Org chart

At some point in your journey to adulthood, you reach the point where you look at the organizations adults belong to, and you wonder what any of them have to do with anything. There they are, with their slates of officer, their elections, their banquets, their treasurers and balance sheets, their conventions and conferences, just like it mattered. Like it had anything to do with the real world. Like anything changed because of the outcome of their parliamentary procedure.

And then you become an adult, and you realize: It does matter. Not on the outside, usually, but on the inside. And on the inside is where people live. The old joke about faculty politics being so contentious because of how little is at stake? Only true from an objective point of view. For the people that have to live in the institution that is formed by faculty politics, it matters a heck of a lot.

Part of the reason I enjoy being a part of the leadership in my little corner of the academy is that I flip back and forth from the not-mattering to the mattering quite adroitly. I understand that the question of who is appointed to what committee is not of moment to the larger sweep of history. But I also understand that it is of moment to the history and future of the organization ... and that people care about the organization, because they have chosen to live within it and to accept it as a constituent of their identities.

When I was a kid, my dad belonged to the local Kiwanis Club, and I vividly remember the one year he was the officer with the responsibility of organizing some regional convention. He put us kids to work putting together name tags and checking off lists. I'll never forget running across the name Orvilline Gumm on the registration roster, the wife of some Kiwanian who possessed, still to this day, the best name I've ever come across in the wild.

I didn't know what my dad did in the Kiwanis Club, other than have lunch with a lot of other men regularly, attend the travelogues at Memorial Auditorium that the group sponsored, and go to the national convention with Mom every year. But I think I know now why he worked for them and what he got out of it. The arcane ways of organizations, the procedures and the offices and the subcommittees -- they create the world, or a very small part of it, for some number of people who voluntarily agree to live some part of their life within it. It's no wonder that people actually care.

Executive decision

Committee work is a funny thing. On the one hand, committees are notoriously unproductive. If you want nothing to get done, the best thing to do is to form a committee, am I right, people?

And yet, being on committees can also be one of the only ways to be surprised in academia. We surround ourselves with people who think like us, in our departments, and form cliques against the people who think otherwise. On a committee, though, we are forced into a relationship with people not of our choosing, people we don't know well (if we're lucky) -- and it's remarkably difficult to predict ahead of time what unlikely alliances will emerge.

When that happens, you can end up seeing people in new ways. Stereotypes and expectations fade, and people with complex principles and motivations emerge. One of the most revealing things that can happen in this kind of work is when a proposal is floated and someone unexpected rises to be its champion. Sure, sometimes people do exactly what you think they're going to do. But those times that they don't -- it's like pulling back the curtain on a reality that you never knew existed.

And as grueling and thankless as commitee work is, there are times when (believe it or not) a committee finds another way -- something the people bringing issues before them didn't see or apprehend. That's creative work. As frustrated as I can be with the glacial pace of collective action, it has a virtue that no top-down dictate can muster: When it's done, everyone agrees that something has happened, because everybody did it. Bringing something into being by fiat may be faster and less troublesome, but not everybody may buy into your assertion that the world has changed and we have a new one to live in.

I met today for the first time with the executive committee of my scholarly organization's board of directors, and I may be overly influenced by the newness of it all. But we did a couple of things today that I don't think a single person arriving in that room would have predicted. And I was stunned and gratified to find likemindedness in places where I would not have guessed. Even though most of what we discussed is still very much in process (if not in limbo), it was a good day. And for a day-long committee meeting, as you can imagine, I count myself very, very lucky.

Drinking the Kool-aid

Like most of my academic colleagues, I tend to be skeptical of business culture. But I've had some opportunities over the past year to take part in a few meetings and retreats focused on business-style vision definition and mission discernment. And they've been surprisingly helpful in moving beyond what the various organizations do -- their traditions and programs -- and toward who they are.

This week the members of my church's vestry read a book about the missions of congregations. And again, I turn out to be a bigger fan of such discussion than I could have predicted ahead of time. Maybe it's because in the final analysis, talking about organizational goals and dynamics is meta-talk, and I've always been fascinated by the meta.

Here are a couple of the ideas in the book (Behold I Do A New Thing: Transforming Communities Of Faith by Kirk Hadaway) that I'm going to keep in mind:

• Even though we tend to focus on definite, measurable goals, there are such things as diffuse, intangible goals -- and they can be legitimate. A church's goal is transforming people, for example, and the outcome of that goal can't be defined in advance.
• Just because a need exists in your population, that doesn't mean it's your organization's job to address it. Distinct organizations can recognize the intersection between their mission and the needs of their members.

On beyond e-mail

For those of us over forty, electronic mail has revolutionized our lives. We communicate more frequently, and with more clarity and accountability, than when paper or the telephone served as our primary media. Items to be read and acted upon wait patiently in inbox, yet remain accessible from almost any remote location. If we've been smart enough to move to an e-mail platform that keeps conversations together in one message stream (like Gmail) and has no attachment size limit (like Gmail), and is robustly searchable (like Gmail), then we use our e-mail account as our external brain -- it keeps track of what we decided and who we contacted and what information we shared, and it never forgets.

But it's always the case that when we adopt a tool, even one as powerful as e-mail, we become aware of its limitations. E-mail is good for broadcasting information to a group of people, but it's not good for conducting conversations among more than two people. Some are responding to earlier messages after the conversation has moved on, because their e-mail client (unlike Gmail) lists all the messages separately, and they tend to start with the oldest one and deal with them in order. Some forget to hit "reply all" and end up starting a side conversation without meaning to, then not understanding why their contribution wasn't heard by everyone (or the opposite -- they meant (or should have intended) to start a side conversation, but mistakenly (or unwisely) sent their reply to the whole group). Documents to be read and annotated, when sent by e-mail, cannot have the annotations easily collected -- the e-mail exchange ends up with multiple attached documents, all different, that someone will have to compare and sort out. Sending large documents to an e-mail list typically runs into server limitations at somebody's end, necessitating breaking apart the attachments into smaller chunks and resending (creating the potential for version confusion). And not everyone is in the practice of saving e-mail indefinitely; almost certainly for some participants the record of decisions reached, information shared, issues raised gets destroyed (or becomes difficult to find) within a relatively short period of time.

Yet all these shortcomings of e-mail represent kinds of communication that organizations need to conduct all the time. No single tool solves all of them and delivers the universality of e-mail. So we decide to live with the limitations in order to avoid asking people to learn and utilize new tools -- online workspaces, document libraries, wikis, bulletin boards.

For people of a certain age -- mine -- we feel powerfully modern asking, "could you e-mail that to me?" (or worse, "Can you e-mail that to everyone in the group?"). But it's frequently the case that our 1993 suggestion is actually a bad idea in this twenty-first-century world, where there are betters tools to address the particular communication need (i.e., "Can you share that Google document with me?", "Can you start a thread about that in our Yahoo! group?", "Can you post that on the wiki?"). Yes, these changes require the flexibility to learn new processes, something in shorter and shorter supply as we age. But why should my personal limitations be the determiner of how my organization does business?

A like-minded colleague and I have spent most of the meeting discussing effective communication (and planning to take the discussion to the next level by working on a project and grant to showcase its pedagogical implications). Here are some of the features of effective organizational communication I've gleaned from this weekend's work:

1. Effective communication is distributed. Various persons empowered with leadership and participation roles in the organization need to be given appropriate levels of ability to initiate and carry out communication directly, without passing through an administrative, staff, or technological bottleneck.
2. Effective communication is structured. Brainstorming space/time is needed, but not all space is brainstorming space/time. Structure sends us important messages about the goal of the communication, and about the nature of the process that will achieve that goal.
3. Effective communication is targeted. Not all information is needed by everyone. The more information that is relevant to me is cluttered by or buried under irrelevant information, the less likely it is that I'll absorb and be able to act on the relevant information.
4. Effective communication is cross-referenced. Links lead to complete previous discussions or decisions, which are pithily summarized in the present communication. Links lead to background information or possible models for action, which are pithily summarized in the present communication.
5. Effective communication is archived. The previous discussions, decisions, versions, etc., must be available to be referenced.
6. Effective communication is efficient. Time spent reiterating, resending, getting the new participants up to speed, going off-topic, etc., is time that is not available for doing productive work.