Clarity kills Communication.

Ever completed a conversation with your boss on the expected deliverables for the next month and come out feeling sure and confident? Maybe a lot of times. Ever been shocked during the final review that the boss suddenly turned skunk and is asking for something else than what was discussed? Maybe a lot lot more times. Lets not go the 'Life sux', 'The boss should die', path already. You may have just been hit by the AFC virus. Assumed False Clarity.
A lot of times the mind understands certain words or sentences in a manner that may be different from the intent of the speaker. Sometimes it may be due to cultural and communication style differences, but mostly, with everyone going for the Global Business Model type of business, the reasons are due to language and dialectic differences.
Let me give you an example. If an American asks the question, 'Are you planning on approaching this project through Bob? in all possibility an Indian may respond, "no, I will be working on the project." This conversation needs further clarification as it could mean one or more of the following things:
1. No. I will work on it alone
2. No. Bob will not be working for the project
3. No. I will not be contacting Bob.
4. No. Bob wont be required for this project.
5. No. I will consult Bob, but the project is my sole responsibility.

If the American assumes clarity thinking its 1 instead of 5, he will feel irritated with the result. This could lead to arguments, discontent and sometimes even resignation of skilled people.

Assumed False Clarity can be avoided by the following steps:
1. Repeat decisions to check if everyone is on the same page
2. Don't wait for the last day to submit work. Have periodical reviews before
3. After a verbal conversation which involves key business decisions, send a mail with the conversation documented, to check if information is accurate.

Conducting business is difficult not just because of tough customers, or bad economies. Just workplace dynamics could be a huge issue. Small corrective and preventive measures could go a long way.

Do logic and humans go together?

Among all life forms, although man has been blessed with a higher intelligence, he almost always fails to take inputs from nature.
It must be the primordial need for control that pushes him to choose his thinking over messages from nature. Result? Logic is always sought as better to the heart. Maybe history has some answers to this choice.
From Socrates to statisticians &scientists across the world the created image for repeatability &reproduceability is data based decisions. Considering the only other competition to this was the paranormal/ alien groups, we know who won. There have been charlatans on both sides; the success of science however, was that once a product was launched it worked the same way for all without a bias. For the latter, the service effect &experience varied from person to person.
Science made success. The areas of the heart kept moving into the background more and more.Today, it is fashionable for people to claim they are left brained and have nothing to do with the heart. With social media it is common to see certain alpha males pimping links from certain sites that claim scientific finds, technology findings &statistical breaking news. They dont really stop at this, they also like to post -ve links on all things right brained. One would think its a war.
Every puffed chest seems to swell as the number of followers in their social groups increase to the assumed mask of knowledge of these people. Nevermind that NASA changes its mind about its findings, on the speed of light or the age of the sunray that travels to the world. Never mind that HBR decides to promote one perspective this season and the contrary one the next.These are looked at with great interest and many a heart goes after whether GE will still be an employer of choice or whether IBM will go from smarter planet to predicting crime.
Humans and all related components however are only right brained. The # of days to make a baby, rains, rate of life growth, experience of the sun, weather, love, disease and recuperation are all occurrences that vary from person to person. Nothing is repeatable. The ability to predict how long an individual will work for a company, his career path or WIIFH(Whats in it for him) can never be computed from a balanced score card, much less a regression analysis. Somewhere nature is asking us to manage as much as we can with intelligence obtained outside (data) but have the courage, resilience and tenacity to manage everything thrown at us. If left dominated right, then the numerous instances we see accidents should have trained us to calculate speed of vehicle, impact and the vehicles make and predict whether the passengers will live or die. But the tip in the balance is clear when hope takes over data, rushes to hospitals and makes several attempts to revive the spirit from the place of faraway land. Sometimes we succeed.Sometimes we don't.
Lets keep the technology to the bell curve. Lets keep the humans to the learning curve. They don't meet. Even during appraisals!

The curse of the CMS!

It largely resembles the 'Tower of Babel' scenario when you try to get the IS team to get into a conference call with the Web development team and the Knowledge Management team to come up with the portal requirements. It suddenly feels like no one understands the other any more. IS rolls their eyes virtually at every suggestion for social networking thrown in by the Knowledge Management team and the graphic design team seem to think that no part of this conversation is of any relevance to them.
This largely is due to the inability of the team to see beyond the single story that they believe is the only view that they see of a technology portal.
Whichever team you belong to, and whatever be the work you are assigned to, there are only three focus areas for you.

1. People
2. Processes
3. Technology

The latter two are inanimate, but surprisingly, people seem to focus more on these rather than on point number one.
Lets take a look at every aspect of a good business or great project management and we will see where the focus is on these 3 areas.

Balanced score card-People
After action review-people
RACI chart-people
Change management-people
Emotional intelligence-people
Lesson learned- people
Agile-people
Six sigma sponsors-people
six sigma champions-people
Lean Value-enabling activity-people
Knowledge management-people
CoP's-people
Collective intelligence-people
Story telling-people

Even information architecture which does the information mapping is done for people. For people to have a clear understanding so the solution architecture is created without mistakes. That brings us to:

Poke yoke-People
Kanbans-People
Andon boards- people

I think we are clear here that people are the focus. Its important that the business is not compromised and the Voice of Business is listened to...but every business starts off with the Voice of the Customer-PEOPLE!

Process Approach!

There are very many advantages to the process approach. S.M.A.R.T goals, pilot areas, sixsigma, focus groups are a few of them. An unstated element to every process approach is that a sponsor somewhere sits in to bring about the systems perspective at every project review. The null hypothesis that is assumed here is sometimes proven false. The alternate brings about the issues of pursuing a single story!
Pre-1990 none of this mattered. We had what we wanted in the palm of our hands. Everything that mattered existed within stones reach...if not the process, atleast the neck that could be placed on the chopping board,if the process failed. Present day scenario is a lot rougher. You dont know who sits where, what is the culture, what is the language spoken, what time of day it is and who actually is the person accountable. This failure model is popularly referred to as the 'global model'. If this is the model that is implemented, then the single story no longer holds good. Multiple processes have to run in tandem and the reviews are measured against the system.
An household example of the systems approach. My geyser trips the home electrical unit every time I switch it on. When the plumber was asked to fix it, he said that he was currently unavailable and the short gap measure to make things work till he came over was to keep the water running while the geyser was on. This worked fine. The issue is, when the focus is only on the project and not of the system, we fail to see long term failure in the light of short term wins.
Our society is paying for water and the water problem is acute. The fix should have been :
1. either to stop using the shower and switch to bucket water
2. To use another bathroom till this was fixed.

On home ground, examples are so sinmple, they are usually attributed to just using your common sense. (which surprisingly fails more often that not)
In large organizations, every drop that is lost with bad decisions and with approaches that dont look at the system in its entirety, costs!Costs the company &bleeds it!