Discussion: View Thread

Management educators et al.:

Our recent flurry of hurt feelings, unsubscribing, and
I'll-just-take-this-offline-so-there-ing has me musing about the
communication foibles of the internet and e-mail, and its variants such as
listservs. All of the above, of course, are common enough in various
listservs, and are not unique to mg-ed-dv; they have been discussed (and
joked about) a million times in a thousand forums; I won't further pursue
them generically here. But what IS interesting to me, is that, as a field,
management education and development (at least as illustrated by mg-ed-dv)is
just as subject to them as anywhere else. We don't seem to be ahead of the
curve at all in coming up to speed on using this communication tool, despite
its (obvious?) relevance to management communication. Why do you think that
is?

I suspect two answers to my question. The first is the usual critique of
e-mail communication as being sort of "real time" but sort of not. That is,
it has some of the impact of direct, face-to-face communication, without the
moderating impact that real face-to-face communication has, kind of like the
impersonal bombing of civilians from 30,000 feet in the sky. But this
aspect is common to all e-mail, and, I presume, will become less of an issue
as the rules and etiquettes of this relatively new form of communication are
more widely disseminated and accepted, and as people become more technically
proficient at it (for example, don't reply directly to a listserv to
unsubscribe and so forth). This aspect, I'm guessing will therefore go away
in time as people learn to use the media appropriately.

However, my second answer may be more specific to management development
education, and other such areas in which the "facts" are in much dispute.
Because we don't have any indisputable answers to management questions,
everything is up for grabs, and therefore, more personal than it might
otherwise be. For example, could you imagine a biologists' forum getting
up in arms about, say, cell theory? Maybe they would debate details of
biological structure, but there would likely be little discussion of whether
mammals are primarily constructed of cells. We however, debate
everything--rightly in my opinion. And usually, the only arbiter is our own
ability to shout down the opposition, which is hard to do in this medium,
unless you SPELL EVERYTHING IN CAPS, which just looks silly.

So, as educators in some fashion or other (I'm a private project management
training consultant) we need to be particularly sensitive to how e-mail and
its cousins work. Increasingly, managers will need to rely on this forum as
they manage large, distributed work teams, and communicate with their own
supervisors. 21st century managers will need to understand the impacts that
their quickly dashed-off missives have. Maybe we should be using mg-ed-dv
as a laboratory for understanding how this media works and what its
drawbacks are. We could, of course, just quit--but would that be serving
our students?

Michael S. Cook, Ph.D.
Colleague Consulting and New Millennium Learning
Laurel, Maryland, USA
Technical and management training and performance improvement
On-line management and sales training at www.newmille.com


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

As an online faculty for adult learners, we do use our classrooms
as a laboratory for learning how email communications impact
our relationships at work. I totally agree with you that this is
a whole new area of communications with different impact
issues that have to be studied and learned.

We teach the importance of using the delete button (with gusto)
to express frustration .... vs taking it out on others in a flaming
reply.

We teach the importance of waiting until we calm down before
we "say" something back to others. In person it is more difficult
to delay response, but still as important not to vent our feelings
all over another person. In email, it is easier to delay and
respond when we have calmed down.

Plus, we teach and learn from experience, the many ways people
can misunderstand, misinterpret and twist what we "say" ... and
how we do this when we "listen." Hopefully, we learn to clarify
what we say and what we hear.

So, yes, a listserv is a communications laboratory ... a great opportunity
to learn about our own communications methods, impact and to
improve it. Information we can all take back to our own courses
and use both online and onground.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Cook" <michaelscook@HOTMAIL.COM>
To: <MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 7:34 AM
Subject: Internet as communication tool


> Management educators et al.:
>
> Our recent flurry of hurt feelings, unsubscribing, and
> I'll-just-take-this-offline-so-there-ing has me musing about the
> communication foibles of the internet and e-mail, and its variants such as
> listservs. All of the above, of course, are common enough in various
> listservs, and are not unique to mg-ed-dv; they have been discussed (and
> joked about) a million times in a thousand forums; I won't further pursue
> them generically here. But what IS interesting to me, is that, as a
field,
> management education and development (at least as illustrated by
mg-ed-dv)is
> just as subject to them as anywhere else. We don't seem to be ahead of
the
> curve at all in coming up to speed on using this communication tool,
despite
> its (obvious?) relevance to management communication. Why do you think
that
> is?
>
> I suspect two answers to my question. The first is the usual critique of
> e-mail communication as being sort of "real time" but sort of not. That
is,
> it has some of the impact of direct, face-to-face communication, without
the
> moderating impact that real face-to-face communication has, kind of like
the
> impersonal bombing of civilians from 30,000 feet in the sky. But this
> aspect is common to all e-mail, and, I presume, will become less of an
issue
> as the rules and etiquettes of this relatively new form of communication
are
> more widely disseminated and accepted, and as people become more
technically
> proficient at it (for example, don't reply directly to a listserv to
> unsubscribe and so forth). This aspect, I'm guessing will therefore go
away
> in time as people learn to use the media appropriately.
>
> However, my second answer may be more specific to management development
> education, and other such areas in which the "facts" are in much dispute.
> Because we don't have any indisputable answers to management questions,
> everything is up for grabs, and therefore, more personal than it might
> otherwise be. For example, could you imagine a biologists' forum getting
> up in arms about, say, cell theory? Maybe they would debate details of
> biological structure, but there would likely be little discussion of
whether
> mammals are primarily constructed of cells. We however, debate
> everything--rightly in my opinion. And usually, the only arbiter is our
own
> ability to shout down the opposition, which is hard to do in this medium,
> unless you SPELL EVERYTHING IN CAPS, which just looks silly.
>
> So, as educators in some fashion or other (I'm a private project
management
> training consultant) we need to be particularly sensitive to how e-mail
and
> its cousins work. Increasingly, managers will need to rely on this forum
as
> they manage large, distributed work teams, and communicate with their own
> supervisors. 21st century managers will need to understand the impacts
that
> their quickly dashed-off missives have. Maybe we should be using mg-ed-dv
> as a laboratory for understanding how this media works and what its
> drawbacks are. We could, of course, just quit--but would that be serving
> our students?
>
> Michael S. Cook, Ph.D.
> Colleague Consulting and New Millennium Learning
> Laurel, Maryland, USA
> Technical and management training and performance improvement
> On-line management and sales training at www.newmille.com
>
>
> ______________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
>

On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, Michael Cook wrote many reasonable things:

> Management educators et al.:



> 21st century managers will need to understand the impacts that
> their quickly dashed-off missives have. Maybe we should be using mg-ed-dv
> as a laboratory for understanding how this media works and what its
> drawbacks are. We could, of course, just quit--but would that be serving
> our students?

I think not!

I learned SO much from that last flurry (or was it a blizzard) about
what works, what doesn't and how many cross-impacts that there can be
(probably even more than I noticed!).

I want to thank everyone who participates.

I'm not leaving.

best regards

alice

*****************************************************************
* Alice Macpherson, TQ, ID phone: (604) 599-2426 vm 9954 *
* Kwantlen University College email: alicemac@kwantlen.bc.ca *
* 12666-72nd Ave, Surrey, BC, Canada, V3W 2M8 *
* "Life Long Learning includes Everyone, All the Time" *
*****************************************************************

Michael Cook wrote:
>
> Management educators et al.:
>
> Our recent flurry of hurt feelings, unsubscribing, and
> I'll-just-take-this-offline-so-there-ing has me musing about the
> communication foibles of the internet and e-mail, and its variants such as listservs.

IMHO I think we are finding that the internet is telling us much
more about ourselves than we care to acknowledge. For a start, by
virtue of our continuing membership we are forced to read/listen
to the thoughts and desires of many people - including some who
we would perhaps not ordinarily communicate with in any form. We
do this without the benefit of visual feedback that often
clarifies meaning and intent long before the message is heard -
and I think we are facing up to the fact that this is a very
difficult thing to do.

As an educator/consultant I am far more comfortable expressing my
message (whatever it is at the time) face-to-face with
individuals and groups, and using as many visual aids as I can to
support what I'm trying to say. But using the internet I can't
do that - the best I can do is communicate along a single plain.
I must admit that in nearly ten years of presenting my message
right around the world I have never had as much difficulty as I
have when presenting it over the internet. Unfortunately I seem
to be better at transmitting my passion and not my message - but
I'm not alone there.

I think there are big lessons here for all of us. For a start,
how best can we communicate our thoughts and visions without the
benefit of whiteboards and gesticulations? And how hard is this
for managers who are today expected to be running virtual offices
and who no doubt are, or will be, having the same problems as
ourselves. What can our lessons teach them?

I would be very pleased to hear the thoughts of those subscribers
who specialise in communications. I think we're entering a field
that many of our constituents don't yet see as being the source
of greater difficulties than they deserve to be saddled with.

Phil Rutherford

On 10 Dec 99, at 13:17, Alice Macpherson wrote:


> I learned SO much from that last flurry (or was it a blizzard) about
> what works, what doesn't and how many cross-impacts that there can be
> (probably even more than I noticed!).

The internet is probably a great example of a system and how the
lack of system understanding causes problems, and how, while the
user of the system sees it as "invisible" acting incorrectly as an
impact way beyond that which most people who are just interested
in using it know about or want to know about.

I think I may work on that idea as a teaching tool.


Visit the work911.com supersite at http://www.work911.com for work related articles, or to find almost anything including lists
.

This thread looks interesting, relevant and productive. So I'll share a
few thoughts.

When I first began participating in discussion lists on the Internet
several years ago (when AOL first got started), I made a few resolutions
and have added to them since then. Here are a few of those I consider most
helpful to me.

My very first resolution was to craft my postings with care. The way I
phrased it at the time was "Fred: Assume your messages are being read by
someone who is thinking about interviewing you for a very important,
well-paying position."

Other resolutions include the following:

I try to avoid witty comebacks. Absent a face-to-face context, they're
almost sure to come off poorly.

When I feel strongly about an issue, I sometimes give a lot of thought as
to whether my response should take the form of a question or a statement.

I try to remember that my interactions with others occur in front of many
others who are watching but not participating. Those with whom I am
interacting are on display so I try to treat them with care and
respect. (I try to remember that I'm on display, too.) Publicly
humiliating or castigating someone in front of one or two or a few others
is bad enough; on the Internet, you do so in front of dozens or hundreds or
even thousands.

I pay attention to emerging and list-specific norms, what we now know as
"Netiquette" (e.g., always signing my messages with my name and e-mail
address because some programs strip off the headers and, in the case of the
Learning Organization (LO) list, always referencing the subject and the
message number in my response). Here, by the way, is where I learned NOT
to do some things as well (e.g., NOT putting large amounts of text in upper
case letters because that constitutes "shouting"; NOT using the reply
feature of my email software when replying to a digest because that burdens
my readers by inserting the entire digest in my reply; NOT rising to the
"bait" some seem to proffer; and, finally, NEVER composing and sending an
email after having several drinks.

Strident rhetoric might play well coming from an orator; on my screen it
looks a lot like the rantings of an unstable person.

Having been out here for several years, I'm pretty comfortable and
confident. So are lots of others. Many are not. Some lurk for a long
time before they work up the courage to post and they are easily
discouraged from ever posting again. A few, I suspect, lie in wait for the
"newbie's" first posting and, thanks, to archives, such assertions are
there (or not) in recorded, patterned responses.

The comment immediately above is also important: I try to keep in mind that
what I'm writing is not just being displayed, it is also being recorded. I
have a history, a record and perhaps a legacy out on the web. I, for one,
don't want to soil mine. If someone were to round up all my postings and
read them, I would want them to have two basic reactions: (1) Hey, this
guy posted some pretty good stuff, and (2) He must be an okay kind of
guy. (A third would be nice, too: Gee, he writes pretty good.)

There was a time when correspondence was an important avenue of
communication. The Internet, as a communication tool, shares some of the
features of correspondence but it is also very, very
different. Correspondence is largely private (and can be so on the
Internet, too when it is between individuals) but list postings are
terribly and sometimes embarrassingly public. Good writing skills matter
in both places but writing to someone you know and writing for many you
don't are two very different writing tasks. A letter, once mailed, belongs
to the addressee; a posting to a list seems to belong to the sender. Other
differences could be noted, too, but going on and on about them would put
me in violation of one of my other resolutions: Try to keep it as short as
possible.
--





Fred Nickols
The Distance Consulting Company
"Assistance at A Distance"
http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
nickols@worldnet.att.net
(609) 490-0095

An open response to Fred Nickols:

As a quiet member (lurker sounds too mysterious and spy-like), I congratulate
you on your comments regarding the last few days' inputs on this list. I had
many chuckles over the incredible sensitivity shown (not sure that's the
correct phrase) by others towards a comment by a "newbie." Your insightful
experiences and calm sharing of some of your 'resolutions' are much needed
and I hope widely read and digested. I have much respect for you just from
your expertise and insights into organizational behavior.

I am grading final exams now where one question deals with appropriate types
of non-emergency communications in a workgroup. I am pleased that most of my
graduate students have learned how diversity of the readership can alter
simple words in a unidimensional medium, such as e-mail, in many ways, and
that we can't take the words on face value without completing that important
step of the communications chain - verifying what the sender intended via
feedback to the sender as to how the receiver interpreted the original
message.

Thanks Fred!

PS: I sent this to the entire list to publicly support your resolutions and
encourage the members of this list to be more understanding of others'
developmental needs and unique characteristics, whatever they may be. I
believe the word is "tolerance."

**********************
Ted Rosen, Ph.D.
301/493-9570
THRosen@aol.com
http://www.homestead.com/throsen/throsen.html

Thanks to Fred Nickols for his thoughtful, excellent, and timely advice on
Internet communication. His message is posted below for those who missed it
the first time.


Larry Pate
University of Wisconsin-Madison
lpate@bus.wisc.edu

>Return-Path: owner-mg-ed-dv@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
>X-Sender: nickols@postoffice.worldnet.att.net (Unverified)
>Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 07:14:22 -0500
>Reply-To: MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
>Sender: MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
>From: nickols@WORLDNET.ATT.NET
>Subject: Re: [MG-ED-DV] Internet as communication tool
>To: MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
>
>This thread looks interesting, relevant and productive. So I'll share a
>few thoughts.
>
>When I first began participating in discussion lists on the Internet
>several years ago (when AOL first got started), I made a few resolutions
>and have added to them since then. Here are a few of those I consider most
>helpful to me.
>
>My very first resolution was to craft my postings with care. The way I
>phrased it at the time was "Fred: Assume your messages are being read by
>someone who is thinking about interviewing you for a very important,
>well-paying position."
>
>Other resolutions include the following:
>
>I try to avoid witty comebacks. Absent a face-to-face context, they're
>almost sure to come off poorly.
>
>When I feel strongly about an issue, I sometimes give a lot of thought as
>to whether my response should take the form of a question or a statement.
>
>I try to remember that my interactions with others occur in front of many
>others who are watching but not participating. Those with whom I am
>interacting are on display so I try to treat them with care and
>respect. (I try to remember that I'm on display, too.) Publicly
>humiliating or castigating someone in front of one or two or a few others
>is bad enough; on the Internet, you do so in front of dozens or hundreds or
>even thousands.
>
>I pay attention to emerging and list-specific norms, what we now know as
>"Netiquette" (e.g., always signing my messages with my name and e-mail
>address because some programs strip off the headers and, in the case of the
>Learning Organization (LO) list, always referencing the subject and the
>message number in my response). Here, by the way, is where I learned NOT
>to do some things as well (e.g., NOT putting large amounts of text in upper
>case letters because that constitutes "shouting"; NOT using the reply
>feature of my email software when replying to a digest because that burdens
>my readers by inserting the entire digest in my reply; NOT rising to the
>"bait" some seem to proffer; and, finally, NEVER composing and sending an
>email after having several drinks.
>
>Strident rhetoric might play well coming from an orator; on my screen it
>looks a lot like the rantings of an unstable person.
>
>Having been out here for several years, I'm pretty comfortable and
>confident. So are lots of others. Many are not. Some lurk for a long
>time before they work up the courage to post and they are easily
>discouraged from ever posting again. A few, I suspect, lie in wait for the
>"newbie's" first posting and, thanks, to archives, such assertions are
>there (or not) in recorded, patterned responses.
>
>The comment immediately above is also important: I try to keep in mind that
>what I'm writing is not just being displayed, it is also being recorded. I
>have a history, a record and perhaps a legacy out on the web. I, for one,
>don't want to soil mine. If someone were to round up all my postings and
>read them, I would want them to have two basic reactions: (1) Hey, this
>guy posted some pretty good stuff, and (2) He must be an okay kind of
>guy. (A third would be nice, too: Gee, he writes pretty good.)
>
>There was a time when correspondence was an important avenue of
>communication. The Internet, as a communication tool, shares some of the
>features of correspondence but it is also very, very
>different. Correspondence is largely private (and can be so on the
>Internet, too when it is between individuals) but list postings are
>terribly and sometimes embarrassingly public. Good writing skills matter
>in both places but writing to someone you know and writing for many you
>don't are two very different writing tasks. A letter, once mailed, belongs
>to the addressee; a posting to a list seems to belong to the sender. Other
>differences could be noted, too, but going on and on about them would put
>me in violation of one of my other resolutions: Try to keep it as short as
>possible.
>--
>
>
>
>
>
>Fred Nickols
>The Distance Consulting Company
>"Assistance at A Distance"
>http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
>nickols@worldnet.att.net
>(609) 490-0095
>

Bob,
People just can't stand "Democracy in action" They still want to instill
order instead of chaos. Do you suppose they feel threatened? Its like the
person with the frog growing out of the top of its head. When the doctor
asked what happened, the fog croaked, "well doc, it all began with this wart
on my -ss.
Dick Montgomery
20th Century Cooperative
http://www.chemmgrs.com
Audio Mailbox, Phone: 517 859-7512
"Our mission is to increase your sales."
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Bacal" <rbacal@ESCAPE.CA>
To: <MG-ED-DV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 11:40 PM
Subject: Re: Internet as communication tool


> On 10 Dec 99, at 13:17, Alice Macpherson wrote:
>
>
> > I learned SO much from that last flurry (or was it a blizzard) about
> > what works, what doesn't and how many cross-impacts that there can be
> > (probably even more than I noticed!).
>
> The internet is probably a great example of a system and how the
> lack of system understanding causes problems, and how, while the
> user of the system sees it as "invisible" acting incorrectly as an
> impact way beyond that which most people who are just interested
> in using it know about or want to know about.
>
> I think I may work on that idea as a teaching tool.
>
>
> Visit the work911.com supersite at http://www.work911.com for work related
articles, or to find almost anything including lists
> .
>

On 11 Dec 99, at 13:15, Dick Montgomery wrote:

> Bob,
> People just can't stand "Democracy in action" They still want to instill
> order instead of chaos. Do you suppose they feel threatened? Its like the
> person with the frog growing out of the top of its head. When the doctor
> asked what happened, the fog croaked, "well doc, it all began with this
> wart on my -ss.

No on all counts. I would hazard a guess that most management
educators who work in classrooms would NOT allow a small
number of people to ruin the experience for others by say shouting
fire, or monopolizing conversation, or going on tangents. I certainly
don't because it's my job to see that people have the best
experience possible in the classroom or on the internet.

Democracy in action doesn't mean mob rule, or ignoring basic
considerate guidelines. It also doesn't mean one can do anything
one wants particularly when one doesn't own the resources being
used (such as listservers).

When the person that runs this service states that there are basic
guidelines, what makes you think that it's a democracy in any way?

Lists are not democracies unless the owner (who puts time, energy
and resources into the list) decides to make it so. You and I have
NO rights with respect to this forum, legal or ethical.

For some reason, the Internet seems to bring out the worst in
people in terms of self-centered, I'll do what I damn well please
behavior. The irony is that the academics have moved to Internet 2,
and one reason is that the popularization of THIS internet has
resulted in it losing value for academics who were (along with the
military) the originators of Internet in the first place.


Visit the work911.com supersite at http://www.work911.com for work related articles, or to find almost anything including lists
.

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999, Ted Rosen, Ph.D. wrote (among other things):
> PS: I sent this to the entire list to publicly support your resolutions and
> encourage the members of this list to be more understanding of others'
> developmental needs and unique characteristics, whatever they may be. I
> believe the word is "tolerance."

I too support these concepts.

As a friendly amendment I might suggest that "acceptance of difference" is
a great place to go after tolerance.

best regards

alice

"Language makes it possible to be both in harmony and in conflict. Where
there is diction, there will be contradiction. There will also be the
means to resolve differences so long as the option of communication is
kept open." Kurt Baier (1958)

*****************************************************************
* Alice Macpherson, TQ, ID phone: (604) 599-2426 vm 9954 *
* Kwantlen University College email: alicemac@kwantlen.bc.ca *
* 12666-72nd Ave, Surrey, BC, Canada, V3W 2M8 *
* "Life Long Learning includes Everyone, All the Time" *
*****************************************************************

"For some reason, the Internet seems to bring out the worst in
people in terms of self-centered, I'll do what I damn well please
behavior..."

The Internet just shows us how we are...

When we take for granted that communication happens we are bound to diverge.
Alternatively, when we take for granted that rarely does communication happen we
are bound to converge. The moral being "Communication by itself does not happen,
we have to work at making it happen". Within the Internet it is rare to ask for
clarification on posted messages, we each want to say our part and move, no
wonder we encounter so many divergences in the medium...

Just a though I wanted to share.

Saludos

Esteban

esteban@CEMEX.COM (ESTEBAN TREVIÑO MUGUERZA)

Muy bien Señor. Sus palabras son excelente. Nos vemos.

Regards,

Larry Cipolla, Chairman and Director
CCI Assessment Group
The innovative leader in 360° multi-rater feedback.™ Since. 1976.

Contact us at:
7021 Comanche Court
Edina, Minnesota (USA) 55439-1077

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