Michael McMaster wrote:
>Sending and receiving as a rather old-fashioned and mechanistic view of
>communication. It's a view that in my experience gets organisations into
>all kinds of trouble.
>
>A dialogue or a conversation occurs in (or emerges from) the interaction
>of two or more people and the idea of sender and receiver is neither
>technically accurate nor, in my opinion, a very powerful interpretation.
>
>Nothing is communicated directly to another. All go through
>interpretations processes of context, meaning, significance, content, etc.
I just wanted to say cheers from a student of Speech (spec. org.)
communication at the Penn. State University. Not only are these
mechanistic and conduit type metaphores insufficient, they get us into a
lot of trouble. It is interesting to study the dynamics of communication
between two people. Both begin to sum the other up based on prior
experience, apperance and other nonverbal cues, and their individual
needs. The attempts to communicate something meaningful and goal driven
occurs in a typically selfish mode. We each have needs to learn about
ourselves, our surroundings, our new/old acquaintences. We seek
confirmation of how we view ourselves in a social world and often see what
we want to see despite the fact that we often receive signals that
disconfirm our self-notions. A hundred other things go on in serial
fashion with feedback being but one mechanism of clarification and
interpretation.
If this is so interesting a study, an it is inherently to me, than
what about communications between multiple people working together as
componants in a system (which itself is self referential--that's a though
to tease the mind) who may or may not share common goals and certainly
have independent ones? Its mind boggling really. The attempt was made
years ago to perfect the measure of network analysis. It became so
complicated that the exactly was being mapped had to be refined over and
over again to keep the analysis from getting out of control. In the FINAL
analysis, we find that what we were measuring was full of holes. Peoples
relationships inside an organization are myriad in fashion, type, purpose,
etc.
To me, these concepts raise not only epistemelogical concerns for
the theorist but structural considerations for the practitioner as well.
Should we, for example, make our units so small that each
manager/facilitator has opportunity to better understand the relations
that form between each unit member and so that s/he can personally catalog
(mentally) the goals and advancement of each member. On the other hand,
maybe we should not have concerns over such things and make our work
units/departments very large and just let relationships and meaning
develope between members as part of the social process. This requires
that we give them a great deal of freedom in both social and task related
concerns--trusting that the group, if encouraged, will desire quality and
is capable of devising ways of obtaining it. This is not to say that no
medium arena for interaction/structure exits.
The development of spans of control stemmed from logistical
concerns over communication and was built on such a mechanistic (and/or
conduit) metephor at Michael mentioned. Modern organizations are between
the grindstone and the ax I think because we know better than to assume
that we can express ourselves clearly (eh hem) and have everyone who
SHOULD be concerned both pay attention and understand. However, the
structure of our organizations have not kept up to pace in many respects.
Maybe being free to learn will require that we shake of the shackles of
our archaic structures and anything else that sounds concrete.
Bret D. Nelson
Penn State University
bdn2@psu.edu
--bdn2@psu.edu (Bret D. Nelson)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>