Care for Critical Conversations

July 8th, 2003 by Hal

I always thought that when one writes a paper it is to stand on its own. Well, that certainly wasn't the case with Lauri Koskela's and Greg Howell's paper The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete. It took me five days of postings of my commentary Notes on Underlying Theory. It appears Greg's and my paper on Foundations of Lean Construction: Linguistic Action will require a similar discussion and commentary. Please join in.

Let's start with what we mean by linguistic action. Most of the action we take happens with some movement of our body. I reach for a mug of beer and raise it to my lips swallowing it in one gulp. (Ok, only in my younger days.) We refer to this as physical action. A second type of action occurs when we put our mind to a task. Reading is an action that is accompanied by eye movements and page turning or head movements to focus on different parts of the text. The action of reading is unobservable to others. Solving a math problem and recalling a fact use similar capacities. Let's refer to these as mental actions. Many of our creative actions are a combination of these two types. For instance working with clay at a potter's wheel calls on both physical and mental capacities for an artifact to emerge from the lump of clay. A third type of action is linguistic action. It is different from the other two in that the action occurs in speaking and listening. For instance, the asking of a question is the act of questioning. Similarly, speaking an assessment is assessing. The action and the speaking (or listening) are one and the same.

There are five basic speech-acts each with variations. I'll go into more detail on each one in following postings.

Assessments
Assertions
Declarations
Requests
Promises

Without semantics and speech-acts there would be no bridges, no water treatment plants, no schools, no churches, no health clubs.

With these speech-acts humans constitute their world. While the physical matter exists independent of the observer of the matter, it doesn't exist as the matter until it is named as such and accepted by a community. (I know that is a philosophical; it's supposed to be.) For instance, a coffee table can be both a coffee table and a fortress but not at the same moment or for the same person engaged in action. Years ago, my young children would crawl under our coffee table engaging with it as their fort. It was sturdy enough that they stood on it using it as a platform of attack for their enemy (read younger brother). When we visited Grandma's house I would be a little uneasy. Grandma had a similar coffee table. Interestingly, the children never crawled under or on top of her coffee table. It's not that they were better behaved at Grandma's house. They still found ways to attack their enemies. It was only that they understood that at Grandma's house that the wooden object in the living room was a coffee table, not a fort. It is where Grandma served cookies and we all congregated for Grandpa's funny stories.

The example of the coffee table shows what it is that is distinguished is wrapped up in the actions that we engage in with that object. Please be clear about this. I am talking about semantics. Yes, it is just semantics, but that is what is so powerful about having language. Semantics allows like-minded people to coordinate with one another using speech-acts to accomplish what one can not do alone. Without semantics and speech-acts there would be no bridges, no water treatment plants, no schools, no churches, no health clubs. They are all physical constructions with significant variations to be recognized as one from the other allowing for different classes of action to occur within. In language we create them and with language we engage with each other within them.

It's time to link this to project delivery. Our success on projects calls on a facility and competence for engaging in particular kinds of critical conversations. Those conversations include:

Making assessments of risk and opportunity.
Distinguishing facts for making choices.
Making declarations for constituting a team, roles on the team, and recurring practices for engaging as team members.
And finally, the always-critical conversations of coordinating action with one another making requests and eliciting promises.

It is our inattention to these critical conversations that leads to the everyday waste, miscommunication, mis coordination, and general disappointment with project results.

Linguistic Action Perspective of Projects

Ten New Rules for Project Managers

Let’s Not Be Fooled

No Critical Path! What Is a Project Manager to Do?

CPM: Fool Me Once

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2003 at 10:44 pm and is tagged: PM practice, Language Action Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Convert this post to a PDF document.

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2 Responses to “Care for Critical Conversations”

Paulo Napolitano Says:
July 11th, 2003 at 2:51 am
Hal

Recent past is linked to the semantic ability of an individual.
Recent past is always changing our background and we are always deciding based on our technical knowledge and our background.
The past of our technical knowledge cannot be modified because he is cartesian unless someone prove,for example, that the Newton�s physical laws were wrong. If it did not happen we can say that the perception of our past technical knowledge does not change and it can be measured from the beggining until the time of decision. I like to use colours to express this as a perception. For example If we are 35 years old we can see our technical knowledge from 0 to 25 years old in a yellow colour. If we are 45 years old we can see it in the same period yellow too.The colour does not change because the perception does not change.Technical knowledge belongs to the Cartesian World.
But background is different. if we are 35 years old we can see our past from 0 to 25 years old green. if we are 45 years old we see it in a different colour because our perception has changed. The same thing happens with semantic because it belongs to the fuzzy world and it is linked to background.
we know that the time of decision is decreasing a lot so sometimes we do not have enough time to use our techynical knowledge to decide, we must use our background, and it is becoming usual today. That is the reson we need to discuss linguistic actions, but a lot of people are afraid to do this because they need to face their background and they do not know what colour or perception they will find. Face our fears is very difficult but we need to do this if we want to stay alive.
Returning to recent past I say that it has a great influence in the colour of our background. We must be aware of it when we are choosing team members to take decisions in a process
Hal congratulations for your courage
Katie Says:
July 11th, 2003 at 5:49 pm
Yup!!

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