Everyone Has to Know What Everyone Else Knows

A bit of "Above the Fold" today before we get started. My friend and former colleague Ashley Nicholson has taken the plunge into independent consulting and has started Avenir Technology. Avenir is a woman-owned small business that offers consulting, business development and capture support, digital services, data analytics, and emerging technology consulting. I you want someone to aggressively manage your pursuit, call Ashley. She's the real deal.

In my last article - "The Symptoms are Not the Problem" (which I'm sure you have shared with your entire network) - I discussed the "symptom solutions" that are created when group efforts to solve a problem become compartmentalized and lose sight of the goal.

An important corollary to this is my notoriously overused gem "everyone has to know what everyone else knows." I remember the first time I wrote that quote on the whiteboard in my office in Albuquerque. I was burned up (as usual) about some communication breakdown and I arrived at the most obvious conclusion regarding the dissemination of information in an organization: Don't expect people to know stuff if you don't tell them. And by "them" I mean everyone. How many times have things happened in your organization and you learned about it from the grapevine and not from the formal communication channels? I'm not talking about the reminders to submit timesheets; I'm talking about things that affect your work or your life.

Take corporate strategy as an example. I have written at length about certain organizations' failure to include employees in the planning process for initiatives that might affect their employment status. Could more employee input have had an impact on the eventual job losses? If those people were smart enough to get hired, they were likely smart enough to stay hired, right? So why not just ask them if they have suggestions? I'll tell you why now, because to do some would mean giving them all the same information about the goals of the initiative. Unfortunately, the compartmentalization of information that exists in many organizations makes that very unlikely.

Let's take a real example from one of my current projects, the same one I mentioned in my last article. The contact center was (and still is) experiencing long hold times. Executive level management said, "fix it". This edict was communicated directly to subordinate leaders, and they dutifully went off and began to work on things they felt they could do to fix the problem - without considering how it might all other initiatives. In this age of RPA and bots, two organizations proposed adding bots, using two different vendors, and two different technology solutions. "Danger, Will Robinson, danger!"

I know that there are three types of responses I will get from readers: (1) The process guru: "The governance plan would address the bot issue." (2) The IT guru: "I know all about bots and I could make them work together." (3) The operations guru: "Have they run an Erlang on it? and (4) The HR people: "What is a bot?" These are all legitimate responses, because you the reader don't have all the information. In that respect you are no different than the folks on the ground trying to address the hold time issue - they need to know what everyone else knows. If they don't it's...wait for it...wait for it...activity without progress!

If you have a critical initiative - especially one that is time-bound - tell everyone everything about it. This hiding the cheese about important stuff under the guise of securing "proprietary information" or "trade secrets" is a bunch of hoo-ha. I'm talking about the whole employee roster, from the receptionist all the way to the C-suite. Tell them everything. Set the information free and their minds will follow!

#thatisall