Keith writes:
It seems to me that we need to find a way to impose some sort of discipline
on the conversations - in particular, to clearly separate
- recognition and identification of a problem
- determining whether consensus exists for a problem statement
- proposals for a solution
- feedback/comment/critique on such proposals
- determining whether consensus exists for such proposals
separation is probably needed both in message labelling and time. in
other words, it's not enough if each message is clearly labeled according
to its purpose (though this would help immensely); it's also necessary
to discourage indefinite discussion in any of these phases, and to have
clear transitions from one phase to another.
This has been tried. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores set up a company
that tried to apply the language-action model to organizational messaging,
using categories that split the messages into the "action" associated
with the message. Many of their categories match the ones you have above.
One of my old college roommates, Bud Vieira, did some work on the
system with Flores and discovered that when users self-labelled their
messages, almost everything got labelled as a comment, whatever
category language-action theory might have assigned. Interestingly,
this was true whether you were dealing with a flat organization or
a highly structured one, though for apparently different reasons.
It is possible, of course, to develop an organizational culture which
agrees upon and uses specific categories for specific types of
communication, but this a barrier to entry and likely to have some
interesting mismatches between naive interpretation of labels
and their organizational meaning.
regards,
Ted Hardie