The Performance Improvement Blog

Email and the Ladder of Inference

Email, as well as text messages, Tweets, and Facebook comments, are often misinterpreted. The words might be clear but the tone of the message is not understood. In fact, tone cannot be accurately communicated in these media. The brevity of the sender’s message and limited attention on the part of the receiver result in a kind of communication that is ripe for misconstrued emotion and intensity. This can cause receivers to feel anger, frustration, satisfaction, or joy when none of these feelings were the intent of the sender. The attitude of the sender is assumed, not actual.

With limited data and a bucketful of assumptions, the receiver of one of these messages often quickly climbs the “ladder of inference.” This is a concept first postulated by Chris Argyris that says that we climb up rungs of a mental ladder, going from observable data on the bottom rung to selectively attending to some of that data to attributing our own meaning to the selected data to making assumptions about the other people involved to taking action based on our assumptions about the other people when, in fact, we haven’t tested the accuracy of any of this thinking.

Of course, we can’t be continually checking out every observation and assumption we make. That would paralize us. These are probably adaptive skills that have evolved to help us function in our complex environments. But we can be aware of this thought process and how often we mentally run up that ladder when reading a terse email from a boss or somebody we supervise or when we get a surprising reaction to our messages. We need to be aware of the impact of our e-words on others and the unintentional impact e-words can have on us.

Dave Johnson, writing for CBS MoneyWatch, says this about the tone of email:

Be careful about your tone. It's hard to read tone in an email, which is why emoticons were invented. Be careful not to inject attitude or sarcasm into your replies, and give emails that you think have "an attitude" the benefit of the doubt. Also be really careful when trying to be funny -- it's easy to misinterpret humor in email. Bottom line: No matter how you feel about the people you're communicating with or the contents of the message, go out of your way to always be upbeat and polite.

Sarcasm is particularly difficult to convey in print. It relies on vocal intonation. For example, an email from boss to direct report that says, “don’t work too hard”, could be interpreted in a number of different ways. It could be sarcastic or it could be an admonition to relax. You can’t tell from the message.

Seth Godin offers excellent advice about email. He encourages us to ask ourselves some questions before sending. At least four of these are directly related to tone:

13. “Am I angry? (If so, save as draft and come back to the note in one hour).”

14. “Could I do this note better with a phone call?”

16. “Is there anything in this email I don't want the attorney general, the media or my boss seeing? (If so, hit delete).”

25. “Are there any :-) or other emoticons involved? (If so, reconsider).”

An article in the Boston Globe’s "Job Doc" column explains why phone and face-to-face communication are very different from email:

Tone matters. And email writers often underestimate the tone their writing takes on. When you talk on the phone with a person, they hear inflection and other clues that help transmit the tone of your words. When you speak face-to-face with a person, he has all the visual clues from your facial expressions and body language to help understand the tone of your words. What can be said sarcastically in person, and therefore is understood to be joking, can seem downright rude when just the words are seen on the screen.

Studies have shown that if you write something you think is positive in tone, the recipient will think it is neutral in tone. And when you write a message that you think is neutral in tone, the recipient takes it as negative in tone.

The difficult thing for you, as the writer, is that you don’t hear the tone in your words when you are writing or when you read the words back to yourself silently.

Alina Tugend, in her New York Times article titled, What to Think About Before You Hit ‘Send’, advises that, at times, we need to talk directly to others and not depend on e-words. She writes:

While it may seem particularly old-fashioned, I’ve found that sometimes it’s better to get off the computer and make a phone call. If e-mails are getting too complicated, if the tone seems to be degenerating, if they’re just not getting the job done, call or walk over to that colleague.

If you are even a slight bit worried that an email will be misunderstood, don’t send it. If you are reacting strongly (positive or negative) to what you perceive to be the tone of an email message you received, be aware that you might be climbing the ladder of inference. 

 

The Future of Work and Learning

I have been asked to speak to a group of 14 to 16 year olds about the importance of finishing high school and attending college. It’s one of my favorite topics. But as I thought about the talk I realized that I better say something about the future of work and why college has become more important than ever.  It’s fun but risky to speculate about the future of work and learning. The world is changing so fast. It’s hard to know what will happen next week, let alone 10 years from now.

As leaders, we should be thinking about the future, including whom we will be leading and what they will be doing in our organizations. We need to be prepared and we need to make sure our employees are prepared.  

A good place to start is with the tech industry because that industry will affect the nature of everyone’s work in the future. Chris Jablonski, in a ZDNet post titled, 5 trends driving the future of work, describes five major ways in which work is changing:

1. More independent workers (one estimate is 20 million by 2013) – These are the independent consultants, contract workers, free lancers, free agents, and temps who cycle in and out of organizations in a constant flow. More people want to work with more flexibility and choice in what they do and more companies want to have more flexibility and choice in who they hire.  I think we will see the rise of a permanent-temp labor force.
2. Working online – Workers will find jobs and do their work via email and Web sites and apps, possibly without ever setting foot inside their employers’ organizations. It’s outsourcing and it’s telecommuting and it’s working remotely; not as an exception, but rather as the principal mode of work.
3. Co-working – For cost reasons or social reasons or convenience, workers are choosing to share work space with people from other occupations and organizations. Sometimes they start out in business incubators and then grow into a more cooperative arrangement. Co-working is more about community than entrepreneurism, although it is some of both.
4. Lifelong learning – Workers need to be learning continually because of a world that is constantly changing.  Jobs are evolving and new jobs are being created in much shorter time frames than ever before. Whether one stays in the same job or moves to a new job, there will always be more to learn just to stay current. People will be working longer, much past the traditional retirement age, and doing that in new careers that require new knowledge and new skills.
5. Businesses that solve new problems – For example (from a list prepared by the World Future Society), we might need chef-farmers who can bridge the gap between farm and restaurant, or clone ranchers who can raise cloned animals, or drone dispatchers who can manage remote-controlled vehicles, or space junk haulers who can clear the skies of unwanted debris. It's fascinating to think about the possibilities.

To Jablonski’s list, I would add five more trends:

1. More small, entrepreneurial businesses – A desire for autonomy, control, and meaning, will drive many new workers (as well as baby-boomers) towards starting and growing their own businesses. New technologies and new consumer attitudes make these kinds of endeavors possible. However, there is a limit to this growth; not everyone is psychologically and financially equipped to take the risks associated with starting and managing a new business.
2. Knowledge workers needed for nearly every job – From assembly line workers to auto mechanics to farmers to truck drivers, jobs will require increasing sophistication in the management of information. Because they have the tools, workers today, especially in developed nations, are retrieving, storing, sorting, and making sense of vast amounts of information as a normal part of their jobs.
3. Changing jobs and careers frequently – Workers will no longer seek stability in their careers. It will become normal to move from job to job, “stop out” of the workforce from time to time, move in new directions and with different organizations, and form different kinds of work relationships with their primary employers. Change, not stability, will be the order of the day.
4. Just-in-time learning – New technology is connecting more people globally and bringing more information to our fingertips (literally) whenever and wherever we need to know something. Workers will become mobile learners and learning will be on-demand rather than learning according to HR’s schedule.
5. Solving complex and difficult global problems – Workers will be called on to solve, not just observe, the most intractable problems of our era: poverty; hunger; disease; global warming; energy conservation; violence; war and peace; and economic equality. We believe that we should be able to solve these problems and many young people are choosing to dedicate their careers to these issues.

Each of these 10 trends suggests that we need a workforce that is more informed, more able to integrate information from multiple disciplines, more able to interact effectively with diverse co-workers and business associates, and more skilled and knowledgeable about technology of all kinds. This is why I think a college education (two- or four-year degree) will be the “cost of admission” in the future, if it hasn’t become this already. To work for someone else or to work for yourself will require the breadth of knowledge, skills, and emotional intelligence that is developed in college.

What workforce trends do you see and how do you think a college education plays a role in the development of workers that will be needed in the future?

 

Active and Passive Learning in Organizations

Many of the typical methods of learning in the workplace make the learner a passive recipient of knowledge and skills. Employees are asked to read, watch, or listen to information being dispensed. The method might be entertaining, interactive, and of their own choosing, but fundamentally these methods are passive for the learner. Another approach is to make the learner an active creator of knowledge and skills. In this role, employees (as individuals, teams, or the organization as a whole) receive feedback about what they are doing and how they are doing it and, through individual and collective reflection, learn how to make themselves, their teams, and the enterprise more effective.

Jane Hart has provided us with an excellent list of “passive” ways in which people learn in their workplaces. She includes:

1. Company training (face-to-face workshops and e-learning)
2. Self-directed study of external courses (of their own choice)
3. Company documents (manual, policies, strategy documents etc)
4. Internal job aids (to support use of systems, processes and activities)
5. Working collaboratively within their team (sharing resources, ideas and experiences)
6. General conversations and/or meetings with people (formal or ad hoc)
7. External personal and professional networks and communities(including online social networks like Facebook and Twitter)
8. External blog and news feeds (reading subscribed resources)
9. Content curated from external sources (daily summaries of key articles, blog posts, etc)
10. Google search for Web resources (looking for and using external resources)

Although “active” methods might be implied by some of the items on Hart's list, I think “active” ways of learning should be made more explicit in our organizations. Otherwise, I fear they will continue to be overlooked even though for many individuals, teams, and organizations they are more powerful learning methods and more likely to result in organizational improvement than the “passive” methods.

Here are ten of these “active” ways of learning in organizations that I would add to Hart’s list:

1. Action learning (structured reflection on one’s own actions and experience)
2. Logs, diaries, and journals (recording reflections and learning as it occurs)
3. Simulation and debrief (group exercises to test assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes about processes and systems)
4. Shared visioning (whole organization identification of collective values and goals)
5. Large-scale events (whole organization system change)
6. Appreciative inquiry (identifying strengths of individuals, teams, and organizations)
7. Dialogue (conversation that seeks mutual understanding of beliefs and values)
8. Coaching (facilitating an individual’s self-awareness and performance improvement)
9. Learning histories (structured group reflection about the meaning of past events)
10. Benchmarking (comparing processes of one organization to those of another)

 

Organization Culture Change: Where There's a Will, There's a Way

Contrary to popular belief, organization culture can be changed, if only leaders put their minds to it. Some executives try to sidestep culture by arguing that the culture in their organizations can’t be changed. It is what it is. It's always been that way. This is short-sighted thinking. Culture is difficult to change but not impossible. Leaders have to show the way by challenging current values, basic assumptions, beliefs, expected behaviors, and norms.

Some executives try to sidestep culture by arguing that strategy is more important. This is a nonsensical argument. Derek Irvine talks about this in his blog post, “3 Lessons for Successful Company Culture Change”. You need both culture and strategy (in addition to resources, people, and the right external environment). Strategy is where you’re going and culture is how you’re going to get there. 

Leaders need to be willing and able to change culture. Robert Sternberg makes this point in a post he wrote about the difficulty universities have in going in a new direction. I think Sternberg’s concerns apply to all organizations. He writes:

Change is not always for the better, of course. But a college or university that is static will inevitably fall behind more dynamic, positively changing institutions. And like any institution that fails to compete, it is on the path to stagnation or death.  A dynamic institution will change and, if the change proves to be in the wrong direction, will redirect itself until it finds a sustainable path…Institutions can change — for the better — if they are able to change, believe they can change, want to change, are willing to appear to change, and have the courage actually to change.

A story about Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor Company, demonstrates how a leader who is willing and able can bring about intentional culture change, even in a large, old, manufacturing company. This story is recounted by Bryce G. Hoffman in his new book titled, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company.  When Mullaly arrived at Ford in 2006 there was an “ego-driven and backbiting culture among executives.” Mulally set out to change that culture and make it one in which honesty and openness were valued. A review of the book by Nancy F. Koehn describes the events this way:

Mark Fields, head of the Americas business, tested the new chief. Mr. Fields wondered: Did Mr. Mulally really want business plan review meetings to be forums where problems as well as achievements were discussed? If so, then the gatherings ran counter to Ford’s culture, in which formal meetings were “political theater,” according to Mr. Hoffman, and side discussions were “where deals were cut and truths too painful to put in a PowerPoint presentation were shared.”

Mr. Fields told colleagues in a business plan review meeting that he was delaying a product introduction. (The vehicle had a possible problem: a test diver had noticed a grinding noise coming from the suspension.) Mr. Fields and some others around the table thought that he might be fired, the book says. Instead, Mr. Mulally started clapping, praising Mr. Fields’s willingness to report the delay. Two weeks later, other executives’ PowerPoint slides were filled with examples of specific problems in their departments.

If an old-line manufacturing behemoth like the Ford Motor Company can change its culture, any organization can change. It takes the will and ability of leadership to confront fundamental values, beliefs, and behaviors that are assumed to be carved in stone but, starting at the top, can be rewritten to align with a strategy for success.