Technology

Good Communication: Seeing the Forest While Managing the Trees

by Peter Vasdi

Effective communication, which often appears effortless, is actually the result of a lengthy and surprisingly complex journey—a journey during which you can easily lose your way.

Staying focussed is the key to retaining a clear picture of how to convey information to its intended audience. From start to finish, the communication journey is an administrative one and has all the branching and complexity of any large administrative process. A good tool, for example, information technology, may illuminate part of the trip, but you should beware of letting that light blind you to other, equally important, byways.

Here are some considerations that may help you to keep the entire journey in view.

The Essence of Communication

Distilled to an essence, the formula for effective communication might read:

   Documentation + Destination = Communication

The simplicity of the formula belies the complexity of the components. For example, the Documentation component involves authoring, storing, and maintaining information. The Destination component involves identifying the audience and structuring the information to penetrate the memory of each individual. The Communication component encompasses a continuum of results that might equally be achieved using formulas that reflect disciplines other than documentation.

As each variable in the formula changes, the other variables are affected. For example, you set a goal for your Communication result. If you then enlarge the Destination component, you must reduce the Documentation component. That is, to meet the needs of the broader audience, you need to simplify what you write. Conversely, if you were to enlarge the Documentation without changing your Communication goal, your potential audience (Destination) must decrease.

If you enlarge your expectation of the Communication result, you must enlarge the Documentation, or the Destination, or both. Notice that enlarging the Destination component is the most difficult, given that Destination means the memory and cognition of the information recipients, not just a set of physical mailboxes.

You cannot adjust all three elements of the communication formula independently. When different aspects of the communication process are managed by different individuals, with no panoramic guidance, a frequent mistake finds one group changing the documentation; another, the destination; and a third, the purported communication outcome. The groups then work toward their goals, unaware that at least one has become obsolete.

A successful documentation solution requires, therefore, that you choose only two challenges from among the three elements in the formula.

Driving Forces

A careful look at the quantity of documentation created and the reliance placed on it has been an eye-opener for many organizations. The Documation '96 conference held in Toronto, Canada, revealed that 90 percent of all corporate data is in the form of documentation. According to the Gartner Group, about 60 percent of the work of any corporation involves documentation in some form. Deloitte and Touche have determined that documentation effort consumes between 12 and 15 percent of any company's revenue. Based on statistics gathered by Apotex Inc., efficient document management can save companies about a thousand dollars per year per employee in lost productivity. Based on the experiences of my own consulting work at NIVA Inc. in Ottawa, Canada, an easily accessible repository of existing documents can reduce the cost of producing new material by 50 percent. These statistics are among the forces driving awareness of the importance of documentation.

Issues of Reach

Until recently, personal communication seldom extended beyond the communicator's immediate circle of influence; typically, a small audience. Nevertheless, such communication functioned adequately because interlocking circles of influence would filter and advance the information. And so society functioned.

Today, new technologies promise that each of us can communicate far beyond our immediate circle. This potential for persuasive power is one of the driving forces in the documentation revolution. For, as the Destination potential increases, the Documentation effort need not increase for the Communication potential to also increase. Remember, however, that Destination means actually reaching the minds of the intended audience, something junk mail rarely does.

Issues of Cost

Money (or the lack of it) is an important consideration in preparing documents. Current economic trends are forcing us to seriously consider what we value and how much it costs. In the recent past, documentation has typically been treated solely as an expense to be borne: a cost of doing business. Today, more and more organizations are looking at the savings that well-written and well-produced documentation can provide. Value derived justifies time and dollars spent; for example, fewer errors on the shop floor, less hand-holding with clients, fewer telephone calls for help, faster market penetration.

By taking account of such savings, documentation becomes an asset rather than an expense. Further, by analyzing existing documents and giving them a facelift or a more visible profile, organizations can leverage past efforts and spending to great advantage.

Dangers, Pitfalls, and Dead Ends

The farther you journey into the specifics of producing information, the harder it becomes to keep the documentation formula in balance. As the complexities multiply, fewer people can envision the entire map. Fewer still can retain a panoramic view after being seduced by the latest software package with its promises to make communication easy.

Documentation tools improve monthly (it seems). Meanwhile, business and technically oriented individuals are developing an awareness of the documentation formula and the elements of good communication. The improved tools appear not only to be assisting communication, but also to be teaching the presentation elements that make for better communication. Page format, style, header, and footer are no longer strange words; they elicit an image, and their function and purpose are known.

But shadows hover. The closer a tool comes to matching one person's (limited) knowledge about documentation, the more easily that person can be carried away by a particular tool's abilities. As they say, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." An individual with executive powers can buy into a technical solution, enthusiastically promoting that solution in spite of its (unavoidable) limitations. The equilibrium of the documentation formula is lost if only one element of the formula is used to justify the acquisition and implementation of a tool.

Or worse, a successful, in-process documentation/library effort might lead partially knowledgeable executives to use the importance and reputation of the project as a trump card to promote corporate-wide standardization on a given tool, assuming that the tool would somehow automate the whole process. The resulting shift in focus and funding would greatly weaken the documentation effort, undermining the return on investment and changing a potential asset into a definite expense.

Acquire a Solution Carefully

The first step in acquiring a documentation tool is to recognize that most tools cater to only one element of the documentation formula. For example, many tools concentrate only on documentation production and management. Electronic mail handles only the destination element. The communication component has not yet been structured sufficiently to acquire its own set of tools. Communication is considered more a result, rather than a force. Tools that might relate to communication are based on their ability to accumulate and measure statistics, or on game playing and multimedia.

Collaborative authoring tools that incorporate reader/reviewer feedback come the closest to linking documentation with destination and thus controlling communication. However, in spite of publicity, these tools are still in their formative stages. Much astute hands-on administration remains before they implement the documentation formula successfully.

While shopping around is fun, remember that you're looking for a complete documentation solution, not just some subset.

Unlike impulse shopping, a considered purchase takes time, and some of that time should be spent at home assessing what you already own. For example, Apotex Inc., Canada's largest pharmaceutical company, already owned Interleaf software. Apotex found that Interleaf and its subproducts such as Worldview were sufficient to enable it to reprocess, consolidate, and republish its procedural documentation with significant cost savings annually.

If you are seeking a tool that completely automates a business process, then you must thoroughly understand that business process. The solution then becomes administrative, not tool-oriented. Despite all the process management software available in the marketplace, not one will be a turnkey solution for your organization. Anything you buy will need to be customized, and, perversely, any such customization will require a process to document the custom work and the end product.

To save time and resources, unravel the process first. Then, optimize the process using your existing tools, and ensure that the results meet end-user (the audience's) requirements. Only then should you research solutions (and acquire tools) that can make individual activities in the process more efficient. Perhaps, along the way, you can also actively seek out other companies developing those tools, suggesting improvements that would improve your process and, by extension, that company's product.

Examples of Tools at Work

At a recent conference in Ottawa, a Lotus Notes Development Corporation executive was sufficiently forward-thinking to recommend that Lotus users should shift their focus from looking for a product that will meet all their requirements to looking for a tool that helps to meet their requirements. She was presenting Lotus Notes as one communications tool, not as a total communications solution.

The main strength of Lotus Notes is that it allows many people to communicate ideas and to build documents collectively in an organized way across a network. Its programmability and its ability to work in concert with other networking tools are additional strengths. Its use as a communications tool for small business is limited by the fact that it requires a significant investment in high-end hardware to run efficiently. It also requires considerable customization if it is to match a company's internal processes. Unfortunately, the documentation and on-line help are on par with most generic development-oriented software products: simple things are well described, but important, complex things are not. In effect, Notes is a software developer's tool, rather than a documentation tool.

ForeHelp is another tool that is useful for communicating information. ForeHelp enables authors to quickly structure on-line documents. Originally intended for creating MS-Windows on-line help, ForeHelp can just as easily document office procedures or product information. It can incorporate graphics, visual effects, user instructions, or any information that a company may want to distribute across a network or to other companies for on-line viewing.

The Last Hurdle

From the perspective of a professional communicator, the major drawback to most of these tools is that they are more likely to be developed by people who are enthusiastic about their sales potential than by experts in documentation and communication. An additional irony is that, to make such a tool really useful, the tool itself needs to follow the documentation formula to properly communicate its function and intent to its users.

At the moment, as evidenced at documentation-oriented trade shows, presentations of such documentation tools are frequently rather rough (to say the least). Spelling, grammar, logic, and consistency errors are rampant. On-line demonstrations distributed on diskette or CD to potential customers tend to fail in unusual ways during installation, and the meaningfulness of the installation dialogue frequently ends once complications occur. After installation, on-line help systems rarely detail the more complicated aspects of the system (a common failing of on-line help systems). In other words, most documentation tools on the market fail to show that they themselves have followed the documentation formula. For these tools to be really useful and successful, they must overcome this last hurdle.

Summary

Good documentation is frequently its own worst enemy: being good, it is invisible and goes unnoticed after its task is done. That seemingly effortless communication is achieved by those who can see beyond the results and into the past, who can see the trees as well as the forest, who are familiar with the documentation formula and who can oversee the whole while dealing with the detail, and by those who aren't blinded by partial solutions.