THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700


[Submitted via Internet]

July 9, 1997                                             03 00050 97070902



Mr. R. Max Wideman
Wideman, R. Max
2216 West 21st Avenue
Vancouver, BC  V6L 1J5
Canada

Subject:  Calculate Cost/Benefit Communication Metrics

Ref:   a. Welch letter to Dr. Tom Landauer Jul 9, 1997
          b. Wideman letter to Welch Jul 4, 1997
          c. Communication Metrics report Mar 28, 1997
              U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Dear Max,

Attached is a letter to Tom Landauer, ref a, who is an anthropologist,
psychologist and cognitive scientist.  He wrote a book published in 1995, "The
Trouble with Computers," explaining limitations of technology on improving
management, based on his work at Bell Labs to get computers to do something
useful for human cognition, as the foundation of management effectiveness. I
tried to get him to speak at Asilomar for PMI last year, and it did not work
out.

My letter to Dr. Landauer requests studies on what Landauer calls "meaning
drift" which relates to the idea of "knowledge creep" explained in my article
in the May 96 PM Network, "New World Order Needs Old Time Religion."  The
people who need help are executives and PMs who make mistakes in
communication, but are in denial because it is such a painful prospect.  The
happier idea is that others are making mistakes and not working hard enough.
In any case I want to develop a calculation of entropy in information that
results over time and leads to all of the problems Risk Management people
worry about.  Citing general studies showing differences in understanding are
endemic to every human experience, may make it easier for stakeholders and
executives to accept that action is needed to discover and correct
communication errors before they cause cost and schedule problems, rather than
hunker down in denial mode to avoid being "second-guessed." Further research,
since you and I talked, has yielded support for efforts to add a "metric" to
communication.  A paper by the Air Force Institute of Technology cites
equations for entropy in a project information base as a direct cause of
project cost growth.  Others cite "intelligence" and "experience" as the most
effective risk management processes, although no source says how to apply
these elements.  My feeling is that Communication Metrics does this, but we
still need to calculate ROI.  As you probably know, many sources on this
subject cite your work and writings.




Any ideas you may have on making this calculation are appreciated.  Attached
to the letter to Landauer is an extract of the Corps of Engineers' report.  If
you want the published document, just let me know.  It has some appendicies
that support various points that may be of interest, but are not essential to
understanding their evalution.  Also sometimes internet transmission mangles
the format of the material, and so you may prefer the publication.  Just let
me know.  Thanks for thinking about this stuff with me.

Sincerely,

THE WELCH COMPANY



Rod Welch


Enclosures


THE WELCH COMPANY 440 Davis Court #1602 San Francisco, CA 94111-2496 415 781 5700 [Submitted via Internet] 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 Ref: a. Landauer letter to Welch Sep 9, 1996 b. Communication Metrics report Mar 28, 1997 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers c. Uncertainty Analysis, Information Entropy Model Project Management Quarterly Vol 6 No. 3, 1975 U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology 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 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. Sincerely, THE WELCH COMPANY Rod Welch Enclosures