Effective communication and leadership are part of every solution

In my professional life as co-founder of Fly High Engineering, I typically get involved into problems where the technical challenges are important. However, most issues arise from us, the humans, rather than from the technology. In particular, they often come from bad communication, leadership with a hidden agenda, and solutions to false problems.

As this argument is a bit tricky and quite sensitive, I'll make examples mainly from politics, which should be simpler to understand for most readers. I'll keep vague about the actors, because I want to focus on the things you may be able to apply in your own projects, rather than writing a political essay.

Trust comes from communication and leadership

Modern history offers plenty of examples of strong leaders, who could move the masses in some direction, either "left" or "right". Their followers completely trusted them and, upon their guide, acted in decisive ways, sometimes for the good of everybody, sometimes not. What is the "threshold" for a leader to overcome, to gain such a trust? Is it different for left and right politicians?

Left and right approaches to leadership and communication differ, don't they?

Although I'm not able to propose a quantitative estimate for the trust threshold, it seems to me that the dynamics leading people to become followers is somewhat different for left and right. Before attempting to get into details, however, let's specify what "left and right" means.

The Swiss document The Swiss Confederation – a brief guide summarises the two political orientations this way:

• Left-wing pushes for s strong social state that levels social disparities, puts emphasis on workers’ interests, calls for price controls and public services, and pushes more for peace policy than for military.
• Right-wing values freedom and personal responsibility, limiting the state intervention only where absolutely necessary, puts emphasis on employers’ interests, calls for free enterprise and economic incentives, and pushes for strong national defence.

Prompt and delayed actions are generated by simple and detailed communication, respectively

In recent times we had examples of very "vocal" political leaders, very effective in moving masses. Their opponents seem to be less effective, because they "lose time" in articulating more detailed positions. As a consequence, when the first have executive power they produce a number of prompt actions, while the others proceed more cautiously.

I have the impression that vocal leaders promoting prompt actions are currently more numerous in the right wing --- feel free to disagree in the comments, if you have arguments showing the opposite --- and that the right-wing tendency is to prefer strong leaders who depict (and possible have) a simple view of the world and call for immediate actions in a well-defined direction. In other words, their followers expect to be told what to do and are ready to act now, because they fully trust their leader, who communicates in a direct and assertive style. When not showing exactly the same behaviour --- which is my impression on the Chinese party, but I may be wrong ---, the left-wing tends to prefer longer discussions on the motivations behind the proposed action, to build a larger consensus. This requires a more articulate and detailed communication style on the leader's side, and more patience and attention on the follower's side.

Prompt and delayed actions may eventually lead to the same future

In practice, one approach leads to prompt actions that have a chance to solve urgent problems, while the other naturally produces a lower throughput of actions, almost preventing prompt reactions to urgent issues. I must admit that, as the human capacity to predict the future (if any) is quite little, neither of the two processes ensures that the decisions actually taken will bring any improvement. Therefore, in practice the first approach produces a series of sharp changes that, when considered in perspective, may look quite noisy; the other approach produces less apparent variability, but this is because it makes less actions per unit time. External and internal constraints often induce a long-term "drift" that is essentially the same, even when left and right governments alternate. This is simply because some changes are unavoidable for a society to survive, and they usually happen a bit too late to get any significant advantage over the rest of the world.

Acting carefully won't bring you out of a fire

If the majority of people perceive a problem as particularly critical and urgent, only the direct and perhaps simplistic communication style of action-driven leaders has a chance to find a suitable solution. Perhaps we are in times where this is the case, as it is suggested by the increasing polarisation of the public discussions. "Polarisation" simply means that people want to be told whether they should choose white or black and expect prompt actions, rather than detailed discussions with which they can certainly understand better the situation, unfortunately too late for the solution to be perceived as effective. Therefore, people prefer betting on head or tails, hoping to get at least 50% probability of success.

Often this means only one thing: 100% probability of failure. We all know about this. Simply, we don't like being told about it.

The leader's agenda

If we cannot predict the future and the long-term trend depends only in a minor way on the political side of the leaders, why do we need leaders at all? And how can such people gain so much success and followers?

Leaders are always welcome because, once accepted as guidance, they let us save mental energy by telling us what to do. This is an instinctive attitude that we all have, and many other living beings share with us too. I can't see a world without leaders, unless something else — an all-mighty AI? — tells us what is best for ourselves. Therefore, let's address the other question. The answer is that leaders become effective when their agenda is promoted in such a way that their followers see some advantage for themselves.

Communication is driven by the leader's agenda and by the followers' interests

Thanks to crafted communication and by leveraging on the needs of the followers, leaders get more and more influential. In practice, it may (and it does) happen that leaders don't solve the followers' problems, but nevertheless advance in their career and bring forward their own agenda. The latter is very often hidden to the followers, who only care about their own issues. They are happy about the promises they hear from the leader and are ready to excuse her/him for failing to address their problems, because (1) their leader shows — but perhaps does not sincerely possess — sincere interest and attention to them, and because (2) their leader admits that she/he, as everybody else, could not be able to predict what actually happened and still promises to continue striving to provide a good future for the followers.

Influence and power may go along or may not

Note that the influence of leaders may be paralleled by their effective power on the followers, as it is the case for the management in an organisation, or may not, as it is the case for the opinion leaders in the same organisation, who can influence the decisions of their managers. Therefore, real-life situations may be quite tricky to understand, also because there are several leaders acting at the same time, whose agendas partially overlap, despite their attempts to look different. The main difference is that influencers who don't have a powerful role in the organisation need to gain a lot more followers' support to become effective, compared to those sitting already in a powerful position.

What happens when the leader's agenda is not aligned with the followers' interests? This is a critical situation, which may occur also outside politics. From time to time, I rediscover again that this is the showstopper in a project, no matter what people claim about technical challenges.

The solution must be compatible both with the leader's agenda and with the followers' needs

I personally witnessed project failures when different stakeholders were pursuing incompatible objectives. I also admit that I could not always save the situation. I'm fond of science and love to address and solve complex technological problems, but when it is about people, I have clear limitations. If this also happens to you, perhaps the following aspects will help you getting out of the swamp.

Three steps to rescue the project

1. Understand the motivations of all stakeholders. They won't tell you about their hidden agenda! Therefore, this takes quite some amount of inference and emotional intelligence, supported by the capability of finding information and hints that suggest what they don't want to tell you.
2. Decide which motivations are compatible with the sought solution. Assess if the overall influence of the stakeholders pushed by such motivations is big enough for the project to have a chance of success. You can't make them all happy! It's impossible, it's not your fault.
3. Decide whether you'd better to abort the project or to push some of the stakeholders out of the game. Both options are painful, and both are fair. Consider strategic aspects and their impact on your own agenda before taking a decision. What pays more on the long term? Can you survive long enough to reap such benefits, or shouldn't you instead go for the short-term advantage and hope that you'll find some way of avoiding the long-term loss?

People don't like change, not even when it's for the better

Don't forget this simple but very important thing! We don't like changing our habits. As a consequence, we oppose resistance even to changes that aim at simplifying our life. Moreover, if the changes are imposed by others, we oppose by default even before thinking about pros and cons. Overcoming the resistance to change is often difficult, and may mine the success of what we are doing. The only possibility to mitigate the problem is to (1) analyse all the relevant aspects since the beginning, and (2) involve as many stakeholders as possible in the formulation of the plan. Although change is always difficult, we have more chance to make it if it comes from our own decision :-)

Summary

Although I usually enter a project to address complex technical challenges, I often encounter the biggest difficulties when the identified solution is not compatible with the interests and needs of all stakeholders. Moreover, the resistance to change adds further obstacles for the success of the project. The success is much more likely if we can perform good identification of influencers, power-gamers, followers, and understand their needs and, if possible, goals. No matter if they tell you that the problem is technical, there is always a human side that deserves attention and due consideration. Solving the technical problem and leaving people unhappy is a failure, not a success. Therefore, you have to become one of the leaders, pay attention to your communication and adapt its style to different stakeholders. Find a solution that brings benefits to all (or to most of them) and make sure they understand the expected benefits, even before starting to do any technical work.