Silence and management - part 9

…text about Silence in organization continues - this is part 9.


Change requires vision, energy and action, quite often change also requires voice: new ideas, astute observations and clearly stated facts which must be taken into account. Therefore it is problematic if there is silence where should be a lot of discussion. Understanding reasons of silence opens ways to create more discussion in the future. Let us not give a frustration a possibility to root itself into our organizations, uprooting frustration is everybody's business.

4.4      Frustration

Frustration means here a feeling that for some reason a person has reached a conclusion that it is not worthwhile to break to silence.

4.4.1 Speaking does not provide results

A person can end up choosing silence if s/he comes to conclusion that her/his efforts to raise issues for common discussion do not seem to provide results. Perhaps s/he feels that her/his openings are met with silence or that her/his efforts to change something have not provided results s/he would have liked to see happening.

In case one feels that s/he is being silenced that experience may evidently create even more silence in the future. At the same time we must notice that the experienced disappointment for not getting changes that someone may want is also a complex issue. Perhaps the desired changes are such which are feasible to achieve, then the disappointment of not getting desired changes could be justified. At the same token it is also possible to think that sometimes people wish changes which are very hard to make at least in the short run if not  ever. In both these cases there should be discussions in organizations that why some required changes may not be possible at the certain time, perhaps there are some justifications why even the in principle possible changes are not done at least now. As we can anticipate one problem here is silence, in other words in desired changes are not even discussed openly there is no way to handle these issues. Silence is prone to create more silence.

4.4.2 Lack of genuine interest

Sometimes one reason behind silence is that for some reason a person may have lost her/his genuine interest toward the development and success organization.  When this is a case a person may choose silence also in those occasions where s/he could instead share something valuable with others. Often silence is an easy solution, sharing would require much more, at least you would need to justify your point and make others listen. Sometimes you would have to compete with different views in order to get your voice heard. For someone who has lost her/his genuine interest, this may feel or too heavy burden and s/he just stays silent.

And also here one dictum of this paper rings true - silence create silence. A person who has assumed a silent role is assumed to remain silent by others. So, how s/he might gather the courage and energy to break silence and beat the expectations, not an easy task. In accounting so called zero based budgeting is something which has been proposed in situations where we just build on old expectations and practices without really stopping to evaluate what would be possible now. Could we apply something from zero based budgeting on human encounters, could we always be open for new realities, open that someone who has not been that active could become active today. At least we should check that our expectations towards anyone are not the ones which help the silence to linger.

 

4.4.3 Negative learning

Negative learning is a concept which I have first heard from professor Tapio Aittola, University of Jyväskylä. Negative learning refers to learning experiences which are very different than those experiences which are typically topics of general discussions. Negative learning  means that a person starts to see how difficult and sometimes practically impossible some things really are. S/he may have had, for instance, a basic idea that s/he would like to do something new, for instance s/he would like to change something in her/his organization. S/he may have an idea that when she focus on something and starts to understand it better s/he will learn new things and gradually s/he will be in a position from which s/he can make those planned changes.

However, sometimes it may happen that the world reserves negative learning experiences for any of us. This means that a person learns that for some reason it is far more difficult and perhaps impossible to make the changes s/he would like to make. Sometimes the world just is much more complex than the person had thought and therefore making changes becomes difficult. S/he may notice that s/he does not have the needed capabilities, energy or time to learn all that what would be needed in order to make changes. Sometimes there may some other reasons like political, cultural or some vested personal interests on status quo which make the changing impossible.

In sum, negative learning experiences may also lead to silence and the fewer efforts to make changes and develop new things. From the organizational perspective it might be desirable that people would not give up too easily when they encounter negative learning experiences. Quite often new openings feel at first impossible, and no one may believe that those ideas could be feasible but surprisingly they may turn into new opportunities after persistent effort.

 

Silence and management - part 6

…text about Silence in organization continues - this is part 6.

4.2   The impossibility to share everything

4.2.1 We simply cannot share everything

It is unavoidable part of normal human life that we simply cannot share everything. Whenever we encounter other people, one or more, we are always in a situation that we able to share only part of that whole totality what we see, think and perceive and also what we have seen, have thought or have perceived, or what we think that we will see in the future, or what we will think or will perceive in the coming days. Clearly this whole array of experiences forms a massive entity of which we could share something but only some tiny part to others.  Perhaps we choose the share something of the present or recent moments, or perhaps we decide to indulge into our memories and share something from there or perchance we decide to look into future and share our plans or our anticipations about the future.

 

Perhaps we may not even pause to think or to ruminate that we actually forced to choose what to share, we may not even be really aware, at least not all the time, that we cannot share everything.  In fact it is even hard to think what it would be to share everything. It is impossible to define in any given situation what would be that ALL what one person could share. In fact, it is impossible to define what is all what we know (experience, think, observer, dream, etc.) in any given moment.

These lines above seem to lead to a following conclusion: we cannot know all what we know. As an executive educator I am tempted to ponder that what this means to our eternal quest of becoming wiser and wiser, what actually is the way to become sagacious: a) to learn new things, ie. to gather the pile of knowing higher, b) to learn more about those things that you already know (at some level, in certain special way), ie. to become more aware who you are, how you are. Perhaps both avenues are necessary for an avid learner.

At the same time it is valuable to notice that it is a decision to choose what we share. Perhaps most of the time we just share something, it comes naturally we do not have to focus on deciding what we share. Perhaps sometimes, in new or in somehow challenging situations we pay our attention to sharing. When someone asks in the job interview about our weak points, we tend to consider before answering. But these situations are exceptions. Could it be that in our professional life we should take the sharing much more carefully. There the point would be to think what others, and what the whole organization need to know. That should guide us when we decide what to share. It is part of professional excellence to understand what to share and to know what is valuable to others and to whole entity, let it be organization or some other unit.

Clearly the discussion above portrays a somewhat one sided picture of sharing. At least implicitly the focus seems to be on those kinds of things which could also be called facts or pieces of information. In other words as described above we know and we have seen a lot of things and we can share only part of it. This is acceptable and these kinds of phenomena are the main focus in this paper. However, we must remember that choosing what to share is by no means limited to facts. For example, we also share all kind of feelings and emotions. Hence in any situation it is often a big decision whether you choose to use upbeat or downbeat style of speaking and sharing. The choice is yours - how do you decide to proceed?

4.2.2          Modes of communication we choose use, modes of communication we choose not to use

Whenever we establish contact with other person or other persons we are also prone to decide which modes of sharing and transparency we consider as most important. I would claim that quite often our attention focus on words and speaking, perhaps almost solely.[1] We might for instance ask whether s/he said everything. 

It is interesting to notice how the speaking really gets a high importance in various situations. For instance, in the court the oath may have the following form: “I swear by Almighty God that I will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” From the perspective of this paper, the way how telling everything is emphasized in the court represent something special, and now I am not referring to the law as such but to something else. What is special here is that in the court people are examining events which have happened in the past.  It is worth mentioning that in this paper we are not examining past events but the way how people share or choose silence in the evolving situations.

 

Therefore, when we are examining sharing and transparency in organizations we must consider the whole spectrum of different modes of communication which we can use. We have to consider all the means and ways what a human being can use in order to communicate something to others. We have to be aware of whole array of different modes of communicating.  In addition to speaking there are also other modes of communication like:  facial expressions, all kinds of gestures, also all forms of action.[2]

The point in this chapter is to make us think that when we are examining sharing speaking is not all that there is. One evocative quote comes from Mark Twain: “Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”

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[1] Let it be admitted that this comment is written by a person who represent a very low context culture. Please see Edward T Hall.

[2] “Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”  ― Mark Twain