Black Belt Dojo

What’s theory ever done for us?

One of the many differences between mainstream PR people and their Internal Communications colleagues is an attitude to complexity and theory.  More than once I’ve heard PR’s bemoan the tendency of IC people to over-complicate things.

And not surprisingly, many IC professionals wouldn’t come within a million miles of the PR department because they think it’s populated by knuckle dragging cavemen who can’t understand anything more sophisticated than a conspiratorial phone call to a news desk and bottle of white Burgundy.

If anything this prejudice is reinforced by the annual round of letters to PR Week from seasoned hacks questioning the value of academic study in the field of communication.  It’s almost as if some parts of the profession are proud to be dumb.

However, there are some central tenets to the creed of internal communication which thankfully have a robust basis in classical communication theory. 

For example, where does the idea that line managers are the best way to communicate with staff come from?  Well, employee surveys always give us a clue, but dig out the work of Katz and Lazarsfeld from 1957 and there you have it.  We can be more easily influenced if a message is relayed to us via a trusted source.

And what about the idea that we should develop internal networks of communications ‘champions’?  Rogers’ 1983 theories on diffusion of innovation  (the one where he coined ‘early adopters’ and ‘laggards’) is on hand to explain things.  It seems that only a tiny proportion of people are moved by formal communication to embrace new things – most of us wait to see what the innovators do before we start to experiment.

This has to be important for anyone trying to introduce change at work – and there’s evidence to support it.  It’s great to know that what I do has actually been shown to work and it’s not some form of strange voodoo (although that might make it more fun occasionally).

If you think I’m showing off then I should own up that I’ve been revising for some seminars for the CIPR’s Diploma group in London.  I don’t normally spend that much time reading textbooks.

Yet it has been a refreshing experience to read up on the subject – and it’s provoked some challenging thoughts.  I’ve already spotted a couple of things I can do differently in practice.

And reading around the subject has reminded me why Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point is so good. 

Which was also a point made to me by one of the Black Belters last week.

Gladwell has managed to take some of the more obscure elements of communication theory and work them together to try to offer an answer as to why social trends or fashions take off.  Which I think is what we communications practitioners are paid to know about.  After all, who else is meant to influence the opinions and behaviours of employees?

I’ve got a lot out of it all and would certainly recommend a re-read of Gladwell.

And as for other sources?

For a good trot around the subject try “Applying Communication Theory for professional life” by Marianne Dainton and Elaine Zelley.

A more chewy read is Joep Cornelissen’s “Corporate Communication”.

And if Amazon ever deliver “Strategic Organizational Communication: Into the Twenty-First Century” by C.R. Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole I’ll let you know if it’s worth a read…

What’s worked for you?

Liam

Interesting times with the PR guys

I spent yesterday at the CIPR talking about communications theory to some of the students doing their diploma course on-line.  They atttract students from as far afield as Russia and the UAE and, although the course is mainly delivered on-line, the participants come together at the start of the program to get to know each other a little.

One of them has blogged about it all.

One of the things they have been debating on their on-line forum is whether they admire Alasdair Campbell - he used to be press secretary to Tony Blair.

If you're not British you may not know how the issue of presentation over substance has defined political debate here for the last few years.

I for one, am looking forward to reading the book because I believe that although what you do is fundamentally important - how you communicate can bring about change for good in a society.  You only have to look at messages about smoking, diet and civic values to see the point.

What interests me though is how people take a blind dislike to whatever a politician says because of their mindset rather than the substance of what is being said.  Sounds like a familiar problem to internal communicators?

Liam