What We’ve Got Here (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

“What we’ve got here,” the prison warden unforgettably played by Strother Martin said, “is failure to communicate.”

Lately it seems like failure to communicate is the theme of my life, although the specific incidents have been so different that I haven’t been able to detect a pattern. There have been notable failures at the office, at home, in formal communications, in face-to-face transactions. Plain, precise language is still misunderstood, or language is deliberately and unnecessarily vague. Sometimes, important information simply hasn’t been communicated at all.

Maybe I’ve just had a run of bad luck, or maybe I’m just noticing something that has always been there. Or maybe our communication skills really are getting worse. Or maybe only mine are.

My recent experiences have been frustrating and disappointing, to me and to the other parties. They have led to delays and unnecessary work, which means lost opportunities. One made me rethink my status as a longtime customer of a particular company. One may have cost me a few dollars. Fortunately, my failures to communicate haven’t been the kind that can cause lasting damage.

Last week, on the recommendation of my boss, I read an article in Fast Company magazine about Ira Chaleff’s recent book, “Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to Do Is Wrong.”

I had never heard of intelligent disobedience, but it means exactly what it sounds like: disobeying because obeying would be stupid. Or deadly.

An example is the training of guide dogs, who are first taught to obey commands and then taught to disobey if obeying would be harmful to the dog or its owner.

Another example in Chaleff’s book is one that Malcolm Gladwell also used in his 2008 bestseller “Outliers,” that of training flight crews to disobey the chain of command if the captain isn’t responding to warnings.

Gladwell wrote about pilot training in the context of cultural differences. Some cultures are highly deferential to authority; others are not. While pilot-error plane crashes happen in all cultures, they used to be far more common in cultures in which the first officer was hesitant to contradict or challenge the captain, not even in life-or-death situations.

Chaleff says empowering subordinates to exercise intelligent disobedience has similarly been used to good effect in operating rooms, another situation in which blindly following instructions can mean life or death. And he extends intelligent disobedience to risk management of all kinds. Executives and directors, he said, need to make sure they aren’t “inadvertently creating a culture that doesn’t support candor,” he said.

Intelligent disobedience within an organization is not the same as whistleblowing. In fact, Chaleff describes it as the antidote — “a place where problems can be internally corrected before there’s a need for whistleblowing.”

When Martin Winterkorn resigned as CEO of Volkswagen, he said he didn’t know that his company was turning out cars with sophisticated programming designed to defeat emissions testing. Assuming he’s telling the truth, someone failed to communicate something pretty important, right? What opportunities has VW cost itself?

Most communication failures aren’t that momentous, but fostering a culture in which the people who have to execute orders are empowered to speak can be important even in the smallest organizations doing the most routine tasks. Someone down the chain knows that people keep getting confused by something on your website. Someone knows that the voice mail directory is out of date. Someone knows about a very common complaint with your product or service — and might know a great way to fix the problem.

To get that kind of information, your corporate culture needs to encourage and reward (or, at least, not punish) timely communication, even of the intelligent disobedient type. Of course, speaking truth to power is only one side of communication; the information has to be received and acted on. But, as I’ve been reminded, we can’t act on information that we don’t have.

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.