Larry D. Lauer

Several weeks ago I observed an extremely frustrating situation which I have been thinking about ever since. What made it worse was that I was incapable of influencing it. And as I reflected on it afterwards, I had to conclude that it was very typical of many communication situations we face in meetings every day.

There were two groups in the room. One group represented an organization about to be evaluated.  And as a part of preparing for this overall evaluation, its leaders had included a proposal for a bold new and comprehensive institution-wide internationalization program. To me, it was an extraordinary proposal with highly creative features.

The group doing the evaluating, however, chose to see this new program differently. And while they initially gave fairly high marks to the organization overall, their evaluation of this new program proposal turned very negative and dominated most of the meeting time. Rather than applaud the institution for its imaginative new initiative, the evaluators chose to review this proposal as if it was a program already in operation for several years. They focused on the absence of a fully developed institution-wide and long-term budget, a complete organization chart detailing every administrative staff position that would be needed for the total program, and specific methods for evaluating all outcomes. By the end of the meeting, all of this negativity led to an overall feeling in the room that the institution’s capacity to accomplish its overall goals was also being questioned.

On the other hand, my assessment as a listener was that this proposal to internationalize an entire institution was one of the most innovative I have seen anywhere. In fact, I thought it was so carefully thought out that it has the potential to actually achieve national distinction. To me, the start-up budget amount was clearly a strong initial commitment, and it did include a plan for  expanding resources as needed along the way. The proposal also described how all the programmatic details of organization-wide implementation would fall into place over time. I was energized and truly excited by the planners’ imagination and vision. But because the tone of the entire meeting was so negative, everyone representing the organization was depressed and demoralized in the end. I was ready to get on with implementing this new and exciting program, but everyone else was huddling after the meeting trying to understand what had just happened.

This clearly was a situation where two groups were communicating past each other, and the outcome was very disappointing. A preliminary meeting to clarify and set some guidelines might have avoided this negative outcome. Admittedly, pre-meetings are not always feasible. But preparatory conversations that try to anticipate both intended and unintended consequences can make all the difference when a constructive outcome is essential to moving forward.