THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700
July 9, 1997
03 00050 97070901
Mr. Thomas K. Landauer
Professor
University of Colorado
Campus Box #345
Boulder, CO 80309
..
Subject:
Calculating Differences in Meaning
Dear Tom,
I have been working the past year telling my story about technology to lift
the capacity to think, remember and communicate. It is a hard sell, but I got
a contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to perform Communication
Metrics in support of a construction project they had underway. They later
reported
favorable resutls,
ref b.
.. The people who interacted with my work
wrote memos,
and the lead manager prepared a general assessment for the
contracting officer. I helped prepare language on cognitive science issues.
Unfortunately, the District Commander, who was out of the loop on this
application, cancelled my contract on the grounds he does not believe
Communication Metrics is useful. Four of his top people wrote memos saying they
wanted to use Communication Metrics, and he refused reflecting your explanation
that market conditions produce
slow innovation,
in your book "The Trouble with
Computers" (p. 203).
.. A common objection by executives is that they see business "metrics" as
providing a report to quantify performance, such as cost or schedule, which
can then be addressed, as needed. They want Communication Metrics to produce
a report on the number of mistakes that occur each month, and trends showing
communication is up 15% from last month, or is 98% effective, etc. I explain
this would be a very big report and would cause emotional trauma. People would
get mad and shun such a system, as "second-guessing." I explain my approach
is to fix mistakes as they occur by helping people make their first-guess
align with prior commitments, understandings, contract provisions, laws,
policies and so on, and this winds up improving everything. Communication
Managers act as a buffer, like computer memory cache, to help people work
through differences in interpretation, and errors that are readily revealed by
my technology, but which are debilitating to the conscious mind. It also
reveals correlations and implications (pattern recognition) that provide
opportunities for innovation which are otherwise overlooked. I call this a
"business intelligence" function performed under Risk Management principles.
.. So, rather than produce a monthly business report showing the amount of
meaning drift, which you cite in your paper on LSA, it occurred to me that
studies may have been done that quantify differences in interpretation of
information that occur in various settings, e.g., meetings, calls, documents.
Can you advise how to find such studies, or possibly you have done them
yourself, that quantify the rate of change in interpretation say in a meeting
as a function of the number of participants, the number of issues, and so on.
Two people in a meeting, may yield one result, 5 may accelerate differences in
meaning, and so on. It seems to be part of the dinner table game, where we
wisper something to our neighbor, and they pass it along. When it gets back
to the originator, the whole thing is changed. A similar result occurs in any
organization, where management is essentially a process of "guess and gossip."
The study would entail interviewing people after a meeting, and comparing
their explanations of what transpired. Possibly studies have been done
conducting the interviews immediately following an event, and at various times
afterward to track the rate of change in understanding.
.. I would like to cite a general study to support the potential for meaning
drift, and then make a calculation on the number of meetings that occur, based
on the number of meetings specified in a contract, and then calculate a value
at risk to a project which can be "saved" using my methods. The U.S. Air
Force Institute of Technology presented a paper on entropy in information, ref
c, which recognizes that cost growth in projects is a function of "disorder"
in the information base, which lends support to my approach, but I need
authority for the correlation between meaning differences and the amount of
information movement in an environment.
.. Below, I have extracted the introduction of the Corps of Engineers' report on
Communication Metrics, which may interest you. Let me know if you would like
the full report. Thanks for thinking about this.