The Way Things Are and What We Should Do

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In the last newsletter, I invited you to take some time in your workplace and try to categorize what you heard into the two main types or two subtypes of claims. They were:

• Claims of Fact (the way things are)
• Claims of Definition (the way we define things)
• Claims of Value (seeing things and good vs. bad (absolute values) or better vs. worse (relative value))
• Claims of Policy (what we should do)

 Judging by the mail I got, some of you were able to pick them out readily, and some had trouble hearing them. That’s because, in real life, people generally don’t organize their sentences in the form of claims (unless they are trained communicators). The words flow like thoughts and listeners, if trained or very interested, will organize the words into claims in order to process them. Said another way:

 

• A trained communicator will express claims in the simplest form to promote understanding in the listener.
• A trained listener learns to use a few techniques to help clarify and organize an untrained speaker’s words so that a clear meaning is shared between them.

The readers of this newsletter are getting the training and, judging by the email, the next thing I need to do is describe how to categorize claims.

 

 Writers master the art of creating dialog that is simple to follow and still mimics natural speech. This is so regular people can remain interested in what characters have to say, understand their meaning, and feel what the emotions that the writer intends to convey. This task takes talent, training, and practice to perfect, and I don’t intend to turn anyone into a screenwriter (not that I could). However, I CAN show you how to listen and use the inquiry model to dissect normal unscripted speech into the correct claims. Let’s start with some talk I heard this week at work:

 
 

“We thought the changes in the customer’s budget would cause a slowdown in new contracts, but they seem to be coming in faster. I think, though, we are going to keep hiring at the same rate we planned. I think we should hire at the same rate that the contracts come in.”

  These three sentences represent a typical natural language thought being expressed – maybe between two people or even in a small group. You know from experience that this just comes gushing out of people all day and that when you hear it, you process it in silence – making a number of assumptions about what the person means and what the impact is. Our assumptions usually are incorrect. Often they are not SO wrong that we have a negative effect on the company operations, but sometimes they are.

 

 First we learn to listen. The key to being a good listener is to focus on the speaker and their words. Don’t try to analyze and “mentally argue” while they are speaking. Just try to understand their perspective, and put them in the form of claims.

 

1 - New contracts are coming in faster than we expected

• Claim of quality (due to the word ‘faster’ - need clarification on what ’faster’ means)
• Need to clarify what ‘we’ means
• Need to question if why the situation is different than we expected is relevant

2 – We are going to keep hiring at the planned rate 

• Claim of fact
• Need to clarify what ‘we’ means (same ‘we’ as above?)

3 – Our hire rate should match the rate of incoming contracts

• Claim of policy (note the word ‘should’ – denotes a claim of policy)

Now the analysis:

 

#1 - With a claim of quality or definition, we try to convert it to a claim of fact by working through the value or word meanings until we agree on their specific meanings. In our example, we will ask questions about the words ‘we’ and ‘faster’ until we arrive at a statement like this:

• New contracts are coming in at the rate of $300K per week
• Our department manpower budget was set for the work associated with a $200K per week rate

By using this method (more on that next time), we create two claims of fact to examine.

 

To examine a claim of fact, we ask just two questions (formally known as "raising issues"):

• How would we test the claim to know if it is true? (what evidence will we accept?)
• Does it pass that test? (is there adeuquate evidence?)

Going back to our example, how would we test the claim that new contracts are coming in at the$ 300K rate? Well, we could ask accounting if we are averaging that rate over some period (like 90 days), or we could ask them what a fair test is to determine that. We would be wise to ask them to use the same test as we used to determine that the old rate was $200K. Let’s say that the calculation accounting always uses is to take total sales for the quarter and divide by 13 (weeks in a quarter) to get the weekly rate. That is the test we will use.


Next, we have to determine if the claim passes that test. Let’s say that when accounting makes the calculation, we find that the average is $291K for that last two quarters. We decide to agree that it passes the test and now we know that the incoming contract dollar rate is $291K. If it wasn’t true – if the actual number was still at the planned rate – then we might stop here and wonder” how do these rumors get started, anyways?” Let’s say you didn’t like my suggested test, and I don’t like yours. We might agree to seek someone out that knows more about it than we do about how to determine these things


The second claim of fact is tested using the same two questions, So How would we test to determine is the manpower budget was set to handle $200K per week? Easy – that one we could probably look up. When we look it up, we find that is correct. We were set to handle $200K per week. So the WAY THINGS ARE is that there is a difference between the budgeted and actual amount. At this point, that is all we know.

 

 

 

#2 – “We are going to hire at the planned rate” is another claim of fact, so we test it the same way. First, clarify to see that ‘we’ in this claim is the same ‘we’ that is planned to hire for $200k per week and let’s say that it is our department. How would we test it to know if we are going to hire at that rate? I would want to ask the person that knows the rate at which our department (the ‘we’) is hiring and plans to hire. Let’s say that we decide that it is our boss. We ask the boss and they say we are adding people at the rate we planned – the $200K rate. So the WAY THINGS ARE is that there is a difference between the budgeted and actual amount of new contracts coming in and we are hiring at the lower rate.

 

 

 

#3 – The last claim is a claim of policy and that is the trickiest kind, although we have done some of the legwork already. A claim of policy has five questions associated with it. They are:

• What is the problem exactly?
• How big an impact does the problem have?
• What is it about our standard operation that keeps the problem from being solved already?
• What is the proposed solution and does it solve the problem?
• Does the solution cause problems?

Let’s step through these:

 

What is the problem exactly?
What we know is that contract dollars are coming in 30% faster than we planned. The unplanned work could outstrip our ability to perform it.

 

How big an impact does the problem have?
We don’t know, but at the worst it could cause us to deliver late, or to be rushed and inject defects into the system. All of the problems that come with dinge overwhelmed. At best, we can handle the work within the current hiring plan (if the work is different than usual and requires less resources OR if we find ways to do the work more efficiently than before OR if the new employees we hire come up to speed quickly OR…).

 

What is it about our standard operation that keeps the problem from being solved already?
There is no automated linkage that would make us review the hiring plan as part of reviewing incoming contract dollars.

 

What is the proposed solution and does it solve the problem?
We propose increasing the rate of hire to match the rate of incoming contract dollars UNLESS we analyze the cause deviation from planned hiring and find that somehow it is unwarranted.

 

Does the solution cause problems?
The solution would cause problems if we hired more people than we need to do the incoming work.

 

RECAP – this week we learned that:

• Listening is the first key and remaining objective is the second key. Listen to ensure that the issue is important and work through the issue objectively to ensure that it is clearly understood.
• Natural speech doesn’t present claims on a silver platter, like a TV script might. You have to listen and then re-phrase definitions, values, and qualities to develop a common understanding of them. 
• The resolution of these issues can happen very quickly if you know how to work this model. It is a model called the SPIRAL model, for reasons that will become obvious in a couple more newsletters.
• Claims of Fact have just two questions that need to be answered in order to resolve them.
• Claims of Policy have five questions to resolve them. 

NEXT TIME - In the course of resolving the issues above, we asked people for information and they gave it to us. When you ask for information to resolve a claim, the information is formally called “evidence”. Next time, we will learn:

• What questions to ask to resolve claims of quality and claims of definition?
• What are the three kinds of evidence that we use and what are the rules for evaluating its strength?

 

 

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