Modern approaches to organizational communication - interview with Mark Phillips
Mark Phillips is an accomplished business leader and innovator through a range of business cycles. His experiences include start-ups, cutting-edge defense projects and senior leadership in the automotive sector. He has presented to thousands of people globally on project performance. Mark is the author of Reinventing Communication and is the editor of The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond.
We spoke to Mark to discover insights into modern organizational dynamics from the viewpoint of project management and program management.
Mark Phillips
Q1 - You’re the author of Reinventing Communication, a book that shares several ideas with Team Topologies - could you give us an overview of the Reinventing Communication book?
The central thesis of Part I of Reinventing Communication is that people are the source of everything good and everything complex in an organization and that communication is the main mesh that surrounds, binds and runs through us all. With that understanding, it goes on to explore various factors that influence communication, concentrating on how communication is received, rather than intended. Effective communication, like beauty, is entirely in the eye of the beholder or, in this case, the receiver. It dives deeper into measurable factors practitioners can use to help design effective communication environments.
When the book was written, in 2013, there were fewer measurable factors and people were less comfortable running measurements on communication. Since then, the number of tools, like corporate instant message platforms and IP based video/audio platforms, has expanded significantly. Organizations’ comfort with measuring communication and making tweaks to improve outcomes has also significantly increased.
From there, Part I proposes a metrics based approach to planning, checking and improving the communication environment. It is based on a combination of the scientific method and earned value management methods in project management, with echoes of Deming. Part I is full of real world examples and practical lists practitioners can use to improve the outcome of their projects or performance of their organizations.
Part II focuses on uncertainty. It shifts the conversation around risk and risk management to the general Orientation toward Uncertainty. The concept of orientation here is meant in the sense of Boyd’s overall theory of human behavior. “Orientation toward Uncertainty” describes how an organization or environment is designed to react to uncertainty. It stems from participants’ perception of how great a role uncertainty plays in a project environment, as well as individual factors which motivate an orientation toward control or predictability. For example, some believe there are highly predictable cause and effect relationships among people and outcomes. Others are more oriented towards accepting the complexity and potential unknowns of how people act.
An environment’s orientation toward uncertainty impacts the solutions delivered by that project environment. Environments oriented to work with a high degree of uncertainty produce different outcomes than environments oriented to work with certainty. These are often the kind of innovative outcomes or approaches needed in today’s world. Orientation toward uncertainty is a design element of a project environment. It can be understood, measured and managed to increase the probability of delivering desired solutions. Bringing the book full circle, connecting Parts I and II, measuring and managing orientation toward uncertainty can be done through communication and the design of the communication environment.
Q2 - What aspects of the Team Topologies book stand out to you? In particular, what will program managers and portfolio managers find useful?
Team Topologies is a fruitful source of discussion for senior leaders. It is easy to see every day patterns and anti-patterns well described with thought inspiring diagnoses and suggestions for improvement. It dives into key aspects of team performance that directly impact the probability of success for projects, programs and portfolios.
Project, program and portfolio managers will particularly find it useful since it provides concrete approaches to the often thorny, human interaction side of why teams and organizations behave the way they do. It helps uncover the source of many roadblocks to team performance and constraints on organizational performance, while offering ways to unblock teams and remove constraints.
Q3 - You have spoken about the need to “design our communication environment” within organizations. What does it mean to design our communications environment”?
In Team Topologies you make an excellent point that organizational design happens whether you intend for it to happen or not. The communication environment is much the same. There’s a structure to it, to the flow and impact of communications, whether you intentionally design for it or not. Like an organization design, there are always going to be elements out of our control or unexpected behaviors. But, we can at least improve outcomes by engaging with and working with elements we can seek to control, optimizing towards desired behaviors. It's never going to be perfect but it can be an ongoing work in progress with continual improvement. Like organization design, the communication environment directly impacts your flow, your probability of success and most importantly, the people in your organization.
Q4 - You recently edited the book The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance. In a world where the flow of value needs to be continuous, what are some themes that emerge from the book?
The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance (aka “The Handbook”) was intentionally designed to include a whole range of themes and approaches. It includes chapters from more than 35 authors from more than 15 countries across four continents. Pulling it all together, one could say the main theme is that practitioners have to use a variety of different approaches and tools to get the job done, depending on the circumstances and constraints of their projects.
The Handbook offers a rich source for finding the right tools for whatever circumstance you may find yourself in. This definitely includes tools for teams or organizations where the flow of value needs to be continuous. There are several chapters on this topic, including one from Allan Kelly who, I believe, has been quite influential to the ideas in Team Topologies. Allan’s chapter closes the main section of The Handbook.
The Handbook also includes topics that may seem far from the general discussion on continuous flow, but which are just as important to obtaining continuous flow. These are themes like the emotional dimension to team members, coaching, storytelling / crafting narratives, mindfulness and responding to change. There’s a nice variety of styles to the chapters as well, which reflects and speaks to the different styles different people respond to.
The Handbook ends with an Afterword exploring what it is we are actually studying when we study project performance or even improving teams for continuous flow. There’s a temptation, particularly for folks who crave certainty, to believe we are uncovering laws of human behavior and management, akin to the laws of Physics. Further along on the scale of comfort with uncertainty, there’s an intention to find, at least, consistently describable trends to human behavior, like those Economics looks for when providing counsel to policy makers. The Afterword finds those two definitions lacking and inaccurate and proposes a new way of thinking about the field of study, One which, it argues, can be extremely useful for practitioners and researchers alike.