Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are attentive to and focused on  different levels of detail, according to their personality, role, and experience. I mentally tend to put these people into one of two groups: "Roughly right" personality types, and "Precisely right" personality types (with apologies to Malcom Gladwell).

If you try to make a presentation about details to Roughly Right people, you will lose them. Yet if you don't provide such details to Precisely Right people, any commitment you seek, or plans you may offer may have little credibility with them.

Successful projects must thus provide a reliable means of engaging with both of these types of people, achieving their buy-in, and demonstrating the ability to translate from high-level concepts to corresponding details consistently. Linking this information requires enough time, resources, and attention to elaborate these details, and close the inevitable gaps of interpretation, as they arise. Read more »

Someone told me once that all problems in engineering systems are communications problems. Their assertion reminds me of one of my High School English teachers, who had a sign which read: Eschew Obfuscation. For those who don't get the irony immediately, this can be translated as 'avoid confusing your audience'.

Communications channels come in many different flavors, and each has benefits and challenges. However, one of the things common to nearly all of them is that they are imperfect. Messages can be lost or altered, and thus may have varying levels of fidelity with respect to what was originally transmitted. The channels themselves have inherent delays, and thus may deliver messages that are difficult to reconcile with each other at different times. Different communications channels also vary in their tolerance to noise. For example, when presenting concepts to a large audience, oral presentations, visual graphics, and written narratives can each be quite effective for a particular purpose, and yet be inadequate in others. Read more »

General Motors was first founded in 1908, and grew through mergers and acquisitions of separate Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet businesses. On Jan. 21, 1988, a senior General Motors executive, Elmer Johnson, wrote a memo which accurately anticipated GM's key challenge in transforming the company: “We have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute.” After 80 years, those businesses still struggled to work together. Read more »

The leadership and team members on development projects often use language whose meaning is ambiguous. Unravelling the possibilities underneath their concepts can be quite challenging. But if you don't confront and solve those challenges, it can cause considerably more pain later, as these misunderstandings must eventually be reconciled. 

Success in development endeavors relies upon effective communications. Such communications involves developing and agreeing on a common, foundational understanding of key concepts that are threaded through such projects. Achieving such understanding usually requires careful listening, disciplined and coherent integration of ideas being expressed by many stakeholders over time, and clear and thorough validation of the implications behind the emerging meaning, in multiple situations and under different scenarios.  Read more »