Jim Grisanzio

JAMA editor DeAngelis in ProPublica:

“They can lie to us, and we don’t do lie detector tests,” said outgoing JAMA editor Catherine DeAngelis, who said her publication gets thousands of submissions a year and doesn’t have the time or money to hire another staff member to check up on conflict-of-interest disclosures. And if she had the money for one more staffer? “Believe me,” she said, “it wouldn’t be for that.”

So, conflicts of interest in the scientific/medical literature are not important. Look away. Good to know.

People talk a lot about communications. But what most people mean by “communications” is just talking. We have to communicate more, right? Meetings, emails, reports, decisions, etc. More words, basically. But people rarely see the direct and reciprocal relationship between communications and actions. Instead, they simply deliver a single message from their brain to someone else’s using words. Once they’ve done that, they’ve communicated. No iteration to press for understanding, no checking to see if messages resonate and lead to desired actions, no assertion of responsibility to clarify as often as necessary, no consent to mutually adjust expectations as things emerge. Just dump the words and run. That’s how most people communicate. Badly.

And that’s why communications comes up all the time. The inherent problems are never resolved because people don’t think through all the steps in the process. In fact, the delivery of words is only one very small part of communications. Also, if you rely only on words you need a lot of them to move people to actions. It’s simply not a very efficient way to communicate.

So, what’s a better way to communicate? Simple. Use actions. In fact, I can’t think of a better way to communicate anything than via action. Actions work. They resonate. They attract. They move. They generate other actions. And they do these things far more effectively than words. Some people who genuinely want to communicate well don’t realize this. They don’t know that actions themselves are communications, so they default to just trying to improve their verbal skills. Others shy away from using actions to communicate because actions are complex and more difficult to implement than just talking. Still others know full well that actions deliver clear messages so they intentionally don’t act so they can duck responsibility and hide behind obfuscation. Their words, basically.

Now, words can be used to support and amplify actions and clarify intent, but the fastest way to see through the meaninglessness of words is to judge their corresponding actions. So, are there any corresponding actions? If so, are those actions consistent with the words? If not, dismiss the words entirely and judge the actions alone. You’ll likely get a vastly different message. But beware. Many people have this consistency bit worked out, and they bend their words to fit their actions after the fact to persuade you they were consistent when reality clearly says otherwise. That’s spin. You can spot that when your stomach turns inside out as someone talks to you. Trust your gut, not your head. In the end a person’s action is the only communication you need to understand. And it’s your most effective tool to deliver your own communications as well.

This image represents the sum total of innovative content the Democrats and Republicans will shove down the throats of Americans during the 2012 presidential election — one hundred percent distraction. Propaganda, basically. And how will 130,000,000 voters react? Oh, they’ll love it. It’s sport to Americans who still believe they have a role in this game. But what’s sad is that people will passionately and tirelessly attach each other in the process of picking someone to dominate them.

Transparency is never what it seems. It’s great propaganda, granted, and it works wonders driving messages into groups. But the concept rarely lives up to its billing. It reminds me of innovation, leadership, and quality. These things are uttered so much that, for me anyway, they’ve lost their meaning. The real test of transparency is not even whether you can see everything — you can’t — but instead whether you can actually do anything with what you see. Try it. Challenge those who say they’re transparent. See what happens.

Conference calls are a reality for anyone doing international business. Actually, they’re a realty for anyone doing any business, but they take on much more significance while communicating across global language and cultural barriers. These calls can be remarkably productive and cut the need for the people of The Palace (where the “core” people work) to travel way out to visit The Provinces (where the “remote” people work), but they can also cause a great deal of confusion and resentment as well. So, since I do a lot of these things I figured I’d scratch out some tips for doing con-calls well. The thoughts below are somewhat random. They are also based on my experiences living in Japan and working with teams in multiple regions of the United States and China and with people in a dozen countries in various open source development communities. See how many rules I break right in my text below. See how much I leave out entirely. A lot.

Overall Context: Communication

• To start, you must understand that a conference call is merely one tool (among many) to facilitate communication. That’s the context. And please don’t underestimate the significance of that seemly simple statement. Here’s why: even under the best of circumstances, effective communication is painfully difficult to achieve for most people. Then you layer on top the many-to-many communications that come with conference calls and things can get complex. Then add the international business bits and complexity grows significantly because you have some especially obvious challenges: language, culture, distance, and time. Also, while people navigate these barriers they are generally doing so with relatively poor telecommunications technology. Not everyone has access to sophisticated video conferencing systems (the ones that don’t blow up by adding more than a few people, I mean). So, this stuff can be hard. Everyone on the team needs to understand and accept this concept as the starting position and remain as flexible as possible to facilitate as much communication as possible.

• The successful flow of your project’s operations around the world is simply not possible without pervasive communications using email, voice, and face-to-face interactions. You need a mix of all three. And as communication via these channels takes place throughout any given day , many mistakes and misunderstandings will occur. This is perfectly natural. So, to help increase understanding, everyone needs to feel comfortable asking for clarification as frequently as necessary. Does your team encourage this behavior? It should. The only way to truly improve communication is to ask questions and iterate on answers until understanding is achieved. Go back and forth and keep going back and forth until you get it. This is the most important point people miss: communication that leads to understanding is an extremely iterative process. I can’t stress this point strongly enough. If you are not iterating then you’re communications will not resonate well and you will not be understood clearly. I’d argue this point with anyone. It’s a big deal.

• Embrace the politics. You may as well since there’s no way around it. All human interactions are political if you have more than one person in the room. I’m using “political” in the most general sense here, but I think you get my point. There are always background or non-verbal conversations going on, right? There are hierarchies, right? Power structures? Agendas? And a hundred other “human” things, I’m sure. Ok, you get it. Here’s why this is important: sometimes effective communication is simply not possible. Recognize it. Document things. Move on.

Date/Time of Conference Calls

• Be mindful of what time it is for all regions on the call before booking a meeting. Check timeanddate.com and ask people beforehand if the time and date is convenient. Don’t assume everyone lives in your town. You have colleagues working one hour away and others working seventeen hours away. In a very real sense, if you are doing international business, everyone is remote. The notion that this is the “palace” home office and those are the “provinces” out there is a perspective that thwarts communication.

• Send a date/time reminder via email if you are not using an automated calender system. Be aware of when you send your reminder, though. What time is it in China? In Japan? In the UK? In Boston? In Singapore? In Berlin? This is important because you’ll want to have an idea of when your colleagues are receiving your email in their timezone, not necessarily when you’re sending it from within your own timezone. Again, this is an exercise in shifting your thinking to understand the other guy’s view.

• If the meeting is scheduled during regular working hours for you, it’s very likely that the call is occurring during the middle of the night for some of your colleagues somewhere far away. So, don’t be rude by being late. I know you need that latte on the way to work. It’s very important. But it’s just as important to consider that it may be midnight on the other side of the planet and your colleagues are waiting for you. Also, end the call early if possible. Why take an hour when 40 minutes will do? No sense in wasting those 20 minutes. You may be able to spare the time, but those 20 minutes may be extremely expensive to the other guy.

• Rotate call times if possible so everyone occasionally shares the pain of doing conference calls at 3:00 a.m. This may seem shocking for Americans since they rarely have to experience this, but it will go a long way to improving communications if everyone knows first hand what it’s like. Plus, if only certain team members are expected to always sacrifice than communication will suffer and resentment will grow — especially if those who never sacrifice are unaware of how difficult it is to work around an inflexible schedule far away. Doing business via a thin pipe is challenging. Try it.

• Be aware that some countries change times twice a year, and this can cause confusion for countries that do not change times.

Agendas and Notes from Conference Calls

• Whoever initiates and/or manages the call should send an agenda before the call, take notes during the call, and send notes and action items after the call. Or this person can certainly assign these tasks as needed, but the point is that agendas and notes are not optional. They need to be a core communications tool.

• Agendas and notes are critical to document meetings because they help keep people on the team focused on the tasks at hand under difficult communication circumstances. People will always miss some important items during conference calls, so they should be able to check the notes and ask questions afterwards. Do you document all your meetings? Do you post the notes to shared wiki?

• Notes shouldn’t be word-for-word recordings of the meeting. Instead, they should be written as a simple outline of bullet lists highlighting the conversations, decisions, and action items. Send notes within 24 hours of the call if possible. Ask for corrections and/or additions. If the notes spark conversations via email among the team so much the better.

Slides Displayed on Conference Calls

• Slides are a dumb way to communicate. Why people use them I’ll never know. They just wreck understanding. But it seems people remains addicted. Oh, I know, a good graph displaying quality data from a spreadsheet or database can be valuable, but most slides are just text. No matter. Do your best to tolerate the slides used on conference calls.

• If you do use slides during a call, or any document, send the content to everyone before the call via email or post everything to a common wiki and send a link.

• When talking through sides, remind people what slide number you’re on frequently. Communication can decrease rapidly in even a few moments of hunting around a 50 slide deck to find where the hell the speaker is. Also, stop occasionally throughout the presentation to make sure people are on the right slide or give them time to catch up — especially if you are skipping around all over the place. People will get lost occasionally on the call because many times there will be network issues, people will lost access to shared web spaces, the call will drop entirely, or just the quality of the call will suck so bad it will force people to drop off and dial back in.

• If you are listening to a speaker talking through slides and you get lost, stop and ask where they are. Assert! Interrupt! Chances are there are others on the call who are also lost if the speaker is not prompting people frequently or if people are dealing with other challenges on the call. Or just ask another team member on instant message or via email. But it’s faster to just speak up if you can.

Call Quality of Conference Calls

• Remember that most conference call systems deliver poor quality pretty consistently. Also, some people have to access the call via their computers, which further reduces quality. And there is always a natural delay over long distance telecommunication systems that everyone has to deal with.

• Always mute your phone when you are not speaking because background noise on your end always disrupts the call for your colleagues around the world. We don’t need to hear you flush your  toilet.

• Preferably, use a good quality headset so you are always talking directly into a microphone. Alternatively, pick up the phone handset and hold it directly over your mouth. And don’t use your office speaker phone because the quality on the other end for everyone else is always bad. You’re in your office, you can pick up the damn phone.

Conference Rooms used for Conference Calls

• The use of conference rooms for conference calls that include remote team members should be avoided. The reason is simple: Conference rooms kill communication. Remote team members are at a significant disadvantage due to cross-talk in conference rooms, background noise, poor quality calling systems, and the fact that the people in conference rooms generally talk to each other and not directly into to the crappy speaker phones. It’s perfectly normal for remote people to dial into to conference room meetings and hear pretty much nothing but garbage. Those meetings are useless. And if they take place at 2:00 in the morning, they are infuriating. Instead, it’s best practice for everyone to be in their offices using phones (the wired kind are best) with high quality headsets (again, use wires if you have them).

• If one person is remote and everyone else is local then using a conference room may be convenient for the local team. However, please realize that your remote colleague on the phone rarely has a good experience. In some cases, if the call structure is such that everyone is listening to a single speaker deliver a presentation, a conference room call with a few remote people also listening may work just fine. However, if the remote people are expected to actually participate in complex discussions along with the people in the conference room, communication will suffer because the venue is clearly inferior.

• Try phone-only conference calls for your distributed team even if the majority of the team is co-located in The Palace. You’ll discover that communication across the team increases dramatically and the people in The Provinces will be able to contribute in ways they could never before.

Language & Culture Issues on Conference Calls

• Because your organization is likely globally distributed, everyone needs to slow down the rate of their speech. This means native English speakers and their non-native English speaking colleagues. It goes both ways.

• Slowing down may feel uncomfortable for native English speakers initially, but with some practice it’s easily achievable. An easy technique to help  accomplish this relatively quickly is to simply pause longer between sentences and pause longer between entire thoughts. In other words, breathe! Remember, some of your non-native English speaking colleagues listening over that poor quality conference call are probably doing some translating in their heads since English is their second language. So, slow down to increase understanding.

•  Also, native English speakers should try to not use local idioms and other specialized cultural and historical expressions since they generally don’t translate across a language/cultural barriers.

• Non-Native English speakers should also slow down their rate of speech. Remember that your English-speaking colleagues listening over that poor quality conference call may not be used to hearing their language spoken in your accent and with your alternative pronunciations. So, slow down to help increase understanding.

• Regarding language equality, native English speakers should realize that although their non-native English colleagues are speaking English the depth of their English is very thin compared to yours. So, the communications relationship is inherently unequal. This affects not only comprehension but also the rate at which communication can take place. That’s why I say slow everything down. There is no way around this in the short term. One thing native English speakers can do is take classes in the native language of their remote colleagues and experience first hand how different life looks living in the other guy’s language. Many times basic assumptions are vastly different, and that can help inject some humility into this relationship.

There’s more to say here but that’s it for now.

They sport fashionable masks in Taipei …

Be afraid, Americans, be very afraid. It’s all about fear. We are on our own.

Some reporters are perfectly transparent …

Here’s an excellent documentary on how technology liberates talent — PressPausePlay. Technology has enabled everyone (well, not everyone, but more than just the elite) to express themselves and create and distribute their content globally. But are there any down sides to this trend? Will art suffer as a result of these new easy-to-use development tools where anyone can be an artist? Some interesting opinions are articulated here. I tend to agree with the liberation of talent part of this issue on an individual level. The more art the better. But on a macro level I’m more concerned about the use of technology to constrain civil liberties and invade privacy. That’s not addressed in the film, but to me it’s the elephant in the room of any tech discussion these days. And I couldn’t get past it here. But as far as it goes, PressPausePlay is a very good view.

It’s always a challenge keeping things open …

Fascinating that Ron Paul is considered “dangerous” out there. Dangerous to who?

Are you here? Or there? The biggest problem I have with my phone is that it takes me away from here and transports me over there. It’s rude when you’re physically with people in a space, but even while alone I find when I’m poking around on the phone I completely miss what’s going on right around me.

2011 was a challenging year at best. On my end some good things happened, but a whole pile of bad stuff came down as well. Some people did really well in 2011, but there were many millions more who got slapped around for no fault of their own. That’s life. Going into 2012 in a few days feels like a time of great uncertainty. It’s best to focus on what you have and not what you don’t have. What will happen this year?

If you didn’t get the Japanese or the English then the universal image should do the trick.

Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, does a bit of analysis of President Obama: What Happened to Obama? Good column. Worth a read.

Westen outlines the failure of Obama to express any reasonable narrative from the moment he took office, whereas the president seemed pretty articulate during the campaign as a candidate, right? Hope. Change. Community. Grassroots. Rebuilding. Civil Rights. Granted, it was all bullshit, but that’s not important. The important thing is that it all basically hung together at least enough to sell millions of people to vote for him over the other guy. That’s my view, anyway, but back to Westen, who argues that Obama should have used that momentum from the campaign to then go after the people who caused the problems in the first place, like Roosevelt did, instead of putting the bad guys even more in charge of the economy. But here I think Obama’s actions are easily understood: Wall Street put Obama into office (#1 source of funding) so Obama’s putting them in charge makes perfect sense politically. You reward the source of your cash or that source dries up. Next Obama may have become too centrist, Westen says, or another possibility is that Obama is just not up for the job and his supporters simply missed his lack of experience. I think that last point is obvious (and Hillary was absolutely correct on the point as well).

Although I don’t agree with some of Westen’s comments on why Obama went wrong, I do agree entirely about why Obama’s rhetoric fails. Westen: “When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability. Whether that reflects his aversion to conflict, an aversion to conflict with potential campaign donors that today cripples both parties’ ability to govern and threatens our democracy, or both, is unclear.”

Jackpot. Imagine Alinksy missing this point? Never! Imagine Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, or Clinton with no villains? Can’t do it. They all had and used villains to a great degree throughout their stories. Heck, all those guys were villains themselves so they certainly understood the rhetorical value of demonetization. It’s used to focus attention on your point and to distract attention from your opponent’s point. Or, to cite some positive examples, consider King and Gandhi. When you read those guys you know quite clearly who’s good and who’s bad. So, how could Obama possibly have no clear, strong, personal villains grounding his rhetoric?