A profession, and a people, on eggshells

It's said that in an unhappy marriage, loud arguments frequently erupt or cold silences commence because in an unhappy marriage, everything is about everything. "Pass the salt" means, "You're a terrible cook." "I'd rather not go until Christmas Eve" means, "You hate my family." "Let's wait til next month to get buy the duvet cover" means, "You don't trust me with money!"

All of society is starting to feel like that. Now we are reading serious articles advising us on safe topics of conversation at family dinners, and we focus our human imaginations on being amusing, yet sufficiently banal that no one could object.

The most reliable way I can witness this change is from my own little world, of corporate communication. For the first 10 or 15 years that I hung around in this business—roughly the early 1990s to the mid 2000s—professional arguments were robust, common, and usually fun. These civilized wars took place first in the opinion columns and letters sections of our communication trade newsletters and at industry conferences, then on rudimentary Internet forums with names like PRSIG, and eventually in the comments section of blogs written by professional communicators.

Who does an employee want to hear from first: his or her direct supervisor, or the CEO? Should employee publications continue to publish personal stories about employees, or should strategic communicators put away childish things? Is the news release dead? Is print dead? Is upward communication dead? Is face-to-face communication dead? Is it possible to quantify the bottom-line impact of communication? Is a particular communication ethics principle worth quitting your job over?

These and dozens of other topics regularly generated sometimes noisy debates, and occasionally deafening donnybrooks characterized by accusations of, "You just set employee communication back 30 years." There were bruised feelings. There were participants so stubborn and tunnel-visioned that they might now be called "trolls." And there was seldom resolution. 

But there was something that amounted to an ongoing and evolving philosophical debate on the nature and purpose of organizational communication.

Now, unless in my own tunnel-vision, I fail to know its location, there is no such debate.

Why? 

I think people had more job security when those debates were taking place, and so were less fearful of burning a bridge and thus more willing to risk rubbing a colleague the wrong way or expressing an unpopular opinion.

And because they had a stronger connection to their employers, I think people cared more—about their institutions, and the profession they worked in—and were more inclined to the spend time and spill the blood.

But maybe more importantly, arguing about communication, back then, wasn't arguing about everything. For instance, I could (and frequently did) have an argument with Shel Holtz about our widely differing degrees of belief in technology as a solution to age-old communication ills, without either of us even thinking of broadening the argument to something like, "Well of course you would think that, because [your politics, your vanity, your function as an unthinking tool of the great oligarchy]." No. An argument about communication was an argument about communication, and it had to be won or lost—or, usually, neither—on its own merits.

Doesn't it sound like I'm describing the peculiar cultural mores of the Edwardians? But it was only 15 years ago that these debates began to dwindle in the number and diversity of debaters. They were engaged by fewer working practitioners and left mostly to pundits like me and consultants whose public engagement were a natural part of their practice.

When did the professional debate begin to blink out entirely? Maybe it was about the time that the 2008 recession scared the professional bejeezus out of everyone and left us huddled together on LinkedIn right in the middle of a U.S. presidential election that polarized the country in new ways.

In any case, I can't remember the last time I had—on this blog, or on any other—a lively exchange of ideas about communication. 

Did we stop caring? Or did we stop daring to bring anything up, for fear that we might bring everything up?

Seriously, my friends: Let's talk about it.

Comments

[Glynn]

You've identified something important about organizational life here, David. It was more than only economic change, I think. A cultural change occurred as well, and I began to see it as early as the late 1990s. It became increasingly difficult to say anything without offending someone, even the most innocuous stuff. Part of it was what I might call "organizational identity politics," but it was more complex than that, and rooted, I suspect, in the change in the "organizational contract" that started in the early 1980s.

[David Murray]

Glynn, tell me more about "organizational identity politics." There WAS the whole corporate diversity thing in the early 1990s, where everyone had to go through sensitivity training about gender, race, disability and culture. A necessary backlash, no doubt, against the years of the Mad Men stuff. But everybody got scared of new HR rules that they didn't understand—and life got confusing.

I wonder how that connects, or whether it does, with the death of the debates in communication circles—which were mostly middle-aged white folks anyway. Why did we suddenly lose our drive or our nerve to have professional conversations?

[Shel Holtz]

For what it's worth, I still see this kind of debate happening. It's confined to LinkedIn, though. Michael Rudnick and I have been going back and forth on whether intranet relaunches should focus on mobile-first. We're arguing our positions civilly. However, Facebook recently has been littered with the same shrill political BS that characterizes Facebook these days. I fear the ability to have collegial disagreements won't be long for this world.

[David Murray]

Shel, did you mean to say LinkedIn has been filled with shrill nonnsense these days!? As for that argument, I'll leave that to a couple of fellas who have been at it since communicators sat in your seminars, gaped at the screens and asked, "Is that the Internet?"

[Shel Holtz]

Yeah, that's what I meant to say.

[David Murray]

Well that seems nutty. I'm all for open argument but carrying on about politics on LinkedIn seems akin to putting your party affiliation on your resume. An employer could be forgiven for doubting your discretion.

Apparently the only place we will withhold our feelings these days is the bosom of our families!