OVERVIEW

Picture a group of 104 people in a room at a conference. The make up of the group is about 51% telecom heads, 45% transmission equipment manufacturers, and 5% broadcasters. The broadcasters finished their once a year presentations, yet another attempt to tell the telecom people that their network performance is and has been unsatisfactory, again (!), for the past year. One more time they didn t get it. A broadcaster cites a 3-hour service interruption and states emphatically and profoundly that they couldn t even get a telephone call acknowledging the outage until an hour after service was restored. The amount of time, energy, and passion put into attempts to gain a common understanding of service-outage would amaze and amuse even the most disinterested casual observer.

What s the problem? In a nutshell, and no pun intended, the group is suffering from a communications problem. Actually, that s not the problem. It s a symptom of more deep-seated malfunction in the practice of human behavior. Any reasonably objective and not necessarily disinterested observer would see there are several issues in the situation described. At the top of the list of issues is this simple fact: these good people weren t listening to each other. Therefore, they couldn t possibly absorb what was being said on the other side and had no chance at reaching a common understanding of and resolution of their age-old common problem(s). Well, maybe they tried, but it was an unsuccessful, feeble attempt at best, to define and reach a...