Agreements Shape Organizations

Whether they are called Mission Statement, Company Policies, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP's) or Company Culture, all of these concepts are kept in place and either succeed or fail because people agree to uphold them.

However:

• The degree of enthusiasm behind the support for these agreements can vary widely.
• Malicious obedience can exist where one adherence to the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law.
• It is possible that people sabotage both intentionally and unitentionally because they do not understand the underlying implications of the ideas.

Keeping Agreements

There are only three things you can do with agreements:

1) Keep them.   2) Break them.  3) Change them.

Most people think themselves as being consistent with keeping agreements. All too often this is not the case. There are two basic forms of agreements: those we make with others, and those we make with ourselves. When we keep agreements we begin to form a track record of consistent follow through. This leads to the formation of trust and confidence.

Productivity

People are most productive when they feel that their work is significant. Believing that they are doing something vital will cause a person to feel important, valued, and significant in themselves as part of a team. Anyone who knows that they are valued will produce because they identify who they are with how they perform. Right or wrong, there is much in the way of Industrial Psychological research to back this up. When they believe themselves competent to perform the task correctly and well, they will work with less stress and great efficiency. This cycle of motivation is completed and perpetuated when meaningful incentives: in the form or praise or reward are offered and given. When any of these three conditions is not met, the tendency for job dissatisfaction in the form of burnout, boredom, or rebellion will raise its spectre in that individual or within the workplace as a whole.

Information Systems and Business Communications

In the atmosphere of modern business, ambiguity, hidden agenda’s and proprietary knowledge render communication, all too often, an exercise in cryptic innuendo. As consumers many of us have had the experience where symbolism and implied information takes the place of direct statements or solid answers. What information is given frequently is embellished or carry’s caveats. As songwriter Tom Waits puts it, “the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Market competitors who act with stealth, deception, or aim hyperbole at each other levy those same tactics at buyers to gain favor or ruin reputation. Within organizations, concerns about “keeping up” or “whose on top” can send distortions through channels of communication.

Misinformation and misunderstanding create a loss of data reliability that can lead a company’s information system to into chaos. This condition of an information system is called “system noise” or “channel noise” The final effect upon information itself is called “corruption.” In the world of work today, too many communications are corrupted by the noise and distortions of stressed workers and managers. When key information providers are out of sink with key decision makers the resulting degradation of the system leads to loss of productivity, failure of strategic action, and declines in employee morale from increases in performance stress or management reprisal. How does this happen? What are the reasons? And the all too familiar and equally noise creating question, “who is to blame?”

What if it were possible to discover and resolve the problem of information system noise where the problem really lies? Not with computers, databases, networks, or web sites, but with the source of the system itself: People!? It would take a technology designed to locate and smooth internal system resistance. A methodology that focused less on the “fixing” problems but rather on increasing the flow and quality of information. Unlike work stations or terminals that can be downloaded on command or taken off-line to be replaced, the exercise of choice and power actually dictate the quality of information that a person will reveal more than the speed of a microprocessor.

Why? Because regardless of organizational hierarchies, obligations, and duties, human beings have an “internal locus of control” which can act with wide variation of motivations. Thus the diagnostic question for maximizing an information system flow becomes, how can one access that internal locus of control (each member of the system doing so) and optimize it for the most accurate and efficient reporting of information?

This issue will become increasingly important as many firms rely on increasingly more minute or granular pieces of information. Timely communication can be the key to preventing a fall of organizational dominoes that could result in minor fires all the way to life threatening shake-ups.

The Cart Before the Horse (Technology before the Humans)

Government and Business organizations alike have spent billions of dollars researching the problem of improving information systems on the digital side of technology. Rapid networks, faster microprocessors, and enhancing the way we portray information as 3D images, video, audio, graphs, and other multimedia; are merely tools for transfer, rendering or display. All of that energy spent on the physics of electromagnetic effects upon technology and almost none upon the analog physics upon which the human beings are based. Or, what we call the physics of emotion©.

Since human beings are the creative source of information, wouldn't it makes sense to design a set of communication diagnostic and delivery tools that directly take aim at the point where system noise will originate and seek to quiet that noise? To make the changes necessary is begin to embrace an entirely new approach to communications. A new paradigm that views communication as an organic and not merely a mechanistic process. Hence, communicating to each other and not merely the “data” becomes as key a factor as whether we can get a PC operating system to understand that of a Macintosh. The keys of understanding and contact: translating format and accounting for system filters. For our purposes we call this technology “No-Fault Communication™.(NFC)”

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