The Power of Communication

Managing Information in Public Organizations

Doris A. Graber

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781483304847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whether it's the Internal Revenue Service or the local police department, every person's life is affected by how public organizations handle information. New technologies are inundating us with data-agencies collect, store, analyze and disseminate information. How organizations manage this information is crucial to their effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability.

It is becoming more difficult for public organizations to formulate clear messages. Political pressure from elected officials and public scrutiny make the task of managing communication even more daunting. By helping students see how communication networks must be treated within larger psychological, cultural, and mechanical contexts, Graber presents ways to construct effective channels so information is transmitted to the appropriate audiences, linking policy decisions and feedback from citizens. Blending the best of theory and practice, The Power of Communication helps both students and practitioners turn a flood tide of information into an asset, rather than a menace, to good government.

Chapter 1

The Past As Prologue for the Future: Theories and Applications

In October 1999, scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) lost track of a $125 million spacecraft—the Mars Climate Orbiter—as it approached the red planet for a landing. The reason: faulty communication. Engineers at Lockheed Martin Corporation, which had built the spacecraft to monitor the Martian climate, had calculated the thrust of the spacecraft in the nonmetric units commonly used in the United States. This important information had failed to reach the NASA scientists who had based their spacecraft steering on metric units. The result was that the spacecraft never reached its target because it was off-course by about 60 miles in its roughly 416 million mile journey. Orbiter’s precise fate has remained a mystery.

In the wake of the costly disaster, government authorities created several review committees to investigate how the error happened and to recommend procedural changes to prevent repetitions. The initial investigations identified eight factors that contributed to the loss of the craft. They include multiple communication problems such as (1) failure to provide the NASA scientists with detailed information about the positioning of the spacecraft, (2) inconsistent communication and training for project members, (3) unduly informal communication channels among project engineering groups, and (4) failure to check computer models sufficiently to detect quite obvious calculation errors.¹

The calamity resulted from a series of errors that are quite common in large organizations in which multiple units must coordinate their activities. The system used to make automatic flight calculations was unavailable during the first four months of the project because of computer file format and other glitches. This forced the navigation team to make their own calculations based on e-mail messages from the contractor. When the files became accessible, the non–metric-based data seemed anomalous, discouraging the NASA navigation team from relying on them. The team also lacked adequate information about the characteristics of the spacecraft that affected flight direction and velocity. Other teams had developed and tested the craft, but their communication with the NASA navigation team was inadequate. The failures of various teams to communicate with each other were endemic in the system. They occurred between the development and operations teams, the operations navigation and operations teams, the project management and technical teams, and the project and technical line management.

The spacecraft disaster is a graphic example of the difficulty of establishing good communication patterns in complex organizations and the serious consequences that may ensue when communication is mishandled. In the Orbiter case, the channels connecting the various teams working on the Orbiter project were not programmed to function properly. Important information available within the network did not reach people who needed it, and a number of misunderstandings among the teams involved in the Orbiter project were not detected until it was too late.

The Orbiter case also illustrates that it is possible to learn from mistakes and to take precautions to reduce the incidence of such problems. The officials who investigated the space shuttle mishap recommended that the teams involved in the project “should increase the amount of formal and informal face-to-face communications with all team elements.… should establish a routine forum for informal communication between all team members at the same time so everyone can hear what is happening.…”² In addition, the investigators stressed the importance of informing all teams fully about various deadlines that had to be met to conduct the mission successfully, with an opportunity to suggest needed revisions of the specified schedules.

Communicating in Organizations: Basic Concepts

Before we can embark on a wide-ranging study of information-management problems in complex organizations, we need to define the vocabulary that we shall be using.

All organizations generate, receive, and use data—accounts about happenings—that become information only when they are arranged in meaningful patterns.³ All transmit information internally as well as to people outside the organization through various forms of communication—the use of symbols to share information. The carefully planned and controlled steps taken to collect information and to communicate successfully constitute information management. As used in this book, the term includes both information collection and communication of information. When information becomes an organized body of thought, through management or other happenings, it constitutes knowledge, which gives those who possess it a clear perception of a particular situation.

Members of organizations communicate because they must receive and transmit information to coordinate their activities and perform their jobs. Messages are intended to change the receiver’s knowledge, attitude, or overt behavior in some predetermined manner. This is why communication has been defined as “a process in which there is some predictable relation between the message transmitted and the message received.”⁴ Communication can take many different forms, such as words, gestures, or symbols, and senders and receivers can be individuals or groups.

The renowned social scientist Harold Lasswell, in a now classic conceptualization of the communication process (grounded in the work of mathematician Claude Shannon and electrical engineer Warren Weaver) identified five major elements that deserve attention: sources, messages, channels, receivers, and effects. Scholars have subsequently added feedback as a sixth element.⁵ Communications are originated by sources, or senders. Message content, meanings, and authoritativeness vary, depending on the source. When the country’s president, based on economic data, declares that the U.S. economy is in trouble, the message carries far more weight than if the same message had come from a sports hero or movie star. Sources transmit information through messages that are designed to communicate the meanings that the sources wish to convey. The messages are sent through channels, such as telephone calls, faxes, electronic mail, letters, or stories publicized in the mass media. We shall examine this message-transmission process to pinpoint problems in obtaining sound information for transmission, formulating it into effective messages, and choosing appropriate channels for sending the message to properly selected receivers.

We shall also examine why messages often fail to produce the effects desired by the sender or have unexpected effects on behaviors, knowledge, or attitudes of the intended receivers or even on others who may encounter them. A warning by the U.S. Treasury secretary that the economy is in trouble, intended to enlighten the public about the nation’s economic status, instead may generate feelings of pessimism and despair. Investors may then sell off assets, producing unexpected stock market declines. To discover the actual consequences produced by messages, organizations need feedback. Feedback—information about the impact produced by the message and the consequences attributable to the impact—permits people to learn from their past actions and to incorporate this new knowledge into future actions. Communication systems, therefore, should be structured to elicit good feedback. Mandating acknowledgment of messages, or reports about activities, or formal impact evaluations of existing programs are examples.

Effective communication requires framing messages—encoding is the technical term—so that they are comprehensible to the receivers who decode them. Message senders must therefore know the culture and comprehension levels of receivers. It seems ill-advised, for instance, to couch welfare application forms in legal jargon that is incomprehensible to most of the people who must complete these forms. Yet this happens frequently. Throughout this book we will discuss a number of aspects of message production that enhance or detract from its effectiveness. For example, in many cases, homophily—cultural uniformity between source and receiver—makes it easier to formulate effective messages; heterophily—cultural diversity of sender and receiver—makes it harder. A Hispanic public health nurse, for example, may find it easier to advise Hispanic women about maternal health issues than a nurse drawn from a different ethnic group. Effectiveness also suffers if there are distortions in messages, delays in transmission, or various transmission channels are obstructed or unavailable.

Conflicting or unrelated messages in the transmission channels may interfere with the transmission and effects of desired messages. For example, non-emergency calls to emergency police telephone lines may block urgent messages. Extraneous messages are often called noise. Repetition of essential messages—redundancy—is commonly used as a means to compensate for noise. A simple example would be an air force pilot’s repetition of control tower landing instructions. Redundancy is time-consuming and may seem wasteful, but it may be essential for accuracy of transmission and comprehension. In normal conversations, half of the messages usually are redundant.

What do we mean by organizations? The term refers to stable groups of individuals who communicate to coordinate their work to achieve collective goals. When working collaboratively involves many people, it usually entails a division of labor and an organizational hierarchy. Division of labor within organizations may also require establishing subunits. Communication is needed to keep these subunits integrated with the larger whole.

Within hierarchies, some individuals are designated as superiors and others as subordinates. These ranking systems institutionalize inequality in organizations, even between people who may be social equals otherwise. Organizational roles strongly affect communication behavior. People designated as superiors are generally authorized to transmit messages that their subordinates are expected to heed. At the top levels, superiors are often the information managers par excellence within the organization. Control over the selection and transmission of information makes them powerful. When companies allow all members of their organization to access its information streams, as happens increasingly in the Internet age, these inequities diminish.

Because good information is crucial to the sound functioning of organizations, the organizations must devise ways to obtain it, process it, and distribute it to the appropriate people within the organization. This raises a number of information-management issues. What must be done to ensure that essential information will be available at the appropriate time? How can administrators ascertain that the information received is accurate and complete enough to manage the organization effectively? What will guarantee adequate feedback? Given the surfeit of information in an age when overabundance rather than scarcity of information is the main problem, administrators must be selective about what information they produce or gather from their environment and what information they disseminate. Information must be affordable in terms of money and effort and collection must respect the rights of people to whom the information relates. Administrators also must decide what information should be stored in organizational memories and what should be discarded after it has been used. They must develop effective internal information retrieval mechanisms for stored information.

Large organizations develop elaborate, interconnected communication channels for receiving information from their environment, for processing it to serve their purposes, and for sending internal and external messages. These channels constitute the organizational communication structure, or network, through which information flows are managed. Collecting adequate information permits organizations to make informed decisions and to get feedback about their wisdom so that corrections become possible. Exchanging information with the external environment embeds the organization in that environment.⁶

Why Information and Communication Management Is Crucial

Thanks to new technologies, the stream of data that most complex organizations collect, store, process, and use is growing steadily. Every person’s life, in good times and bad, in peace and war, is affected by the ways in which government organizations, including thousands of administrative agencies, handle these information flows. That is why the study of communication in public organizations is so vital. It is also uniquely rewarding because communication flows that are essential to the life of organizations are amenable to human control. This is the province of information and communication management. It is also the substance of this book.

Three major aspects of information and communication management will be the central focus of discussion. Following the overview in this chapter, Chapter 2 covers problems faced in the selection and collection of essential data to provide the information that government agencies need to perform their missions. This information needs to be shared widely, requiring the creation of communication channels and policies for selecting network patterns of channels. Chapters 3 and 4 therefore deal with issues involved in constructing channels for the flow of information and arranging them in networks that ensure that stakeholders in public policies are appropriately connected.

Channeling information flows can never be a purely mechanical process. The psychological and cultural context in which the flow occurs must be considered in message framing and channeling. Chapter 5 deals with these contextual aspects that reflect the fact that human nature is always a major component in public sector communications. The remaining chapters deal with issues that arise when information must be created for particular uses and transmitted to specific audiences. Chapter 6 covers the information and communication needs of government officials charged with making policy decisions. What happens between the initial selection of data and the final decision and what are the explanations? Chapter 7 concentrates on the communication that needs to take place between government officials and citizens as each constituency serves the needs of the other. Officials need to transmit information to citizens, but the reverse flow is equally important. Chapter 8 focuses both more narrowly and more broadly than the previous chapter on how government co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables, Figures, and Boxes
• Preface
• 1. The Past as Prologue for the Future: Theories and Applications
• 2. Building Information Bases: Resources and Obstacles
• 3. Channeling Bureaucratic Information Flows
• 4. Constructing Networks
• 5. Designing Climates and Accommodating Cultures
• 6. Foundations for Sound Decisions
• 7. Refocusing on Serving the Public
• 8. Public Relations and Public Information Campaigns
• 9. Vistas of a Likely Future
• Index