One of the week's main topics was the sanction imposed by Paris Saint-Germain on Lionel Messi for his absence from club training. Messi maintains that they were on a break. In his weekly column for Entremedios, Damián Fernández Pedemonte examines this situation in MDZ.
(MDZ – May 7, 2023)
Through a video, Lionel Messi apologized to Paris Saint-Germain for traveling to Saudi Arabia without the club's authorization. Messi had signed a contract to promote tourism in Saudi Arabia, a candidate country to host the 2030 World Cup. The club sanctioned the world's best player with a two-match suspension (without pay), and fans reacted angrily, dissatisfied with the club's performance and also with Messi . The player, for his part, is about to finish his contract with PSG and will look for a new team next season. A video can mitigate the unintended consequences of this incident because it is a communication issue . Whenever someone has to calculate how their words or actions will be interpreted by relevant stakeholders, because some of those interpretations could trigger negative reactions to their project, we are faced with a communication problem.
A pre-candidate from a political party makes statements that upset the supporters of the other candidate from the same party, whose support he will soon need to win the election. An oil company implements an evaluation and promotion system for its non-business technical staff, but the results are negative, forcing it to deliver this bad news to highly qualified experts who are in high demand by the competition. The IT department of an outdoor advertising company develops a project management platform that employees find overly restrictive when granting authorizations or allocating time for different tasks; they complain and circumvent the system whenever possible.
In these three examples, there are and are not communication problems . In the first, the reality to which the pre-candidate's (imaginary) statement alludes may or may not be timely, but the way it's delivered suffers from a lack of professional communication , as it fails to anticipate certain foreseeable effects or does nothing to mitigate them. The expert evaluation process is a great idea and may be well-designed, but the result triggers the problem of how to communicate it in a way that doesn't resent these highly valued staff members. It's likely that the advertising agency's IT department didn't design the process from a user experience perspective, and that's why it's now failing, due to a lack of the communication channels required by the various stakeholders.
Communication problems plague management. They can cause management to fail . Although communication problems often appear later, they stem from a lack of prior planning for this aspect. Communication is the fuel that must circulate through the complex machinery of organizations for them to function. Technical processes alone are insufficient for proper operation when they are not lubricated by effective communication.
Most political problems are political, and most business problems are business-related, but communication can help solve them. There are also problems that are inherently communication-related. A communication problem is one that can be solved through communication , or even avoided altogether. There's a type of latent contingency that doesn't become a manifest problem precisely because communication intervenes in time . The paradox, in this case, is that communication is most effective when its intervention is least conspicuous.
The communication problem also reveals a more acute relationship problem: each party likely has conflicting perceptions about the other's intentions, authority, and ability to influence. When we do consulting work, we usually distinguish between the problem that brings us in and the real problem, which is revealed when we delve deeper into the organization.
A candidate's statements may target whoever they perceive as the main obstacle to their electoral aspirations (which is often friendly fire). The difficulty in providing negative feedback may stem from a leadership problem. A top-down approach to defining a process may reflect a theory of efficiency, perhaps at odds with long-term effectiveness. The root of the problem is often the fear of the leader involved of not achieving their goals or of losing the approval of a manager.
But what is this communication that solves and prevents problems? Communication is the process of interaction between people, organizations, and technologies, through symbolic means . The quintessential communication tool is conversation , at the personal, organizational, and public levels. Quality conversations are managed and serve to manage. Communication , then, is something that is managed and something with which communication problems are managed.
