Navigation
Search
New Comments
Handy Links
Syndication
« I have the personality of a bunny | Main | The Current State of Integrity Testing »
A Failure to Communicate
On December 14, 2007 by Jamie Madigan
Here, I want to share two quotes with you, neither of which make much sense to me. First, from the newsletter of a major management consulting firm:
Enterprise risk management is the proactive execution of a senior-management sponsored, entity-wide assessment and response to the collective risks that impact an organization's ability to maximize stake holder value. While many acknowledge that developing a leadership pool is critical for business, few see the lack of leadership or lack of succession planning as a business risk.
What? Huh? I can barely make it past the first sentence the communication barrier is so high. It's like it's being spoken by some guy on the Moon who's speaking French for some reason. And I don't speak French. I only speak a little Spanish, so my standing there and shouting "¿¡Adonde esta la biblioteca!?" over and over again isn't going to get us anywhere. Seriously, I have no idea what it is that the author is talking about there. It's business speak gone out of control.
But wait, let's look at something from the scientist part of the scientist-practitioner spectrum. Here's an excerpt from something published in the latest Journal of Applied Psychology:
Table 3 shows the correlations and descriptive statistics for the study variables. There were positive correlations between (a) supervisor-rated task performance and (b) extroversion (r = .15, p < .05) and positive moods (r = .16, p < .05). A preliminary step for HLM began with fitting a null model to estimate the total systematic variance in the dependent variable; this resulted in an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICCI) of .21.
Okay, so I happen to speak whatever language this is written in, but I imagine a lot of people who are interested in that study's general topic (the effects of being happy on job performance) don't. Or they only speak a little, so they could only haltingly ask "Please which way to the alligator station please?" in response. For most people, the message is equally ineffable.
Before I go on, I want to emphasize that I'm not singling any of these particular authors out. They're obviously very good at what they do. Better than me, certainly. And yes, the quotes are devoid of context which makes them seem more dense than they really are, but I got a point to make. And that point is that addressing the practitioner/scientist divide in I-O Psychology is a hot topic right now, and a lot of people are talking about how to make academic journals more accessible to lay people by using less esoteric language and communicating the research within a more realistic context. This is a good discussion to have, and I think that there's a lot of low hanging fruit to be captured if those who publish in the academic press can just unstraddle their preoccupation with certain styles and traditions. My part of the upcoming "Good Science Good Practice" column in TIP deals a lot with this.
But what really struck me about that first quote from the management consulting firm is that this argument can be applied to both sides of the spectrum. Granted this is partially marketing speak, but I've seen a lot of brochures, websites, and even white papers that use similar language at the expense of clarity and effectiveness. When I read stuff like that I have to either just ignore it or look for the contact information of a person I can actually talk to. Perhaps some of those crying for academics to change their tone should consider changing their own.
Existing comments:
Posted by charmayne at December 18, 2007 3:12 AM:
hmm...i appreciate that the information needs to be more accessible, but every discipline has its own language. we need things to be conscise and unambiguaous (at least the psych quote was for me :-)
maybe we need to encourage more writers across fields to synthesise knowledge for he masses, and teach them a little of the language while they're (we're) at it.
Posted by Jamie at December 18, 2007 5:59 AM:
The thing is that the I-O discipline is less homogeneous than that. The end users of the scientific research aren't just academics and grad students, they're managers, HR folks, and other professionals who probably never took a research methods or advanced stats. They need to understand and make use of the research.
Some folks that I've talked to and read do recommend a middle layer of works grounded in the original scientific research but written in a much more approachable way that doesn't worry about adhering to the styles or accommodating the scientific method at the expense of usability (e.g., including tons of info on method/population for the sake of repeatability). That makes some sense to me, and in fact it is going on. Just not enough.
Post your own comment:
