Brick on Brick, Without a Plan

The Art of Communication

The art of communication is one that should never be left without nurture. It is a skill I have honed since childhood, when making myself heard, and hopefully understood, mattered.

I know the many times in my working life when being articulate, honest, truthful, clear, and detailed about ideas, events, or situations has been the difference between staying put and being walked out of the door with alacrity.

Conflict and the Power of Words

Conflict leers around the office or the workplace, where genuine engagement can easily slide into belittlement and being patronised. Both could be mistaken for compliments, only to be turned into something backhanded or used to upbraid you.

Besides that, there are the power plays and egos, where choosing your words carefully can significantly change the tone of an exchange. Drawing on a wealth of vocabulary with studied deployment is hardly putting the quality of your education to waste.

Finding the Right Analogy

When the going gets tough, and it usually does, finding the correct analogy to depict a situation becomes the best tool to deploy.

Consider a scenario where a user expected us to exhaust every avenue to determine why his anticipated long-running script terminated after two hours, even though nothing on the system had changed.

I posited that when a washing machine does not complete a wash cycle, you explore issues with the device, the water supply, or the connection to the mains; you do not ask for a building inspection.

That thought came to me as I finished taking a shower.

A Managerial and Political Issue

This afternoon, I was met with a complex managerial and political issue. For all my protestations about the guidelines, framework, and structure needed to govern a process that I felt left us exposed, all management wanted was for us to do something, anything, first, before addressing concerns that would fill reams of paper dating back to July last year.

After I had answered a series of questions, the activity was cherry-picked out of a larger case for correct procedure and directed towards a decision to be enforced.

In what I could only term a dare to challenge authority and face the consequences of stepping out of line, the manager, now assuming control where earlier they had failed to provide support, asked on the Microsoft Teams group chat:

The Challenge on Teams

"Everyone, anyone here unhappy with the approach?"

He might as well have said, "Anyone up for a fight? I'm here to bludgeon you."

I was dissatisfied, but this required tact, and there came the inspiration for another analogy.

The Bricklayer Analogy

"To put it another way, we are the bricklayers, and you want a house for which no architect has been engaged to design and no structural engineer has assessed. We are just putting brick on brick and hoping we end up with a shelter everyone can use."

As bricklayers, we know what houses should look like, but without a plan, a lot can go wrong. My job is to paint the picture; how you appreciate that work of art is beyond my ability to dictate, but the work has been done.

It will sink in somehow, and the message will not be lost in the morass of politicking and power plays.

Eloquence as Construction, Not Evasion

Let me be clear about one thing: eloquence here is not a tool of evasiveness. It is the means by which I explain and construct a clear narrative of the risk profile of an activity, one that could lead to penalties, the loss of professional reputation, or a negative impact on business operations and the user community.

Knowledge shared through such communication exposes the blind spots and pitfalls that are usually not taken into consideration.

Nor is this a matter of perfecting a process. There is no process. What we have is a range of assumptions that have not been properly tested or validated, yet are forced into implementation by expediency.

There is a further purpose to all this. By communicating in this way, one is also documenting the issues, so that when the matter of responsibility for any action arises, the points made earlier will show that management was informed and chose to act against the identified risks they had been asked to appreciate.

Experience Speaks for Itself

Many of us might hold junior roles in the multilayered hierarchy of the organisation, but never confuse our positions with a lack of maturity.

After 40 years in this business, where this is probably one of the least significant roles I have held in 30 years, I think I know a fair amount about management, and about being managed, and about getting a point across without equivocation.

We didn't just start at this yesterday.

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