IT Outsourcing

The elements of communication are the key roles, which go in helping decide what is a sense of urgency. The key elements are the communicator, encoding, message, medium, decoding, receiver, and feedback. In a situation where a sense of urgency arises, all of these elements have to be in place. If any of these communication elements breakdown, the urgency may not be stated, or relayed to the right person. The communicator has to get across a message to the key players that a problem does exist. The medium for this message has to be in a format that is easily available to the key players, but not in a format which may saturate the message. As discussed in Kotter's book, calling a meeting in an extravagant conference room screams success. The message has to be decoded by the receiver so that it has some relevance. Receivers decode messages differently, so it is important that the decoder be someone who can make the right decisions or pass the right decisions along to the proper people. One of the sources of complacency in Kotter's book is a lack of sufficient feedback from external sources. Kotter mentions young employees going out and collecting external performance feedback, but being treated like lepers. People were miscommunicating information, because they did not want to hurt someone's feelings or company morale. Communication has to be effective and accurate on all levels, in order for the right decisions to be made. .
             In today's economy, no organization can afford to be complacent. The best way to fight complacency is for an organization to be prepared for the future, make the proper decisions, and to have effective communication. Effective communication can help to establish a sense of urgency, and key decision making can help resolve situations which were brought by senses of urgency within the organization.
             The second theme of the eight-stage process in Kotter's book is about creating the guiding coalition.