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C. ;onversationa, Conventionsand Participation in Cross-FunctionalDesignTeams Eleanor Wynn
David O. Novick
Ziba Design 305 N.W. 21st Avenue Portland, OR 97209 USA Tel/fax: +1 (503) 656-7108
[email protected]
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology P.O. Box 91000 Portland, OR 97291 - 1000 U S A Tel: +1 (503) 690-1121 Fax: +1 (503) 690-1334
[email protected] The consequences for organizations of undetected breakdowns in system development are clear: teams may design systems that are thought to be understood, when in fact the views of team members (a) differ in significant ways or (b) have been effectively unheard. This suggests that organizations should not assume that simply assigning people to "participatory" teams will result in automatic improvements in process and outcome; such teams have communicative problems that the members will not have encountered in their "home" organizations.
The benefit of participatory teams--their cross-functional and diverse nature--presents a converse challenge to communicate in a common "language", using shared conventions, against the backdrops of an unfamiliar speech context and the tacit organizational social structure. This paper employs constructs from several language-use theories to identify mismatched conventions and consequent confusion that impede or inhibit full participation in settings like system design or work-process redesign.
The impact of the issues we point out may vary greatly according to organizational context, level of commitment to project goals, and a wide range of facilitative and process skills. We can imagine scenarios where differences are resolved over the course of time and others where a team is incapacitated by them. The real point of raising the issue is that the phenomena form a random and unaccounted-for variable in the dynamics of any kind of participatory system design or cross-functional organizational process change. Managers responsible for technical design might otherwise assume that teams they form consist of homogeneous, socially undifferentiated participants working harmoniously toward common goals.
INTRODUCTION Several years ago we became concerned with how participatory design actually works, given what we know about differences in communicative styles [35, 26, 25] and the shared and implicit nature of the management of conversation [28, 29, 12]. The original premise was to look at software engineers interacting with prospective system users. We expanded this concern to include conversational practices in cross-functional teams, because the issues are basically the same. Our hypothesis was that background differences and assumptions about the importance of technical knowledge, organizational role, and other social characteristics and expectations of participants [35] could easily override the participatory intent, by means of miscommunications, unexplored conflicts of assumptions, and preference for modes of interaction that would inhibit the production, in the conversation, of situated expertise by nontechnical or operational level participants. These breakdowns may be noticed and informally articulated by participants, but they are generally inaccessible to member analysis because they (1) go by very quickly; (2) are embedded in the specific form of locutions; and (3) incorporate tacit assumptions about social relationships which are taken as givens.
As researchers from different backgrounds (linguistic anthropology and artificial intelligence) we shared an interest in the problem, as well as a set of theoretical frameworks and tools for conversation analysis. Using tools already developed in the conversation analysis literature, we are developing a method specifically applicable to the problem domain of system development conversations and workflow change using cross-functional teams. Our first cut is to identify the sources of mismatch between participants' "worlds" or communities of practice [23]. The current paper identifies some of the constructs we used in explicating our understanding of what occurred during a videotaped meeting of a cross-functional team working to restructure workflow in a technical service domain. We use examples from our data to illustrate the constructs. In reviewing the video recordings we sought to identify principles that contrasted with what we saw as breakdowns, given the premises that (1) all participants have valid knowledge to share, and (2) the purpose of the situation was to elicit all perspectives.
At present it is possible only to point to the existence and tacit nature of the breakdowns, as well as account for them in a general framework of differing communicative conventions, not to prescribe fixes. The set of cross-functional team projects--of which this meeting was a single instance--was deemed successful overall, compared to prior experience in the same organization. However, not every team in the program was equally successful, and some were disbanded after a short life. Permission to make digital/hard copies of all or part of this material for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copyright is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires specific permission and/or fee. COOCS 95 Milpitas CA USA © 1995 ACM 0-89791-706-5/95/08..$3.50
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The Problem Organizational and technical system design, business process reengineering, and workplace improvement efforts are all ideally participant-based. Cross-functional teams are increasingly common in a range of such efforts. The notion of participatory design has moved from an "alternative" or progressive position such as that supported in Participatory Design Conferences and on innovative system development methodologies [11, 39], to mainstream corporate techniques for quickly airing and solving complex problems and implementing radical changes of work procedure and organizational structure [15, 30, 19].
These teams tend to involve participants from different groups, either within a single organization, or between a client organization and providers of reengineering or design services. The purpose of participant-based or cross-functional groups is to take advantage of the variety of people's experiences, perspectives, detailed knowledge and specific training, so that the outcome serves the full range of organizational purposes, rather than emphasize limited perspectives. Another oft-cited benefit of crossfunctional teams is "buy-in" to changes, forestalling organizational "resistance" to change.
may well be one of the reasons for carrying out BPR in the first place. Catch-22 ? [33]
Perspective Differences and their Effects Perspective may be a product of experience in a domain, organizational rank or responsibility, education or profession, and role differences that affect the perception of authoritative knowledge [17, 35, 36], the manner of approaching a topic, specific language, and the sense of how the conversation is meaningfully ordered as a cooperative event.
Designs with limited perspective often result in further redesign efforts, in work-arounds to the new processes, or in entropy toward practices that people working in various parts of an organization have developed as informal ways of coping with unavoidable contradictions [16, 5, 22, 4].
Participants with different backgrounds and perspectives tend to use different "languages" and conversational conventions, which serve as a context for the meanings they are trying to put across. Following our previous outline of the problem [27, 25], we propose that these background differences, as reflected in assumptions and conversational practices, can undermine the participatory purpose in subtle ways that participants may experience but do not articulate easily.
The cross-functional team, a valid and practical technique for disclosing authentic organizational problems and for anticipating and avoiding costly redesigns, introduces a corresponding dilemma. The very perspective differences that constitute the value-added of such groups are also a source of confused conventions within the structure of group discourse that can short-circuit the purpose, lead to standstills, and allow important contributions to be overlooked (cf. [2]).
An effect we originally anticipated was that organizational or technical background would constrain either the production or the perception of useful solutions which arise from situated modes of thought and expression available in the conversation. These contributions might fail for reasons unrelated to substantive "content." In the case of system design conversation, the person with technical knowledge would implicitly draw the relevance boundary of the conversation, with the result that the organization is described as more logically structured and less constrained by non-rational issues than is virtually always the case [25, 35].
The group itself embodies a preexisting set of cultural and subcultural behaviors (what Heidegger calls the "already always listening") typical of the old order of the organization. Normative sessions intended to enculturate the group to new ways of interacting may address relatively minor issues (psychologically "fair" behaviors, such as "I-statements") and sidestep real issues of power and authority in the meetings, as we saw in the data for this paper. Facilitators and moderators are also subject to the power structure, may be concerned about the group's output as a reflection of their own performance, and can unintentionally act as a conservative drag on the group's process. Exploration, required for a novel exercise and discovery, is by definition "inefficient" at the outset.
Some people thus have the right to recognize validity in a conversational contribution, from their perspective, while others depend upon having their contributions recognized, or translated by recognition, into valid contributions. We presume those people doing the validating to have in some way more power or authority in the situation. This power is exercised subtly and indeed unobtrusively in the process of discourse.
A practitioner's statement from the Business Process Reengineering Internet discussion list summarizes in the language of experience what we hope to explore in more detail in the analyses contained in this and future papers:
The Study The study develops a notion of miscommunication based on differing conventions of conversation that are linked to differences in working life backgrounds, or conversely to uncertainties about how to manage a conversation in a new and emergent cultural setting. We look for evidence for the notion in an extended sample of workgroup interaction.The data we use were videotaped during a meeting of a workplace redesign group at a regional telephone company in 1993. The meeting included representatives of the various operational and territorial groups as well as facilitators from an R&D group. Other studies of like processes include [8], [6] and [21].
I have chosen to consider the way in which the BPR team works together as the major element influencing success. In other words, I am choosing not to focus on what is done, but more on how it is done. Some of this is, in practice, problematic. It asks the management team to behave in a facilitative manner, possibly against the existing culture - which is often based on command/control styles of management. ...They can feel exposed to their staff and to each other. Also, there are likely to be all sorts of issues in the management team that undermine true t~amwork. Interpersonal issues, alliances and sub-groups, rivalries, biases, power struggles for example. I usually have to start with senior management and, when I go beyond glib agreements, find that there are usually real differences in opinion even as to what the BPR exercise is for.
Our analysis of the discourse in the meeting reveals several key differences within the group affecting the production and perception of appropriate discourse. We also noted ambiguities and differences in operational assumptions about the definition of the meeting situation and the organization itself. The key findings from this research, keeping in mind that groups are likely to differ, were that:
Arguably, the dynamics of the management team are reflected down through the organisation structure and similar issues can be experienced between staff in the various functional areas that may be i n v o l v e d in the exercise. In short, in order to achieve full success in BPR, people may need to begin the process of behaving differently. Bringing about this new behaviour
The participatory or cross-functional meeting presents a novel situation where some members are not clear about their rights or personal appropriateness in the conversation;
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• The psychologistic "norms" session at the beginning of many facilitated meetings bypasses the real issues of power and politics;
recognitions of rank and power, other specific social roles, rights and obligations, politeness, and deference.
• Conversational conventions based in professional or managerial styles of discourse tended to lead to greater perceptions of relevance (judged by uptake discourse) partly because of the speakers' explicit connection of discourse to topic;
In situations of stable cross-cultural communication, there are conventions to manage exchange across boundaries [13]. The conventions affect the choice of topic and of locutions employed in specific contexts and guide the conversation to conform to expectations for managing the differences. Indeed, the language of business is a classic example of a generalized set of conventions or linguafranca for handling situations across subcultural boundaries, in terms of politeness and topical conventions, while maintaining distance with respect to interests. These conventions tend to handle commonly occurring situations or formal encounters rather than ontological exercises such as redefining a business or a new way of working through information systems.
•
Conversational conventions based in field operations discourse styles tended to tell stories which were connected to a topic only by inference and were easily "missed" or dismissed;
• The implicit connection was perceived, as evidenced in off-line break conversations. But since it didn't conform to meeting style, this repair was not performed in the meeting itself; •
Perceived relevance is therefore a function of conversational convention and speech style which in turn is a function of role and experience or background;
• There was confusion about the nature of the speech event in progress, which led to conflict between real interests and the nominal schedule. Content would have been sacrificed had participants not repeatedly retaken the floor with the overtime topic; •
There was a conflict between fully exploring the topic and coming to closure with action items;
• There were several occasions where multiple models or topic definitions critical to the purpose were allowed to go on separate tracks undifferentiated, specifically the topic of "communication" and different implied models of the "organization" elicited by it. The transcripts and discourse analyses supporting these conclusions are too long to present in an introductory paper. Several other important discourse phenomena also arose. All of these will have to be dealt with in forthcoming papers. However, we feel it is important to lay out the basis of our methods and the array of constructs we selected from, since there are rich precedents for performing highly illustrative and convincing deconstructions of such meeting phenomena, by laying out in conversational and linguistic logic what otherwise is reported only impressionistically by both participants and observers. FRAMEWORKS AND TOOLS Language-in-action philosophers and social action theorists make the claim that understanding, the social order, and even the distinctions apparent in the physical world are socially constructed in language, the means for communicating about the relevant features of the shared worlds we inhabit in human communities [7, 31]. In this section we describe the frameworks and tools we had on hand, and found useful as a simplest explanation for events we identified in the data.
Implied in the different cultural worlds are clusters of commonly held assumptions about: • The way things work; • What is common knowledge; •
Framework or perspective;
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Epistemology (how information is phrased and evaluated);
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What counts as a token of competence, power, membership; and
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How the social group, society or organization itself is defined and dealt with [9].
A host of conversational assumptions and practices are acted out in discourse, based in judgments about membership. These include: •
What to discuss with whom;
•
What words to use; and
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What logic and conversational conventions serve to develop the topic.
Pre-understandings show up in logical implications of the talk itself. These "conversational conventions" are what concern us in implementing truly participatory design because they are both invisible and highly generative of content and outcome. Each individual design or cross-functional group will present a distinct configuration of these "world" or membership properties. The following excerpt of conversation from our study (names have been changed) illustrates a subset of participants establishing speech community in this way: Angela: And the cards are on back order. Now, one side says they're not aware the cards are on back order, so there's a communication problem there, o r - -
Speech Community
Pete: It depen--also it happens to be, uh, card specific. Certain cards I have no problem getting, or that I have. Then it's just a matter of somebody notifying me that they need the equipment. OK? Other cards are a problem. Uh, right now on the T1 side, uhhh your 3292, uh 9L's?
We can also employ a simpler notion from the ethnography of communication, developed by Gumperz [13, 14], of speech communities that comprise linguistic cultures and subcultures. Within these speech communities, whether identified by language, dialect, speech style, specific vocabularies or more subtle conventions of communication, there develop dense backgrounds of presupposition, assumption, shared history, and significance that orient participants efficiently to "what is going on" in the conversation, as well as to socially appropriate topics, speech styles, and turntaking conventions--all of which identify participants as competent members of the group [29, 34]. A speech c o m m u n i t y reflects common values, assumptions, and a world view, as well as
Nick://3182's// Rick://I think it was '82's.// Pete: 30, OK the uh, it's uh, I go by (Hesse) all the time TR1 PAV's. Okay? Those I got about 300 in stock, that's not a problem. I send 'em to you 25 to 50 at a clip. Nick: Right.
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The participatory design situation, encompassing the range of applications mentioned above, tends by nature not to be a situation of conventionalized cross-cultural discourse or, as above, even common terminology. Instead, in participatory design, Quality Teams, continuous improvement teams, and Business Process Reengineering teams, participants find themselves in novel situations where conventions of cross-departmental or cross-rank discourse either don't exist or don't apply. The participatory team bases its efficacy of output precisely on a shift in role relationships among participants.
the perceived meeting style, then their content was either withheld or as we saw in a few instances, brushed off.
The Speech Event
In novel situations the conventions must be renegotiated. In the case of the participatory design situation, the designated group leaders and facilitators tend implicitly to define the event-and hence its governing conventions-even when they express the intention to allow the group to do so. One reason for this is that participants cannot readily identify the "rules of the game" in novel situations, and thus will take their cues from a presenter, facilitator or other ranking individual, who become the default definers of the situation. Again, the break time repair act performed by a manager (discussed above) evidenced this authority to define appropriateness. He acknowledged the relevance of the comments in principle and to the contributors, although in the meeting they were passed over with sidetracking uptakes.
Another construct we used in looking at this material is that of the speech event. This is generally known as the communicative context. In linguistic anthropology, speech events have been shown through a large body of cross-cultural field research to be highly determining of content and of appropriate roles and relationships specific to the setting, as well as to speech style. Among examples too numerous to mention is Bloch's classic collection of field studies analyzing the coercive power of relationships established by named speech events [3]. Bloch illustrates that, simply by engaging in a formal speech event, a lower status person may be constrained toward an obligatory outcome, because to challenge content is to challenge the form, which in turn is to challenge the whole social order. This notion is also described as a communicative genre by Yates and Orlikowski [38] (See also [2]). However here we are not taking into account all the communicative media but the notion of distinctive speech behaviors appropriate to commonly understood events, such as meetings, breaks, hallway conversations, personal conversations and the entire range of labelled discourse forms. Structuration theory, used by others for related work [38, 27, 18], is not presently part of our framework.
How the event is defined by participants affects what they will say, how they will say it, and whether they will speak up at all. It sets up a context for appropriate roles, topics and speech styles. In ordinary speech events this context and its corresponding conventions are understood a priori.
Who defines the situation ?
The lack of common definition of the speech event in our data gave rise to a conflict between the nominal event and "venue opportunities" that arose from sub-events within the process. For example, in this excerpt the participants persist in an "opportunistic" discussion despite control attempts from the facilitator. At this point in the meeting, Pete is explaining that he was planning on 20 cards a month but with the new "Just-In-Time" policy his shop is suddenly using 40-50 cards a month. He explains and distinguishes between vendor delays and funding-based problems such as a differential supply of cards, and time delay on getting cards due to the manufacturing cycle. Then:
The key notion is that the event as culturally defined sets up inference possibilities which in other contexts are not in effect. Thus the meeting event for the participatory design situation is a highly formative context (cf. [4]) for the participants' sense of what is appropriate and allowable behavior. Indeed, we saw in the meeting videotapes a significant distinction between "meeting" behavior and "break" behavior, where the meeting behavior provided tighter constraints on the recognition of a contribution's being "on topic."
Angela: What level has this been escalated to? Pete: I know it's past District at this point. Sandra (facilitator): Right, so I guess the question for the group is there any information that Pete can provide that would be helpful t'you, number one, and number two....is there anything about the discussion that has taken place that uh ...you would like to take.., to the Core Team? by way of sharing information, uh....or, or not. So.. in the first place is, is there any more information that you need from Pete or anything else....((looks around)), uh, OK. Does, uh the group...// (want to do anything)//
Discourse that had been brushed off in the meeting was acknowledged on the break to be relevant, but only to the people violating the relevance principles. This was treated as a "side topic": the unspoken or informally spoken "reality" of organizational behavior. It emerged that the meeting was produced as a group enterprise not to contradict or challenge the orthodox organizational reality, but rather to be conducted according to certain politeness codes where no names are named (quick interception if they are) and no fundamental problems (chaotic organization) are aired. It should be obvious that this constraint would not lend itself to fundamental rethinking. These codes emerged in the meeting, otherwise we wouldn't have known about them. It is how they were handled as a function of the dominant understanding of the "event" that is the issue.
Ben: (manager)://Just one quick question// Pete: Yeah. Ben: Does that mean that., because of Just Say When w e ' v e doubled the number of circuits we' re putting in? Pete: Uh...Okay, either they were doubling the number of jobs that were going in...or, and actually d' jobs WERE going in, or people were positioning themselves, let's say, t'handle any, any uh problems coming, dey don't wanta be caught short wid cards. Uh the field has a tendency sometimes to want to uh ...protect themselves and they'll try to maybe squirrel some equipment away. I can't really blame 'em. ((People are nodding and looking knowingly at each other.))
Other researchers who had facilitated similar groups [20] also reported small break gatherings to be more candid about the topic of the meeting than the actual meeting behavior was. In other words, participants' assumptions or search for definition of the participatory design speech event was critical to their sense of appropriate language, style and content. If they didn't command
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The Speech Act
Analysis
We make limited use of the speech act construct [l, 32]. It applies to any conversation in which we want to identify what people are "doing" by means of their utterances. It is useful for instance in decoding certain surface queries or statements such as (a) "Is this something we want to take to the Core Team?" or (b) "I don't think we can solve that problem today," as being in fact conversational mechanisms to steer discourse away from a direction, indirectly ask for formal closure, or gently bring a topic to an end, rather than less intentional locutions. Query (a) is not just a question and does not have that perlocutionary effect. Nor is (b) a mere statement of opinion without illocutionary force. They accomplish objectives in the discourse by what is implied in their surface content (or by implicature).
We used the constructs of both speech event and speech act to identify conflicts in the participants' perception of the proper scope and definition of the situation, without resorting to motivational or psychological attributions.
A presentation by the manager of the inventory function, meant to occupy a specific informative niche as an extended declarative speech act, was allocated a time slot in the meeting. It was meant as a "report" from inventory on the status and methods of procuring parts. Participants turned this act or sub-event into a broader discussion of the inventory process and how the organization works in general. The group took the occasion as an opportunity for an extended discussion that included challenges, requests and questions about broader organizational context. It is unclear what the facilitator or organizers had intended participants to "do" with the information presented by the inventory manager, other than listen and take note. In fact they were activated by it, as one would suppose they ought to be, into a heated exploration. Judging by repeated (and repeatedly ignored) cues from the facilitator to "wrap up," this topic extension was an unintended addition to the meeting. For example, the conversation reported above continues as follows:
In the particular case, the value of the opportunity to the participants was apparent from their continuing engagement in the inventory topic, despite three attempts by the facilitator to close it off once its time slot had been used up. The occasion both to get and to give an extended rationale about the supply of parts, and distinctions about the availability and purchase cycles of specific parts, was irresistible to the inventory manager in the political as well as the cognitive context of the organization. This could have been a unique platform for him to communicate a complex and apparently problematic function. Thus the opportunity to "present" could hardly be resisted as an opportunity to explain, justify and defend, with the corresponding opportunity for other participants to challenge, query and propose. All of these are "speech acts," and none were intended in the setup of the discourse. Both notions of speech event and speech act help us to understand some of the conflicts exhibited in the meeting, as different parties struggled to frame the topics in terms either relevant to their spontaneous interests or relevant to a poorly defined "purpose."
Relevance and Other Conversational Maxims We used notions developed by the philosopher Paul Grice to detect discrepancies and contradictions in the enactments of the speech event in question. Grice postulated a cooperative principle that guides conversation and keeps it from expanding infinitely, given the ambiguities and associations that are available in any encounter between people. Maxims of the cooperative principle include notions of:
Loren: Well actually we could look at the bright side a' dis, at least we're makin' money someplace. Pete: We're makin' money someplace. Loren: It it's, y'know we're selling something. Sandra: Ya, which isn't really a question in itself. Is there anything that the group wants to take to the Core Team meeting next Tuesday in terms of uh, what Pete has described.
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Quantity (not talking more than is required);
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Quality (not being untruthful);
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Relation (talking "to the point"); and
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Manner (being clear-saying what is needed for others to understand)
What Grice--as a philos0pher---did not address is that these conventions differ by speech community. The notion of relevance presupposes some notion of "topic." The major disjunctures we found during the meeting were:
Loren: Just give him more//money.//
1. Different ways the participants appeared to define the "topics," and hence how they recognized relevance; and
Janelle://He needs//money for the lo--, the um, cards. Pete: He needs that money for certain cards. Other cards, like your T1, comes out of the general fund. out of supply, even though the usage has gone up, I had money to handle that, and I ' m handling that side for your Tl's. The issue there is, don't call me up today because you need cards tomorrow and you're down to your last card with the Tl's. ((Pete goes on with this for a while, and recaptures his reasoning process.))
2. The means they used for developing topics, that is, how they perceived manner. Discrepancies in observing the quantity maxim were a fallout of these two perceptions.
Onstage, Backstage Goffman's [10] premise of onstage vs. backstage as a speech context was useful to us in interpreting the resolution to a dilemma. We noted exploration about the conventions of appropriate meeting behavior and some turns that were either cut off or not taken up, even though by general criteria they were on topic. The break behavior contrasted markedly with meeting behavior in informality. At the same time it provided an opportunity for people to relate to each other in smaller groups, including a repair act be performed "backstage." In this case, the repair act linked two story-based turns to the general topic of "communicating in the organization", confirming to us that the turns were indeed relevant by one criterion, but not by the prevailing criteria for the meeting. The infer-
Sandra: ((Interrupting)) Pete, this sounds like a recommendation of a procedure that could be captured and put into the minutes....and uh, l-let's see what, what it is. Pete: It's like if you get into an urgent demand situation. You get into a problem. I get this all the time. I call it my Friday night four o'clock urgent demand. Janelle: That's awful.
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ence to draw from this is that story turns may be understood by other participants but lack force in the assumed meeting convention. This then limits participation to those who command more abstractly structured discourse styles.
Angela: Right, right...
The discontinuity in worlds between the R&D group and the TelCo people who were the focal participants showed up mainly in:
Karen(?): (mumble) He shoulda come back to us with that decision instead of supporting..
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Conventions about meeting conversation;
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Notions of topic;
Ben: That'll happen without him_the odds are that everybody's gonna get it done...
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Involvement in topics;
Karen: Yeah.
Ben: (laughter) It's...He knows he's supposed to do it. The overall stuff's been there for umpteen years. He figures he'll get away with it, because the odds a r e - -
• Ways a topic is reasonably developed; and •
Angela: It won't come back to 'm...'n
Unique opportunities of the venue.
Ruth: ((Interrupts by asking Ben for a phone number that's in the TI book. This is her second interruption of a criticism of Hamill, to whom she recently reported.))
Any of these mismatches of conversational worlds would provide a significant challenge for any facilitator.
Ben: I had one of my guys just refuse to do an (antenna)... He don't wanna be dispatched. From point to-point-point. Because, we went out, they weren't ready in the city, so now he doesn't wanta redispatch when the city was ready. He says run through the smart jack. He refused to dispatch. To do the antenna--
Topic and Relevance Our analysis of the videotape quickly uncovered a discrepancy in how sets of participants identified a "topic." The notion of topic is a critical presupposition in the evaluation of what people understand to be relevant. We found the conversants struggling with apparently different understandings of what it means to "stay on topic." Professionals have conventions for developing "topics" that are artifacts of secondary socialization in the profession. The brevity and perspicuity maxims are included within these conventions. To some extent, professionals are evaluated by their peers in conversation by how efficiently they can make a point using specific language.
Angela: So what happened? Ben: Didn't happened...Didn't happen. 0 Didn't happen. Angela: It's not one a your guys' fault. Ben: Yeah, (the city called the installer) the installer, its the installer's fault. He says, he says "let them run through the smart jack." Yeah !
People with different discourse styles have different mechanisms for developing topics. We found that some of the TelCo people in the group tended to develop topics illustratively-by stories, rather than top-down by generalization or abstraction (cf, [24]). There was evidence in the off-line conversation that this illustrative approach was recognized as a topic-development approach by other TelCo participants. Yet the repair act that showed this to us was reserved for a private conversation rather than being performed in the meeting context itself.
In addition to the construct of topic and relevance, this example concurrently illustrates the concepts of backstage and of conversational repair, described in the next section.
Conversational Repair A well-developed notion in discourse analysis [28], is that of conversational repair acts. These are places in the discourse where participants produce speech that clarifies perceived possibilities for misunderstanding, thus r e v e a l i n g their u n d e r l y i n g sense of whether the discourse context, or specific local content, or conversational intent, is shared or not shared by the other party.
Reasons why people with less authority may use illustrative topic development include: •
They know the story is true; Ethnomethodologically this is seen as evidence of members' ongoing evaluation of the context, the sense of possible interpretations within it, the sense of what assumptions are shared between the speaker and hearer and which are in doubt. Ultimately then, it is a demonstration of competence and membership to know which items may need repair and what clarifications will repair them.
• They are uncertain how to generalize about the illustration; • They may not want to make statements beyond their scope. The difficulty is that this approach is inconsistent with expectations of professionals and may look like "getting off the topic" or violating the relevance maxim, because the link between abstraction and details remains implicit. Moreover, more detail may be included than seems perspicuous. For example, during a break Ben clearly pulls together two illustrative stories that participants had earlier offered on the subject of "communication." The first story is about people not following through on communication in the organization; the second story is about a different communication problem relating to the coordination of service through the dispatching office. These stories had not been taken up in the meeting. By discussing them in sequence, Ben is demonstrating the connection he sees between them as relevant to the communications "topic."
Hermeneutics and Meaning We were able to understand problems in the discourse through application of the basic hermeneutic principle that: 1. You can't understand structure without details, and 2. You can't understand details without structure. This is known as the "hermeneutic circle." It is difficult to break into this circle of implied meanings, but it is possible by observing conversational repair [28] acts, which show how details relate to context.
Ben: You talk about communications. The communication's gotta get to this guy's ((a manager we'll call Hamill)) boss, 'n he signs off and overall..there's no communications problem.
The "backstage" conversation during the break, quoted above, helped us to intercept the hermeneutic circle introduced by the par-
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ticipants' use of illustrative detail to elaborate a topic. One participant held a repair c o n v e r s a t i o n that tied details from two illustrative subtopics to the nominal topic and further to a structure that went beyond the meeting context: what prompts people to act in the wider organizational setting. This off-line conversation thus made explicit the dilemma perceived in the management of the topic during the meeting, when both illustrative stories were either cut off or dropped. They related to the topic, but apparently not in the style of the implicit conventions of meeting talk.
vast and (2) that further examination of other meetings would disclose an entire range of problems or issues along these lines. Unexamined, these problems can seriously undermine participatory design or group-based systems and processes because: 1. Process evaluators can easily miss the results possible through participatory design; 2. Participants may become disaffected; and 3. The underlying organizational issues are not fully disclosed or incorporated into action agendas.
CONCLUSIONS In examining the interaction in the Service Process Team meeting, we uncovered issues that are critical to the success of participatory team processes. Even given the limited scope of the present data, some profound mismatches of assumptions and conventions have been disclosed, including:
The worst outcome is that if participatory efforts fail early on, they will be discredited and their enormous opportunity lost: for the organization; for a prospective system; for the cross-functional team; and for other employees who would benefit from this more situated understanding in their new work context.
• Conversational conventions about abstraction versus illustration •
Conversational conventions about topic and relevance
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Views of organizational structure for communication
•
Views of status and authority
In a second paper dealing with relevance and speech style, we address in more detail how the perception of relevance affects both contribution and uptake, and how the relevance perception in turn is affected by style. Perceived relevance is a key regulator of conversations of all kinds [37]. The clearest conclusion that researchers or c o m p u t e r system designers can draw from the work is that without attending to differences in communicative conventions, it is hard to know whether all participants have said what they have to say to inform the design. In other words, people will participate differently and make different contributions according to how they perceive the language g a m e of the participatory event. A facilitator or a designer therefore needs to be aware of sociolinguistic factors in order to get reliable results from the process. We return to the variability aspect of the phenomenon, in that some facilitators/designers intuitively will be able to negotiate this dialogue, whereas others will be unaware, depending upon their own repertoire range and experience. All can have better facilitative skills by understanding that the domain of conversation, being co-constructed, can also be deconstructed and examined, rather than being relegated to the vague arena of the intangible, unanalyzable and "irrational".
We posit that these problems are endemic to the process, given the way that most organizations conceive the work of design teams and design-team facilitation. The process tends to focus on format, nominal participation, nominal topics, and bullet point closure. In fact, deep organizational context and conflicts emerge readily whenever participants from different domains have the opportunity freely to explore common interfaces in the organizational context. In spite of attempts by a facilitator and R&D observers in our data to keep discourse on a "reasonable" track through means such as calling for action items to list, questioning the appropriateness of a topic direction, giving the floor abruptly to someone who changed the topic without returning, and repeatedly attempting to move to closure when time allocated to a topic had mn out, we saw participants revert frequently to authentic problem exploration and definition. The opportunity to interact manifests itself as a speech event effectively defined by the participants themselves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The subjects that arise in opening up the organization, their own departments and the workings of other departments as sanctioned topics for a discussion in an action framework, drew these participants into a "natural" exploration of obviously keen interest. The dilemma facing moderators is where to draw the boundary on this exploration so as to maintain some "control" over the outcome. While control may be unnecessary, in case after case, the questions of outcome and productivity remain as evaluative backdrops to the sanctioning of participatory teams. These constraints arise from organizational habits still in effect in background assumptions of an ontological nature: who are we and why are we here?
The authors thank Patricia Sachs, James Euchner, Angelika Kinderman, Karen Ward, Rob Kling and the COOCS referees for their contributions to this paper.
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