Two meals have made a huge difference in sharpening my thinking about how traditional internal communication, informal social networks within organizations, and knowledge management can come together in a powerful and paradigm shifting way.
The first meal—an excellent dinner in the Amsterdam suburbs with Cheryl Cooper, a visionary Knowledge Management consultant from Yorkshire, England—cemented the idea that there is far more interconnection between organizational communication and knowledge management than either field’s practitioners are willing to admit.
The second—which hasn’t happened yet but which I’ve been invited to—is a conversation to happen next month with one of the leading luminaries of the
organizational communication field where we will discuss these interconnections.
While internal communication and knowledge management are seen as two threads, in the lead-up to the second dinner, I had an insight that led me to identify not two but three strands of communication that shape the way organizations operate:
News/Direction: The
information that tells people what to do and when. This flows mainly through formal internal
communication and line management channels, and incorporates official definitions
of the impacts of external news.
Opinion:
This information is designed to influence the recipient and how he or she
acts. It mainly comes informally from
peers and colleagues but may also come from external stakeholders, or as
embedded justification in official news and direction.
Knowledge: Knowledge is
the information that tells an individual how to act effectively on the news and
direction he/she receives. It is again
generally found from peers and colleagues, though it can come as embedded
instructions or can be harvested from databases and case studies.
What is significant here—indeed, what opens up the possibility of an integrated
communications model that takes both the formal and informal flows of
information into account, and differentiates it into its factual, instructional
and attitudinal components—is that it recognizes the legitimacy and importance
of peer opinion as a driver within organizations. Indeed, the unwillingness to recognize the
legitimacy, value and role of opinion within the organization and come up with
credible ways to measure its impact on organizational performance, has been, I
assert, what has limited the ability of our profession to conclusively prove
our worth to clients, detractors and peers alike.
What gave me the insight was in talking with my “dinner date” about the way in which colleagues are seen as a source of news/direction within a company. This said “colleagues do show up, but staff hate relying upon them.” I didn’t dispute the claim. But it struck me that the answer addressed the wrong question. Employees may hate obtaining “News/Direction” from colleagues. Indeed, it makes sense—since what I define as news/direction has an authoritative component that doesn’t pass well from colleague to colleague. But do staff hate getting their colleagues’ opinions on what Head Office ? I’d swear on a stack of water coolers as high as IABC Headquarters that staff love getting the opinions of their colleagues. And I’d swear on a stack of database servers that staff love to pick the brains of their colleagues when presented with a tough or intricate business problem.
Moreover, news/direction, opinion, and knowledge don’t flow in isolation. In fact, the flow often requires conscious effort to differentiate. But currently, much of the current thinking in both internal communication and knowledge management treats the disciplines as separate—and ignores the importance and legitimacy of opinion entirely.
Now, as pressure from clients and from leading lights in the industry mounts on internal communicators to embrace potentially dozens of new channels under the ‘social media’ rubric—channels that could further cause the three main threads of information to intermingle more closely—a new approach for looking at how these threads of communication intertwine may be vital to keep things from descending into anarchy.
Hence—a ‘social communication model’—a media-agnostic model
that focuses on the what and why of communication, giving space for more
effective means of ‘how’, and giving smart practitioners a much more effective picture of how to use communication to create a climate for positive results.
