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Organizational Spr2006 Sess27

Communication as Value in the Workplace

Lessons of NASA
- Building an organization is building a communication system
  - Openness and candor
    - encourage an informal communication system
    - that supplements and extends the formal system
  - Adaptation can mean combining organizations or splitting them (mitosis)
- The best time to build a strong communication climate is when things are going great
  - Because its easy, when things are challenging, to slip into bad habits.
    - Organizational forgetting
    - Decisions rooted in misperceptions
      - semantic-information distance
    - Everyday patterns of communication that can be hard to change
    - Antagonistic cultures
      - The silencing of dissent
      - Fear of dissent
      - Discursive closure
    - Value reprioritization: valuing cost and schedule of safety and quality
These kinds of problems are hardly unique to NASA
- ?McWane Corporation
  - Disciplined management practices
  - Optimizing production and costs at the expense of safety
  - Treating fines as a projectable cost
  - Treating people as expendable resources
  - Making political threats to evade prosecution
  - When prosecuted, two communication transgressions
    - Blaming the victim
    - Maintaining plausible deniability
  - When challenged, blaming the behavior on foreign competition
- The counter-example: ACIPCO
  - Just as cost efficicient, but much safer
  - Operated on the Golden Rule (Do unto others as they would do unto you
    - "OK. This rule. What if it is applied to me? Is it fair?"
  - ?McWane left ACIPCO when this rule was made
- The contrast is ethical
  - Instrumental Rationality: ?McWane
  - Value Rationality: ACIPCO
- Lots of organizations have problems here
The Walmart Effect
- Every new Walmart closes two supermarkets and numerous small stores
- 30% of America's consumable staples
- Squeeze manufacturers to move overseas
- Squeeze cities on taxes
- Squeeze workers on salary and benefits
- Simultaneously working to
  - create organizational identity with titles like associate and team member
  - but treating conversation between team members as time theft
The stock option as incentive to lie.
A review of transgressions
- Lying
- Encouraging others to lie
- Power plays that have the appearance of bribes
- Failure to listen to subordinates
- Plausible deniability
- The affectation of innocence
- Failure to report conflicts of interest
- Fear of speaking truth to power
- Asymmetry of information (an absense of the transparency that capitalism depends on)
- the suppression of "voice"
- the absense of feedback loops

-- Last edited August 27, 2008

Unless otherwise noted, the contents of this page were written by participants on the Media Space Wiki, operated by Davis Foulger, and should be cited accordingly. For example (APA):
Foulger, D. and other participants. (August 27, 2008). Organizational Spr2006 Sess27. MediaSpaceWiki. Retrieved on from http://evolutionarymedia.com/wiki.htm?OrganizationalSpr2006Sess27.