Hello! Welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. I’m Ellen Wartella. Today, we’re hearing from Dr. Marshall Scott Poole. Dr. Poole is David L. Swanson Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Director of The Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. He is a Fellow in the Organization Science Program at Vrije University in the Netherlands. Dr. Poole’s research in organizational group communication, structural communication, theory building, and communication technologies has shaped the field’s understanding of how individuals interact within a group setting. Dr. Poole is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. He received the Distinguished Scholar Award for a Lifetime of Scholarly Achievement from the National Communication Association and the Steven A. Chaffee Lifetime Productivity Award from the International Communication Association. Our interviewer today is Andrew Pilny, an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Kentucky where he develops and tests theories to better advance different types of organizing systems. Andrew’s work has been applied to non-profit organizations, social movement groups, and work teams. Here’s Andrew.
Welcome to the ICA podcast, Architects of Communication. My name is Andy Pilny here interviewing one of the architects of communication, Scott Poole. So let's start pre-college, Scott. Who are you?
Well, I was born in Amarillo, Texas. Very flat, lots of cowboys. I grew up fishing and hunting. I also did a lot of stuff like science fair and things like that when I was in high school. So that's what put me on the trajectory, that I followed to today.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you initially studied chemistry. I did biochemistry. So this was undergrad. Yep. And what school Michigan
State? Spartan. Yeah. Goswami, actually my master's degree in communications during Matthew because I went back, but I went there for two years and then transferred to Wisconsin to study communication or
biochemistry to communication. Something happened.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you initially studied chemistry.
I did, biochemistry.
So this was undergrad?
Yep.
In what school?
Michigan State.
I didn’t know you were a Spartan.
Yeah, I am. Go Sparty! Actually my master's degree in communication was during MSU because I went back, but I went there for two years and then transferred to Wisconsin to study communication.
Biochemistry to communication. Something happened there. What happened there?
Well, what happened? Now
I met Dr. Kushner,
I met Donald Cushman, who was a very influential scholar in communication back in the 70s and 80s. And he got me very interested in rhetoric actually, I was originally going to be a rhetorician. I studied Aristotle, Plato, and all of the rhetoricians, and because of always liking mathematics and statistics, it just naturally bent me back away from rhetoric, and the social side of the field.
more.
So what period were you in college? What were the years?
Well, 1969 to ‘73. So I was there during the revolutionary period. Believe it or not, I had really long hair down to the middle of my back.
So a lot of what you said was your natural curiosity with mathematics, but what were the questions that you wanted to answer with communication?
When I first got into it, my orientation was a lot more philosophical. I read a lot of Richard McCann, who's a philosopher at University of Chicago, that wrote a lot about communication and rhetoric, even though he wasn't a communication person. His work, though, is just so rigorous and amazing that I thought that it was possible to have a social science that could be as rigorous as biochemistry was, and I wanted to try to create that. That's part of the trajectory of my career. I don't think I've maybe not succeeded as well as I thought I would, but I've always tried to bring things like mathematical modeling, structured theory construction, methods and things like that to my work and teach them to other people.
Was there a question that was driving you, especially in this moment, when you were in college, lots of social anxiety, perhaps?
At an abstract level, I really wanted to theorize how communication constituted social reality. But the experimental vehicle that I used was a small group. I had worked with groups a lot when I was in college. I was a group facilitator, and I could see how much of a difference communicating well could make and how effective groups were in making decisions. Groups make most of the consequential decisions in our society at some level. Even if just advising somebody that makes the final call. For me, that was trying to help groups function better, that was something our field could directly contribute to, that was a very important thing. Our field tended to be looked at as trivial and public speaking.
You mentioned how groups construct reality, but you were taking a very much different approach of measuring things, but not just like in the flat snapshot, right. Did you meet resistance, because you're taking a very different view?
People in communication always say there's so many processes. But if you look at about 99% of the work that's published, it doesn't study a process. It gives out a questionnaire and does a correlation. Rhetoricians come probably the closest really to studying processes, but even most of them just do critical studies that look at communicative events, though it was frozen. I was very interested in could we really devise methods to measure, theorize, and draw conclusions about processes, per se, rather than just variables like persuadability that people were using to study when I was in school.
Can you talk about your dissertation? If I remember, it was about the different stages groups go towards, right? And how you challenged this long-standing model?
Everybody knew that all of the models of group decision making says it goes through like four or five stages. You define the problem, then you understand the problem, then you generate some options, then you choose one, then you implement it- as though it went in those blocks. But I've worked with groups all my life, and I knew that they were very chaotic, and they weren't nearly that organized. What I did was to say, “Well, let's see if we can actually map the procedures that it goes through.” What I did was to identify markers, using usually coding systems of the interaction. Sometimes I would have the people write various stages of the group, but usually, it was just from the outside. What I did was to devise markers that would let me identify, for example, when they were defining the problem, when they were analyzing the problem, when they were defining criteria. And what you would have is, a group might do a problem definition, criteria solution, go back to the problem, go back to the solution, redefine the criteria, orient themselves again, and things like that. What I tried to do was to define types, and what I found was about six or seven basic types of groups. And only about a third of them went through the stages in that sequence that was taught to us in our classes, as being the way groups make decisions. Two-thirds of them took other routes.
So you mentioned that came from a little bit of your history of groups. You just knew this is not how it looks. But it probably also came with your study of biochemistry, where the nature of reactions and sequences can be chaotic?
It probably did, but in all honesty, because I had been out in that consulting company, facilitating groups, I knew how weird they are, how disorganized people are, and how they really think they make a rational decision, but they're really not. What I actually found is that a lot of times, they don't follow those rational sequences, but they still make a perfectly good decision.
Have you ever thought about what causes groups to go toward those different trajectories? Is it completely chaotic or is there something that explains it?
I think there's a couple of things. I think that in any group, each member thinks that they know how the group ought to make the decision. And each one of them has a little separate theory about it, or their theories don't quite coordinate. In a way, I think it's a struggle among individual members that causes that disorganization. But, I also think that groups are sometimes disorganized because people just don't think rationally. I've been in a lot of groups where somebody says, “We've got to make a decision, okay, I know what we should do. Now, I'm going to try to persuade or force everybody to adopt my decision.” That is not what we teach in our classes, groups should do, but it also is what happens in an awful lot of groups. And then there's a certain number of groups that are just helpless. They just don't know how to do anything and they just wander around, and when the time's up, they'd say, “Okay, we're gonna do this.”
What you just said reminds me of your advisor, which was Dean Hewes, right? One of the more notorious things he wrote about was the egocentric model of group communication, the socio-egocentric model, yeah. People come in with their opinions, they don't listen, and they just engage in this. So when you were working with Dean, was that something you had an inkling, but because a lot of your work seems to challenge that idea?
It's a very provocative way to look at groups. Was he 100% serious or is he being a little provocative?
It draws on that, but what I was trying to do is to say, “I know a certain number of groups do what he says.” He basically says that, “Groups of adults are basically like groups of three-year-olds.” Three-year-olds engage in social egocentric speech. They have an idea and they just keep repeating it. And they don't listen to anybody else. He did, for example, he used Markov Modeling, and if you can fit a Markov Model to a group, it shows that the group has some structure. That is that the people are coordinating their activity to a degree. What he showed is that a surprising number of groups, you couldn't fit any model to, it was essentially random discussion. I've certainly been in enough groups that were that way. A lot of my work was to say, “Well, I think that probably a certain number of groups go through that, but then a lot of them don't. Can we identify departures from that baseline and different structures of group interaction that depart from it?”
I think it was a little bit of a joke, but he had studied groups of children. He's started his career studying children communicating.
I thought he was just in a lot of bad faculty meetings.
Oh, that too. I didn't think about that. But that's true. Yeah. But he basically then used that as kind of a baseline, and he expected adults to be different. And when he found that they weren’t, they have a structure and kind of inspired him to think, well this might be a good way to model what's going on the departure from randomness.
One thing I've always wanted to ask you is: how you seemed to be influenced by structuration theory a lot earlier -Anthony Giddens. When he was developing those ideas, was it a zeitgeist of the times or was there something about that theory that you thought you could take from a more macro, and apply it to a little bit more specific micro area?
Well, I learned about that theory from my good friend, Rob McPhee. He's been a great colleague of mine my whole career, and he was always forward-looking in people that he read, and he found Giddens before anyone else in our field and introduced it to me. The thing was going back to it, I wanted to theorize process. And structuration theory says, “This is how people constitute society through engaging in processes that constitute society.” That looked like a very good lens then, for me to study process through. I changed the theory a lot as I developed it into a communication theory. I moved away from a lot of Giddens's ideas and added some that made sense to me based on my observations. While some people really stuck close to Giddens, I think I kind of moved away from it quite a bit.
Can you talk about those group decision support systems in the late 80s, early 90s?
Group decision support systems, and they're still very common, is they were basically a computerized system that built in the steps of a decision-making procedure live. Define your problem, generate ideas, evaluate the ideas, make a final choice, figure out how to implement it, just like those steps I was talking about. But it was actually built into software, and it actually encouraged people to go in those series of steps. Now, one of the things that I found was that they didn't. They misused the software. One time, people were supposed to brainstorm ideas into the computer, and what this one set of people did is argue the whole time and fight. Then at the very end, they realized they hadn't entered anything into the computer. So one guy entered his idea and said, this is our solution. That's exactly the opposite of how a group really ‘ought to operate.
Do you think today, that software might be more receptive as people have almost been more obedient to technology? Like, “Hey, Alexa, do this,” or like Google Calendar, here's my thing. Do you think maybe it was a sign of the time?
Well, it's an interesting question, but even four or five years ago, once those things happened when we were doing studies, we would find certain people are just very resistive to it. Sometimes people think they understand the software, but they don't, so they misuse it. In other cases, they feel like it constrains them too much, and so they just refuse to go along with it. So I think it's a great idea, but one of the things that we always try to do is to teach groups to use them as a tool. That is to say, here's a brainstorming routine. So when you guys need to brainstorm ideas, or get ideas, why don't you use this tool, because it will help you do it in 20 minutes, you can do what would take you an hour and a half if you did it by hand. Rather than telling people they just had to be ruled by the software, we tried to show it to them as a set of resources they could use. Then we tried to train them and how they could use it properly. And I still think those are wonderful systems. Especially for things like brainstorming and evaluating ideas, you can do in a half-an-hour, but if you sat in a group and did it by hand or wrote it up on flip charts, would take you a couple hours. But I think most of it is because people aren't good at working in groups.
Why is that?
I just think they don't learn it. They learn how to do individual decision- making, which means you have a point of view and you advocate it and you argue it through and you compel people to fall in with your point of view.
Do you think that's more common now?
It depends. It's the culture of the organization. In a very participatory organization, GDSs would be welcomed, but there's an awful lot now, that still are very participating. I go to university committees, and you would think professors would be willing to kick ideas around, and they are, but it's amazing how many times I see one person who has an idea just railroading the rest of the group to go along with it.
So that suggests that groups are very sensitive, that it could just take one person to derail a lot of decision-making conversation.
I think a lot of it is because just like I said, I think most people, even people in communication, don't know how to work in groups. They don't know the tools like brainstorming, nominal group technique, different things like that. They never learn them, or if they do learn them, they just ditch them when they come into a group.
How do you learn brainstorming? What do you think is a good way to teach that?
Oh, it's super simple. There's five rules. To learn it, all you have to do is write the rules up, and a child can follow them.
The rules are basically: go for quantity, not for quality. The more ideas, the better. Even lame-brain ideas can sometimes end up being good. Don't criticize anybody's idea. Let the group move forward. Write the ideas up on a flip chart so that everybody can see it. Then, discuss the ideas and make sure they're clear to everybody. Then, you can add additional steps like writing or ranking the ideas. That's what you do in nominal group technique.
Let's imagine that you were a graduate student today.
Heaven forbid.
In 2022, what would you be doing your dissertation on today? What are you interested in today and what do you think a good future trajectory, at least to your curiosities would be?
People still haven't studied processes properly.
Is that a measurement thing or a theory thing?
It’s a theory thing, a measurement thing, and an analysis thing. Most of our theories of group processes are weak. Even the ones I've put together, they're not well structured the way a good theory is. They have lots of premises that interact, and they're not super well-specified, because they have to be vague. I think that the second thing is that measuring processes is very time-consuming the recording and coding, and a lot of people just aren't willing to put that much time in. It's a disincentive. Then once you have the data, it's pretty rough to analyze it. We're beginning to develop some standard models for analyzing these things.
Do you see more hope in process approaches now that we have such an ability to scrape data easier now more than ever?
There are some automated coding systems now. People have developed those, and automated analysis things. The big problem is: once it's automated, you're doing it the way one other person wants to do. What I've found is that you often have to make little changes or adaptations for particular problems, or particular people, or even particular kinds of interaction. And those standardized methods don’t allow for it very well.
What makes a good process theory? A lot of the ways we perhaps evaluate theory now may be different for processes, because it's almost a chain of events. You have to predict a lot of things, a lot of sequences correctly. Is that one of the big criteria you would use to evaluate a process theory?
The real challenge always with all processes is human beings have free will. We would like to think that as things unfold, as people make a decision or generate ideas, there's this structure behind them that drives them. But the problem is that people always can deviate, they can change, they can disagree, but sometimes they may even just take a dislike to somebody else in the group. A lot of what happens is idiosyncratic, if you will. Therefore, not really predictable by any theory we have. I'm not saying that, I haven't been able to do that. I was able to explain 60-odd percent in the decision paths that groups followed using about six variables like difficulty, the task, and prior conflict in the group. Those are all things I could code before I ever looked at the group process. Ultimately, though, I think to really be responsive, we have to be able to move with the particular vagaries of a particular process and be able to help the group work through that. So if they avoid problems and make the best decions. On the other end of things, I teach facilitation. We wrote the handbook on group facilitation, which basically gives people a set of tools they can use. And what I try to do in my classes is to teach people to read groups to figure out what's going on, and whether they're moving in a positive or negative direction, and possible problems that could arise; but then to teach them tools to address those problems, so that maybe they avoid the problem, or if the problem emerges, they can use the tool to solve the problem. A lot of it is giving them a set of tools, and teaching them to be resourceful and adaptive in using them, and not to expect things are always going to happen in one way or the other.
Let's shift to more meta about communication itself. Because you mentioned earlier that sometimes it's not perhaps taken as seriously as some other disciplines. That always struck me as odd because it's the one thing that separates us from a lot of other species, our ability to communicate and create meaning and transfer information so fluidly. If someone was asking you perhaps a high school student or a young college student, “Well, why should I study communication?” What might you say to them?
The main pitch I make are two things. Number one: communication is how we do things. When we work with other people I can teach you tools to make your work more effective, or potentially manipulate them, if you decide you need to do it. You need to turn a group in a certain direction. So that's one thing. The other thing is I would try to teach people to read the processes that are in front of them. It sounds unusual, I guess, but I think that sometimes, we don't necessarily know what the best thing to do in a social situation is. You just have to be able to read it and see if you believe it's moving in a good direction, and if it's not, then to take some actions, but if it is, to help it along. I don't think we always have to control everything.
So this is called the Architects of Communication, and the implication is the architect has built something that will withstand the test of time. As you look back and kind of view yourself with this metaphorical architect, what do you think through your contributions to communication research that, in theory, will have the biggest pillar?
From my point of view, the structuration work that I've done, and in terms of showing how that operates, and how you can use it to turn a group in a more positive direction, or see how it's leading a group in a negative direction. That's very valuable. Most people that look at that theory, though, because it's a rather abstract theory, they don't see a lot of the value. So I think a lot of the value that people would see in my work would probably be the more concrete things. Nominal group technique, for example, and some of the other techniques that I've helped to craft and build would be things that I think probably are more tangible things that people would find useful.
So this has been the ICA podcast for Architects of Communication. Thanks for having us in your lovely home, Scott. And we hope you all enjoy this as much as we have.
Architects of Communication Scholarship is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Our producer is Bennett Pack. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.
