Communication: the Most Important Tool in the Box

What’s in most organizations’ quality tool boxes?  Ask a quality manager and they will cite you a host of examples, such as:

• Affinity diagrams
• The balanced scorecard
• Control charts
• Ishikawa, or fishbone, diagrams
• Flowcharts
• Regression analysis
• Workflow diagrams
• House of Quality

If you ask 100 quality managers, “Which tool is most important?”, you’re liable to get considerably more than 100 answers.  A sizable percentage will probably say, “It depends”, and if you were to limit the discussion to quality tools like the ones above, that might be true.  How many quality managers do you suppose would cite “the ability to communicate” as the single most important tool?

“What we got here is…failure to communicate.”
(Captain, Road Prison 36, “Cool Hand Luke”)

Think about it.  When projects don’t work, everyone has his or her theories and opinions, most of them outwardly directed.  “They did this”, or “they didn’t do that”, or “somebody dropped the ball.”

However, if they all got together to conduct a root cause analysis, they might come to the realization that theirs was a collective failure.  Maybe they didn’t speak up, and maybe they spoke too much.  They definitely didn’t listen — 98% of communicating is listening.

They didn’t take the time to verify that everyone understood everyone else, that they were all in agreement, and that the project couldn’t go forward if they weren’t.  Effective communication is an integral part of any project’s fabric.  Of all the tools you could use to plan, develop, test, and implement a project, communication is the one tool you have to have in your toolbox, and you don’t want to keep it in the box.  You have to have it out, and you have to be using it constantly.  Other tools have their place in a project but communication’s place is every place and every moment.

When projects work, it is because communication is effective, and communication is effective when it is in continuous use.  Communication is unlike any other business tool — it won’t wear out with use.  It only gets better!  And, by communicating effectively — and continuously — you will find your projects will get better, too.

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Posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 under Business Communication

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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Communication: the Most Important Tool in the Box. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com