Now that’s a statement you don’t hear too often. In fact, you hear the opposite more frequently: You can’t over-communicate. (I may have been guilty of uttering that cliché myself.)
Have you ever sent out a company-wide email reminding people to be sure the lights in their office are turned off when they go home each evening—when actually only one person forgets and leaves hers on? Ever invited all 15 staffers to a meeting so they would feel “in the loop” when actually the information pertained to only five—and then had the meeting last twice as long as it should because the extra attendees asked irrelevant questions that bogged down the discussion.
These are symptoms of Brooks’ Law, and the cost of inefficiency can be enormous (as Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, pointed out in his blog, Joel on Software).
Fred Brooks, in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month, first set forth a principle that he discovered while helping to run the OS/360 project at IBM: Adding people to a late project tends to make it run further behind—not end quicker.
Why does putting more people to work on a project tend to make it slower rather than faster to complete?
Clearly, communication is the culprit: I’ve scratched my head as it has happened dozens of times. Sherry’s updating the layout of customized course materials (leader guides, participant manuals, job-aids, slides, and so forth). We pull Vicky off another project to help her. Sherry has to stop her solo work to communicate to Vicky how it’s done. Vicky joins the project. Vicky has to communicate and coordinate her work with Sherry. The deadline is looming. So we bring on freelancer Rachel to help Sherry and Vicky. Now whenever any one of the three wants to make a change in the layout, they need to meet to discuss the decision. If something necessitates a deviation from the general layout rules, they need to communicate that to the other two and await their feedback. If they don’t agree, that requires more time to work out their differences and come to decision. Every time another person joins the team, the interactions and meeting times grow and the actual work time on the project decreases.
Brooks followed this process repeatedly with mathematical formulas, counting communication connections and interactions to be managed and the resulting days added to project completions.
Recently, a group of hospital administrators asked me to conduct a workshop on how to run more efficient meetings. The easiest problem we had to diagnose and correct? Their typical meetings included 40-45 people. The ideal meeting size is seven. With too few people, you limit creative ideas. With too many people, discussion bogs down. Sidebar conversations start, irrelevant issues surface, and good ideas die for lack of time to investigate them further.
What are the take-aways here?
- Limit email distribution to those with a need to know rather than cluttering everyone’s in-box.
- Stamp out the paranoia about not being invited to meetings that are not directly related to a person’s job. Don’t create a culture where missing a meeting is a career-limiting move.
- Assign one person to make sure relevant communication goes to those involved on a project.
- Create opportunities for conversation that generates innovative ideas and builds relationships rather than communication that complicates and clogs ongoing work.
Talk is not cheap. Real communication is priceless.
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Posted at 5:47pm in
Communication—Interpersonal, General Communication, Personal Productivity |
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