One of office games I used to play some time ago was injecting a fictional gossip into company and looking where it comes back from. It’s like injecting contrast medium to human body to see clearly on the X-ray how it is spread over the organism. I learned several conclusions from the exercise.
1. Never underestimate the power of Mighty Gossip. People believe what they hear and don’t really cross-check information.
2. Never underestimate the spread speed of Mighty Gossip. People talk with each other and share news which looks the most interesting. You meet persons who can keep the secret much less often that you think you do.
3. Secrets can’t be kept. Tell a couple of people something and you’ll hear that (possibly adjusted) from surprisingly different people.
4. The kitchen (or the smoking room) is the center of information. Go there and you’ll learn all the secret things.
5. The higher you are the less you know. People don’t talk with you. People don’t trust you. Sorry.
All those points teach the one lesson: share all information you can among the team. Don’t try to keep secrets among few people – just go there and tell everyone. If you’re stressed about the fact of telling people, your organization isn’t probably transparent enough and as a result people don’t really trust you much.
Sure, you can find news which shouldn’t be opened to everyone and you usually close them within specific groups (e.g. management). Anyway, the bigger the group is, the greater are chances something will leak and you go back to the point when you need to make your organization more open, honest and straightforward.
Subscribe RSS feed
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe by email
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Pawel
Great piece, it certainly struck a chord with me. Working for many years in the Requirements Management area I could only hope stake holders would communicate ideas and issues to the project leads and developers as quickly as they would gossip about what they watched last night on TV or where they went drinking.
I also find it odd that people can chat “off the record” near the coffee machine about what’s going wrong, but never repeat the comments in a meeting. Only confessing up when the project is delivered that actually the need they had previously documented had changed or simply gone away! Actually no one ever admitted that –they simply blamed everyone else for mis-interpreting the requirement.
People often talk off the record about things which won’t be repeated in front of their bosses. One of reasons is natural fear of people who are “more important.” Another thing is atmosphere in the organization – when the messenger with bad news is executed you’ll never hear all of the team’s fears.
Yes, good article.
You can use gossip to your advantage also. When setting up stakeholdes for decisions or managing change into the organsaition you can use gossip as a softener, to unfreeze thinking and getnthem ready for what is coming.
Interesting perspective. I haven’t looked at gossips that way. Probably it was so because I usually had a chance (and guts) to present information directly with no risk of executing the messenger.