Managing Risk and Complexity through Open Communication and Teamwork

Phillip K. Tompkins

Description

Along with increased complexities in work and life in general in the twenty-first century come new and dangerous risks to workers, customers, and the general public. Drawing on decades of experience as a researcher and consultant for a range of organizations and individuals in high-risk domains, the author of this book presents a powerful theory of open communication and teamwork. This unites a range of communication practices and principles that have proven to combat risk and complexity in organizations. The book initially focuses on NASA, an organization that experiences and engages with high complexity and risk daily. As a participant-observer in the Apollo program, the author witnessed pioneering communication practices that, for example, empowered engineers with "automatic responsibility" for any technical problem they perceived. It was partly the failure to follow such protocols that resulted in the catastrophes experienced in the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, as the author shows. Using the lessons learned from the space program, the book then explores complexity and risk in medicine, aviation, the fighting of forest fires, and homelessness, again consistently finding communication practices that worked and did not work. Based on detailed research conducted over several decades, the book presents a unified theory linked to generally applicable communication practices. Case studies include the results of an international experiment of surgery conducted in ten countries that produced a highly significant reduction of deaths and infections in Africa, India, and other parts of the world, to the creation of innovative communication practices that significantly reduced risks in the US aviation industry.
Introduction

1 Pragmatism and Critical Realism in Organizational Communication

2 A Call from the Moon: Exemplary Communication Practices at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

3 Studies of Open Communication and Teamwork

4 Operating as a Team with Checklists: Reducing Complexity and Risks in Health Care

5 Fighting Fires with Smart Risks

6 Challenger, Columbia, and Risk Communication

7 Responses to Apollo, Challenger, Columbia: The Decline of the SpaceProgram

8 Our Homeless Neighbors: “At Risk” and “Risky” to the Domiciled

9 Interorganizational Risk Communication: The Aviation Safety Reporting System, STOP, and Safe2Tell

10 The Age of Participation,

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

Sujets

• Problem Solving
• Decision-Making
• Gestion et management
• Economics
• Business

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612493848
• Langue: English

Extrait

MANAGING RISK AND COMPLEXITY
THROUGH OPEN COMMUNICATION AND TEAMWORK
MANAGING RISK AND COMPLEXITY
THROUGH OPEN COMMUNICATION AND TEAMWORK
PHILLIP K. TOMPKINS
PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS, WEST LAFAYETTE, INDIANA
Copyright 2015 by Phillip K. Tompkins. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication data on file at the Library of Congress.
Paper ISBN: 978-1-55753-712-6
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-383-1
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-61249-384-8
Contents
Introduction
1 Pragmatism and Critical Realism in Organizational Communication
2 A Call from the Moon: Exemplary Communication Practices at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
3 Studies of Open Communication and Teamwork
4 Operating as a Team with Checklists: Reducing Complexity and Risks in Health Care
5 Fighting Fires with Smart Risks
6 Challenger, Columbia , and Risk Communication
7 Responses to Apollo, Challenger, Columbia: The Decline of the Space Program
8 Our Homeless Neighbors: “At Risk” and “Risky” to the Domiciled
9 Interorganizational Risk Communication: The Aviation Safety Reporting System, STOP, and Safe2Tell
10 The Age of Participation
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
Introduction
W hen surgeries fail or airplanes crash, individual human error or technical failure is often assumed to be the cause. More often than not, coworkers fail to call out a warning at a critical moment. Or misguided managers ignore the report of an urgent problem because of the pressure to meet either a deadline or a budget. Organizational cultures often create in individual members a fear of reprisal should they send bad news up the hierarchy. Top managers frequently do not appreciate the degree of complexity and risk facing people at the bottom and hold to the sexist and paternalistic domination expressed in the old adage Father Knows Best. Few of us understand how many catastrophes and fatalities have resulted simply because the message was either sent too late, misunderstood, ignored, or not sent at all. Although organizations are both at risk and risky, the first concern in a capitalist economy is that of financial risk to the company. But organizations not only take chances that impact their financial status, they also risk the well-being of their workers, customers, and the world.
In the first chapter of this book I present a theory of organization — the theory of concertive control — which was originally inspired in part by my experience as a summer faculty consultant to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in 1967 and 1968. During those years I was able to observe and study some amazing, creative, and open communication practices that worked — one criterion being that the MSFC successfully developed the Saturn V , the rocket that landed astronauts on the Moon in 1969.
I was young but trained well enough to know that I was observing some amazing communication practices, exemplary ones I shall describe in chapter 2 . I have written about those practices before, but they need restating here because I now understand them at a new and deeper level, allowing a new interpretation that helps introduce the theme of this book: managing complexity and risk through open communication and teamwork.
I have long been aware of the mathematical approach to risk analysis, an approach that helps a person or organization reduce or manage risks and uncertainties. I saw such approaches at work in NASA, of course, but with a new framework, I now better understand MSFC director Wernher von Braun’s belief that verbal communication — that is, communication with words, oral and written — is an indispensable complement to the mathematical approach and should take place prior to that approach. The second stage of the Saturn V had the ultimate in complex requirements. In chapter 2 we shall see how that rocket stage succeeded against the odds by means of exemplary, aggressive forms of open communication that I now call collectively a “risk communication system.”
My first attempt to theorize on those practices was done with the help of a colleague and former student, George Cheney. Together we developed the theory we called “concertive control” because it captured the essence of participatory, democratic decision making. I thought that if people were attracted to it, employed it, and verified it in empirical studies, it would become a grand theory of organization qua communication. Parts of concertive control theory had been tested in case studies conducted by me, graduate students, and colleagues before it was first published in a relatively complete form in 1985. 1 The coauthors were me, a professor of communication at Purdue University at that time, and George Cheney, then an assistant professor of communication at the University of Illinois, who had received his doctorate from Purdue University with me as his adviser.
The theory of concertive control was built on top of the tradition of organizational theory as we understood it, as well as some new trends — notably participation — in 1985. The year before, 1984, I had been invited to write a chapter about organizational communication for the Handbook of Rhetorical and Communication Theory edited by Carroll C. Arnold and John Waite Bowers. This would be the first time the subfield of organizational communication would have a place at the table along with traditional areas in the field of communication such as rhetorical theory and criticism, attitude change, and interpersonal, group, and mass communication. The editors assigned their functional theme to the title of my chapter as “The Functions of Human Communication in Organization.”
The essay began by examining some major challenges to the dominant paradigm in the larger area of organizational studies, involving sociology, management, and public administration. The first challenge or critique was labeled the “action” critique of reification, the treatment of abstract concepts such as society or organization as concrete objects. Organizations were then treated as objective realities within which things happened. Textbooks, for example, talked about communication as being internal or external, as if the organization was a container. It was clear to me that the field of communication could handle this criticism easily, but the refutation was made more persuasive for me by the words of a Nobel Laureate in economics, Herbert Simon, who observed that anyone treating organizations as “something other than interacting individuals” was guilty of reification. 2 A communication scholar could not have said it better. My solution to the critique of organizational communication was this:
Whether sociologists will resolve this issue is uncertain. In any case, organizational communication, by definition, should avoid the fallacy of reification by focusing on interacting individuals as the organization. Communication and organization should be conceived as synonyms: Communication constitutes organization rather than being something contained within the organization. 3
I thought this was the first time, 1984, that the constitutive argument had been made, but Simon, of course, had beaten me to it without using the word constitutive . There may have been other writers who used the word itself before then, but with the constitutive conclusion in place, the essay quoted and summarized the communication contributions of organizational and management theorists such as Henri Fayol (who will play an important role in the Epilogue), Max Weber, the Human Relations Movement, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, and Herbert A. Simon. It also summarized the existing empirical research done in organizational communication as of that publication date made memorable by George Orwell: 1984.
These sources made up the vocabulary with which Cheney and I approached the development of the theory of what we called concertive control with the constitutive assumption. In addition, my 1984 “Functions” chapter had also noted a serious power critique of organizational studies. Little or no attention was paid to the phenomenon of power at that time, so we sought to correct that problem. But because power is an amorphous concept, we had to focus on control, the communicative manifestation of power and a commodity all organizations seek — whether we like it or not. The history of organizational control had been pursued by a temporal theory of it. Our theory of concertive control, with a new dimension or infusion dealing with risk, will be presented in a condensed form in chapter 1 ; it will also be illustrated and supported by case studies in later chapters. Organizational research in general clearly suffers from too many one-night stands — a single study of an organization with a fictional name that is never visited again. In this book, whenever possible, new data points will be entered on organizations studied in the past. Observations of organizations over time allow tentative generalizations about the life cycle of several organizations considered in this book.
As we follow the development of the concertive control theory, we shall see why I have chosen to change its name to open communication and teamwork theory. My ambitions for concertive control to become a grand theory were illusory, not pragmatic. In addition, by rethinking complexity and risk, I realized that a pragmatic theory would be more valuable and realistic than a grand theory. We live in what has been pronounced both the Age of Risk and the Age of Participation, and in this book the two streams achieve a confl