With the 2010 Summit, Michael Hughes rose from First Vice President to President of STC. With that comes his very own monthly blog here on STC’s Notebook, called “Open Mike.” Today marks the second Open Mike, opening a discussion of “old guard versus new guard” and continuing the discussion on transparency.
Two themes kept coming up for me the last several weeks: old guard vs. new guard and transparency. In a way, I think they are related.
First off, let me say that I think most “this vs. that” classifications are artificial and can be off-putting in that they classify us as falling into one of two boxes. Liberal vs. conservative, modern vs. traditionalist, right brain vs. left brain, serial comma vs.—all right, that’s taking it too far. But I feel they can be useful if we think of them as we think of design tensions—end points along a dimension that we as designers need to resolve by landing at some appropriate point in between. In fact, we are all a little bit old guard and a little bit new guard, so it’s OK to talk in those terms if we are using them to understand our own inclinations and internal conflicts.
I’ve been working with others to determine how STC can use social media to be more transparent and I’ve been noticing the internal conflict this brings up in me: Controlling the message vs. initiating the conversation.
Social media is a quick and effective way to get a conversation started. But I notice that when an organization starts talking about social media, the old publication norms quickly take over. I think this is natural and we as technical communicators are especially subject to it. “Docs must be complete, docs must be accurate, docs must be reviewed.” For us it is a genetic mantra. However, the new guard part of me wants to assert in these discussions that control and social media are antithetical. But my old guard emerges and reminds me that no control leads to chaos. So we’re trying something new in our board meetings to resolve this conflict. The last five minutes are reserved for discussing what we said that can or should be discussed by board members in social media. And we ask what shouldn’t get talked about yet. Enough control to stop us from shooting ourselves in the foot, but enough leeway to stay out of the way of creativity and spontaneity.
And since I’ve already slipped into a shooting metaphor (it doesn’t take us Southern boys long) let me share my latest view of social media as an organization communication strategy. My new process model is, “Ready, fire, aim.” As a user experience designer, I have seen the positive effects when early, often crude, design ideas are shared and opened up for scrutiny and feedback. So if you’re not sure where the target is hiding, it’s not a bad strategy to fire off a round or two and see who or what it flushes out from the weeds. Then you can start to close in more purposefully.
I think this can work for organizational communication as well. Shoot your mouth off early and then listen for how you were wrong. Because there is another thing I’m noticing about social media—what it breaks, it can fix. Get the message wrong? Fix the message and communicate again and some more. This is essentially how all conversation works: open a channel and then exchange and iterate the message until a common understanding is reached.
So what’s the STC board of directors up to these days? We started working on the budget. We are doing a zero-based budget, so right now we are trying to identify the areas we think are most important and the programs we want to support. We have a strong sense of urgency because we know that communities need to do their plans and they will need to know what their funding model will be.
We approved a new task force to look for possible synergies with other organizations. Its stated mission is, “To identify to the Board of Directors best practices and opportunities that increase STC member value through ongoing dialog with related professional organizations.”
The Community Funding and Support Task Force delivered their final report to the board. Here’s a link to it. You can also find it where we post the board meeting minutes [Ed note: When they're approved]. We will be making detailed responses as we go through our budgeting process, and we will make those responses public as well.
We are sending out a knowledge-based governance survey to get input on what our members think about student members having the right to participate in Society level votes. Have an opinion on that? Please take the survey and share that opinion with us.
A final note, using social media to open organizational conversations works best when all are committed to respectful dialog. So if I’m getting any of this wrong in your opinion, I want to hear about it. Just leave the “Hey, stupid,” off.
As usual, Mike, your aim is true. Couple of observations:
You talked about shooting off your mouth and then listening to see how you’re wrong. There’s a plus side to this: sometimes the reaction will tell you that you’re resoundingly, perhaps surprisingly, right. You fired a shot into the bushes, and you hit the target. Wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t tried.
The tension between opening up the conversation and controlling the conversation is a microcosm of what’s going on in our profession. If you think that you’ll be able to control the conversation until you get it just right…Fuggedaboudit. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago.
Thanks for your openness and your insights.
Mike, thanks for making me think…. In the process of learning about what’s up with the Board, I also learned a new way to think about social media in the process. Love it. Can’t wait to see what’s next. In the mean time, I will try to remember to keep my mind open and my control-freakishness under control, if I am going to survive and thrive the wave of social media and its impact on technical communication.