a ‘bandwagon’ business.

   The organisation must think of itself not as one which produces goods or services, but as a conduit for developing customers – and doing those things that will make people want to continue to buy, remembering the fickleness in every marketplace.  Relationship management is all about making it easy for customers to stay, difficult to go.  The whole operation, top to bottom and back to the top, must be enthusiastically aware of the corporate style, direction, objectives, plus the needs of existing and potential customers.  If they do not know where they are going, they will never find the road to take them there. 

   Even with attitude and aptitude in place, there are dangers.  It is too easy to become obsessively responsive to fleeting customer whims and media-whipped fads; so often, there is a lack of risk-reduction market research and attitudinal surveying; sometimes, the back-office support provides insufficient ammunition for the front line troops; and within service industries in particular, there can be a tendency to reach ahead of the market, making offerings that are too complex or over sophisticated, trying to sell electronic shovels before people are familiar with using spades.

   Little in business is straightforward.  But to grow and sustain growth, managements must turn around to face their customers. 

   Professional marketing communications are crucial.  And yet saying so won’t make it so.  Products and services are selected by purchasers’ overall perceptions of the supplier, not merely by clever headlines, compelling imagery or high-sounding mission statements.  Successful marketing puts customers’ needs at the centre of every stage, every process, every activity of the business machine and its output – then presents to the outside world with unified, clear and consistent messages designed to persuade customers that they will be the beneficiaries.  (Out of sight is out of mind, is out of business.)

   This requires a totally integrated and rigorously implemented all-company approach, explained via skilled communications.  Nothing less will work.

OF COURSE you could have written that.  Everyone in business is expert at stringing words together on screen and paper, or so they think, if only they could find the time.  They know they can’t design the cover for the company’s sales brochure, update the logo, or build a new website.  These are mystical, creative vocations best left to experts.  But: writing?  Anybody can do that.

   Writing is the most undervalued of all communications skills.  It is the one to which least attention is paid – yet it is the most important.

   Believe it or not, professional writers have been trained.  Yes, they have latent talent.  In the case of yours truly, an English graduate, the preparation was in the hard-knocks arena of Fleet Street and then as a copywriter in exacting advertising agencies.  The process in the latter role would be to take a brief, research the subject and its objectives, come up with a string of headlines, narrow them down and then write the body copy.  The agency demand was for compression, precision, clarity, simplicity, rhythm and appropriate corporate style – grammatically potent, although not necessarily purist.

   This is starkly different from the writing that emerges from general business.  “I’d write it myself, but I’m far too busy,” and “Surely we have someone in-house who can write this, instead of paying for it?” are familiar-sounding remarks.  Undoubtedly, business managers spend chunks of their working days assembling words in the form of memos, reports and letters.  Secretly, they are likely to be proud of their prose and would be starkly horrified at any suggestion that their output might be written badly.  Nonetheless, to the professional eye, it is usually poor in terms of the assemblage of ideas and worse still in clarity of expression.

   Facets of writing professionally include being able to absorb – and to question – a brief, to define the most appropriate communications strategy, to create the concept, then to execute it in a tone which is compelling, precise, economical and true to the client’s corporate culture. 

   Always, the writer must transpose into the position of his or her readers, and to seem to be speaking their language.  Effective writing concentrates on those who buy the product or service, not those who make or sell it.

   This applies whether the writer is working on a total communications package or a single item.  Most certainly, it is not a task for part-timers, nor for those whose heads are filled with a plethora of other concerns.  It is not a job for the great untrained.

   You will not get through to an audience that is bored or restless.  Corporate communications programmes will never work at full power, nor deliver value for money, unless they are implemented by craftspeople who understand your corporate objectives and can help achieve them for you through the use of energetic, clear and digestible language.  Communications are not only about pretty pictures.

the chart widely used wrongly!

’93% of communication is non-verbal’.  How many times have you heard that one quoted on communication courses or by well dressed consultants? In the original researchers own words “Whenever I hear this misquote, I cringe!”

I said a silent ‘hoorah’ to myself yesterday when I heard Albert Mehrabian interviewed on Radio 4′s ‘More or Less’.  For every communication and many NLP courses that I have been on, the trainer has quoted that old ’93% of communication is non-verbal’ blarney. I have been telling everyone not to believe this for sometime now.  Of course, effective communication involves far more that just words – specifically tone of voice, pitch and quality of voice, facial expressions and other non-verbal language are critical in being understood.

But next time you are told that the words that you say only communicate 7% of the message that is understood, you now know that (officially) this is a misrepresentation of the original work and simply untrue.  Common sense tells us that this is not true: how can you possibly expect to instruct someone about how to bake a cake through non verbal communication? But we love to quote simple summaries of complex research and this asinine conclusion is exactly how our brains take a more complex and meaningful ‘deep structure’ and translate it into a ‘surface structure’ that is, at a best, a partial truth.

So, as we know in this deep to surface structure translation, there are deletions, generalisations and distortions: so what has been deleted in this study.  Well Albert Mehrabian’s study was purely done on single word communications to test the effective communication on positive, neutral or negative feelings.  For example, the speakers would say positive, neutral or negative words with a mixture of positive, neutral or negative tonalities and facial expressions. In this way, the study revealed that it was the vocal element (tonality etc) and the facial expressions that people believed (when it comes to communicating feelings), even if the words spoken completely contradicted the feeling expressed through vocal or facial expression. 

 So, let’s take the lesson from 41 years of believing half-truths: sometimes the complex cannot or should not be summarised into simple numbers and a memorable construct or we miss important learnings. 

Listen again to Prof Mehrabian on Radio 4 tomorrow at 8pm or on BBC iPlayer.

The February issue of Scientific American’s Mind magazine has an interesting news article about identity and behaviour. New research suggests that cloaking oneself in a new identity – even for only a few minutes – can disrupt long-established patterns of behaviour. To conduct the study, psychologists entered the online gaming world and developed new ‘avatar’ identities for volunteer ‘players’ and then got them to do maths tests. From a mix of male and female participants those given a female identity and who competed against two males performed worse and gave up quicker than did those assigned male identities and whose opponents were female.  However the subjects’ real genders did not affect their scores!

Whilst the news item does not elaborate the specifics of how the avatar roles were created or transferred to the volunteer subjects, we know that identity is made up of a number of important factors.  It is who we are, who we see ourselves to be; that is our abilities, beliefs we have about ourselves (ie females are rubbish at maths??!!), our values (a certain form of belief that is non contextual) and our thoughts, as well as our attitudes, emotions and the behaviours and strategies we have adopted for that identity (ie playing dumb to be a female ??!!). 

These are of course, exactly the components we study, deconstruct and reconstruct in experiential modeling (or you could call it experience reprocess engineering!). So this research supports what we find (and have found for the last 25 years) in modeling ability and the structure of experience using NLP.  (Why does it always take the psychologists so much time to catch up with NLP?  my opinion only .. and perhaps a little ‘blind’ at that!!). And what we have found is that the effect of identity and ability is not tied to a lifetime of experiences, and can therefore be deconstructed and taught to others.

In my second interview with David Gordon he talks about how modeling can be used by organisations to improve performance and help organisations become excellent. Drawing on examples of work done modeling technical skills for a patent office, modeling effective team work for a large oil company on an oil platform in the North Sea, and also a modeling study on a CEO to improve leadership communication.  Listen to the 5 min interview below.

Podcast

Changeworks Blog

Communication comes in two flavours: Communication and communication. Communication with big ‘C’ refers to the formal, planned communication programmes; the ‘big splash’, so to speak. By communication (small ‘c’) I am referring to the informal means of communicating with people: word of mouth, role models, mentoring, on the job training, one to one meetings etc. In organisations, we need both types of communication for communication to be powerful and most effective.

An interesting article in the New Scientist magazine, considers the transmission of communication through informal networks. Whilst this article puts an interesting slant on these ‘transmissions’ considering anything from moods (happiness, depression) to habit patterns and illnesses, what is interesting is the subconscious and rapid way that our peers influence our behaviour.

Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus. The fact that, seemingly, friends and peer groups are more influential than relatives or partners and spouses is even more pertinent to the transmission of communication at work. And gender is important, so the research claims: women observe and are influenced far more by other women and vice versa for men.

So what does this mean for organisational communication? There are two sides to this: the first that we need to recognise how powerful this transmission of ‘influence’ is in the organisation’s informal communication system. If employees are influenced more by those around them – in terms of attitudes, thoughts and behaviour – we need to know how to use this for positive influence in communication and change programmes. We also need to understand that this social influence can both hinder and help change communication programmes. And of course, what applies inside the organisation through informal social networks, applies even more powerfully outside the organisation. Think of the informal influence, negative or positive, that your salesmen, engineers and customer service staff have on your customers every day.

This influence is spread through a process of unconscious imitation – like the reflex action of our nervous system, this imitation by passes any conscious process and is performed highly efficiently by our brain and nervous system without any conscious interference or even awareness. Remember how infectious a smile is? I often walk around with a smile on my face, and I notice other people – complete strangers – smiling at me for no reason at all! I think they are nutters until i realise that they are simply and unconsciously copying me. This process of unconscious imitation – copying of behaviour – that we humans are so beautifully ‘wired up’ to do – facilitates in the ‘modeler’ (the person doing the copying) the experience of the emotion of the model. By copying that person’s smile with my body (facial expression, posture) i experience a ‘pale reflection’ of my model’s emotions. So by copying behaviours, I start to experience the attitudes, emotions and even thoughts of the person I am copying.

And what of the implication for organisational communications? By tapping into the ‘collective intelligence’ of social networks in the organisation we can ‘engineer’ the adoption and spread of new behaviour and cultural change. Viral Change (TM) offers a process for this, but it does require careful planning and facilitation (and an understanding of human behaviour) behind the scenes. Coupled with a strong ‘Communication’ programme, this can be a very powerful way to effect change and communication in organisations.

And what about applying this yourself? Whilst we might not be in complete conscious control of the process of social modelling, our brains take the shortcuts before we even know it; we can choose who we have around us who are likely to influence us. In 2009, do you want to be more happy or more depressed? More successful or more lazy? Whichever you prefer, think carefully about who you have around you – they might be more influential than you think!

Talk to us at Changeworks to find out how we use traditional and new media as well as behavioural change techniques to turn around performance and communication in organisations: info@changeworkscom.co.uk.