Ithuta JV

Source - Article by Bob Andrew

Good communications can make a project a great success and bad communications a project disaster.

Despite the wide range of technology to manage and control project communications, such as shareware, document management systems, active white boards, video conferencing and, of course, the perennial favourite, PowerPoint presentations, communications actually boils down to four basic attributes of people: how they talk, listen, write and read. In business and human resource management, there has been a great deal of effort to train people to become better speakers and better technical and business writers. How to listen and how to read and comprehend seem to have been overlooked.

Psychologically, our ability to speak, listen, write and read are all interrelated: our communication cognitive function is a highly complex system. The more articulate we are when we speak, the easier it becomes for someone else to listen, the better you can listen, the more effectively you will write, the better you read, the better you will speak.

Although speaking, listening, writing and reading are highly developed human skills, there is a lot we don’t know about them. It would appear that most of the work that has been done by cognitive psychologists in trying to understand these skills have been focused on educational and therapeutic aspects. Accordingly, we know how people learn to read, speak, hear and write and why they fail to do so. However, we know very little about how they comprehend what they read, how they get to say what they do to make others comprehend, how they listen and comprehend what they hear and how and why they write what they do.

The common factor in all the cognitive skills is the construction of meaning or comprehension. Psychologist Richard E. Mayer believes that there are three kinds of knowledge needed for constructing meaning: content knowledge (prior knowledge about the subject), strategic knowledge (the strategy used by the individual to understand written and verbal structures) and metacognitive knowledge (the ability of the individual to monitor his or her own understanding.

It’s probably true that we have all had the experience of reading something or listening to someone speak, where we know what all the words mean but have little idea of the meaning of what we are reading or listening to. This clearly means that there is more to understanding than just the words themselves. Other processes are required to take the meanings of the words, together with their order in the stream of text or speech, to form a more global meaning. This, clearly has much relevance to project management, for example, understanding and being able to implement a project plan, in the context of the project and its stakeholders, requires a far higher level of meaning than just understanding what a WBS or Gantt Chart are.

Understanding is not discrete, it's a continuous scale of comprehension. You don’t either understand or not understand: your understanding at one time is at a particular level, which by effort, you can improve, or by lack of effort you can retard. However well you understand something, you can still do it better. Improving your level of comprehension is by talking, listening, reading and writing.