Communicating About Communication

In a recent posting in the local paper, our local school board president and district administrator penned a lengthy piece addressing the topic of communication in our school district. Concerns about communication are certainly not unique to our small, rural district but this essential component of any effective education system has been on my mind especially of late as I have begun to tackle my summer reading pile in which I came across the following quote in a book titled Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership by Bolman and Deal:

"By increasing the flow of information, improved technology reduces uncertainty. Galbraith (1973) defines uncertainty as the difference between the information an organization has and information it needs."

Uncertainty creates problems. My immediate reaction was to ponder how this plays out in a school. In a school, uncertainty creates stress and frustration. If a teacher doesn't provide clear directions and objectives, students get stressed out and frustrated. If an administrator shares very little about upcoming events or changes and plays things close to the vest, teachers get stressed and frustrated. If there are changes in a school or problems with a student that aren't shared with parents, those parents will become stressed and frustrated. These sound like very easily corrected scenarios and, at this moment, everyone reading this certainly has a handful of suggestions ready to fire off. However, what happens when you consider the possibility that the two parties might have different definitions of what information is needed?

Technology is great and it has done amazing things for how we interact socially and professionally. However, no amount of technology can remedy a situation when you have two entities who have different definitions of what information is needed. From a school leadership standpoint, there are so many different ways to manage a building and/or district. Some approaches are more top-down while others rely on what some might label "over-communication." In both of these extremes, stress and frustration abound among staff. In the former, the frustration is due to not enough being shared while in the latter, the complaints revolve around the perceived excess of information. There are also many different approaches to communicating with parents. This is one area where technology has really taken off. There are products and platforms for sharing up-to-the-minute details about what's happening at school but if parents feel besieged by reminders, emails, phone calls, letters, bat-signals, and text updates, don't we once again have friction over what information is needed?

I guess my question to you is this: How do you communicate with your target population to figure out what the best way to communicate with them is and at what level of information sharing you should be communicating at? I don't know if there is an easy solution to this problem especially in schools where you have such a wide range of students, staff, and parents. However, if you can find this communication "sweet-spot," amazing things can happen for your school!