Risk Communication and Miscommunication: Case Studies in Science, Technology, Engineering, Government, and Community Organizations
160
Risk Communication and Miscommunication: Case Studies in Science, Technology, Engineering, Government, and Community Organizations
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Overview
Drawing from research in rhetoric, linguistics, technical communication, educational psychology, and web design, Boiarsky provides a new way to look at risk communication. She shows how failing to consider the readers’ needs or the rhetorical context in which one writes can be catastrophic and how anticipating those needs can enhance effectiveness and prevent disaster. She examines the communications and miscommunications of original e-mails, memos, and presentations about various environmental disasters, including the Columbia space shuttle explosion and the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, and successes, such as the Enbridge pipeline expansion and the opening of the Mississippi Spillway, and offers recommendations for effective communication.
Taking into account the growing need to communicate complex and often controversial issues across vast geographic and cultural spaces with an ever-expanding array of electronic media, Risk Communication and Miscommunication provides strategies for clear communication of data, ideas, and procedures to varied audiences to prevent or minimize damage from environmental incidents.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607324676 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Colorado |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Risk Communication and Miscommunication
Case Studies in Science, Technology, Engineering, Government, and Community Organizations
By Carolyn R. Boiarsky
University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 Carolyn R. BoiarskyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-467-6
CHAPTER 1
Writing and Reading in the Context of the Environmental Sciences
A Case Study of the Chicago Flood
Introduction
The Chicago flood of 1992 was a man-made environmental disaster, caused by city officials failing to plug a leak in a wall, rather than a natural disaster, such as the lower Mississippi River flood of 2011, caused by the natural forces of melting snow to the north in winter and excessive spring rain. As with so many environmental disasters, the Chicago flood might have been averted had a memo written earlier been heeded. The information Chicago engineers were expected to provide their managers in a request to repair the tunnel leak under the Kinzie Street Bridge in 1992 — description of problem, cause, corrective action and estimated cost — is the same today as it was then. The difference is that today the request would have been sent electronically as an e-mail rather than through interoffice mail as a memorandum.
The Chicago Flood
On Monday, April 13, 1992, downtown Chicago came to a standstill. The Chicago River was flooding freight tunnels that had been dug underneath the city in the early part of the twentieth century. Water was seeping into the basements of office buildings in the city's financial district, with its stock exchange, commodities market, and Federal Reserve, and into the upscale retail area, where department stores such as Marshall Field's (now Macy's), Burberry, and Neiman Marcus are located. All buildings in the area were evacuated and traffic halted. Downtown Chicago became a ghost town for three days. The city took weeks to pump all the water out. The cost in closed business and ruined inventory ran to approximately $1.25 billion.
The cause of the flood was a leak in the wall of one of the tunnels abutting the river. Several weeks earlier Louis Koncza, the chief engineer for the Bureau of Bridges in the city's Department of Transportation (DOT), had sent a memo to John LaPlante, acting DOT Commissioner, notifying him of the leak and requesting permission to repair the walls. But the wall wasn't repaired before the leak became a flood. Miscommunication between Koncza and LaPlante was one of the reasons.
Beneath the city of Chicago lies a labyrinth of tunnels that were created at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tunnels allowed small train cars to carry coal from the barges that came down Lake Michigan to the basements of the city's buildings above. With the change from coal to oil and gas in the latter part of the twentieth century, the city began to lease these tunnels to cable companies for stringing their cables. In January, four months before the flood, a cable company employee went into the tunnel near the Kinzie Street Bridge to study the situation prior to the company's installing the wire. The employee found water and soil leaking into the tunnel and notified his company, which, in turn, notified the city. A city engineer was sent to investigate but couldn't find a parking place. It took over a month before another employee was sent to check out the report. This time he found a parking place. However, by now the small leak had become a large leak, and the employee found so much damage to the wall that he felt it was unsafe to enter the tunnel. He took photographs and returned. After several meetings to determine what should be done and to estimate the cost for the repair, Louis Koncza was charged with writing a memorandum to the manager of his division, John LaPlante, requesting permission to repair the tunnel (Figure 1.1).
The memo was typed on a form for interoffice correspondence that included in the upper right-hand corner the names of the people other than Koncza to whom documents in the DOT were routinely distributed. These people were often involved with some aspect of a project. In this case, one of the men, Ociepka, had been the project manager for the installation of new pile clusters around the Kinzie Street Bridge, where the leak had begun. Apparently, during the installation, one of the piles had hit the tunnel wall, puncturing it. Another reader, Chrasc, worked under Koncza as his coordinating engineer and would be responsible for coordinating the repair project. Koncza penciled in at the upper left-hand corner the names of three additional people who needed to be informed of the repair work for the leak. Many of these people were eventually fired by then-mayor Richard Daley, Sr.
Koncza, who was busy and had several other problems demanding attention, did not spend much time planning the memo. Instead he wrote it using the same organizational structure that he had used in writing many previous memoranda. He was very much aware of the economic aspect of the tunnel, which brought rental fees to the city, and alluded to this, implying that if the tunnel was not fixed, the city might lose its fees. He did not take much time to read it over and make revisions, other than checking that the facts were correct and then proofreading it for grammatical or spelling errors. On April 2 Koncza sent the memo through interoffice mail to his supervisor rather than delivering it in person as was the convention for matters requiring immediate action.
LaPlante received the memorandum along with a large batch of other interoffice mail the following day, April 3. He constantly received memos describing construction problems and requesting approval to have them repaired. Because this one had been transmitted by interoffice mail rather than in person, it did not appear different from the others.
When LaPlante received the memo in the pile of mail delivered to his desk that Friday afternoon, he simply gathered it along with the entire pile and took it home. On Sunday afternoon, he read through the stack of memos, including the one on the Kinzie Street Bridge.
LaPlante had only recently been appointed to the position in an acting capacity. He was not an engineer but a financial manager. He had little knowledge about the problem discussed in the memo; he wasn't even sure where the Kinzie Street Bridge was. Having no secretary or typewriter available (this was BC [Before Computers]), he handwrote his response on one of his memorandum forms, approving the repair. Recognizing that the mayor was up for reelection (the political context), he recommended that the repair job be put up for bid. (A PSR [project specification report] is a form for putting out a bid.) He also penciled in the names of several other readers who needed to be kept informed of the project (Figure 1.2).
Returning to work on Monday, LaPlante placed the memo in interoffice mail. It was delivered on Thursday, as the stamp in the upper left-hand corner indicates. It took three more days for Koncza to respond to LaPlante's orders and send a memo requesting that the PSR be processed.
The PSR was prepared and put out for bid. Two bids came in by April 10. Both were over $70,000, approximately, $60,000 over the expected cost (Figures 1.3 and 1.4).
Because the bids were far higher than expected, they were not accepted. It was decided to solicit other bids with the hope that they would come in closer to the engineers' estimate. But before other bids could come in, the tunnel wall collapsed and the river flooded the city.
Reading Koncza's Memo
The general consensus of those investigating the flood was that if LaPlante had responded to Koncza's memo by calling for immediate repairs without putting the job out for bids, the flood could probably have been averted. But LaPlante was not able to understand from Koncza's memorandum that he needed to make that decision.
The Chicago flood memo is a prime example of a writer-based rather than a reader-based text and demonstrates what happens when a writer fails to consider readers' processes and styles of reading as well as the context in which the reader will read the message.
Knowledge of the Topic Affects the Reader's Comprehension of the Message
Because LaPlante was not an engineer, he did not think about the extent to which a small hole can become a large hole when it is subjected to water pressure. He also did not consider the damage to electrical wiring and to structural integrity that water can cause when it floods building basements. Nor was he aware of the tunnels or even of the actual site of the Kinzie Street Bridge, and so had no way of recognizing that the financial district as well as the area in which the high-end retail stores were located would be affected if the tunnels flooded. In his memorandum, Koncza needed to provide these explanations to fill in the gap in LaPlante's knowledge of engineering and the area he had only recently been asked to oversee.
Readers' prior knowledge and experience affect their understanding of a topic. To understand a writer's message, readers relate information in a text to their previous knowledge and experience. They then categorize related pieces of information into chunks, sequence information in logical order, and process it both verbally and visually. Comprehending a message is like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to create a whole picture. Readers must put all the pieces of information in a document together to create a picture of the writer's message.
In order to create meaning from the information in a text, readers engage in a three-step process: predicting, reading, and aligning. Readers begin by predicting what they will read, based on the situation in which they're reading, the cues they obtain from a document, their knowledge of documents, the topic under discussion, and so on. If they receive a letter, they will predict that they will read information from a client or customer. By glancing at the subject line, they will predict the topic. As they begin to read the letter, if the first sentence relates to the topic they predicted, their reading will be aligned with their predictions, and they will be able to read the text fluently, without stopping. However, if the first few sentences do not relate to the topic that the readers predicted, then they will stop reading because the text is not aligned with their prediction. They may reread the sentences to try to find a relationship, or they may reconsider their prediction. Either way, they will not have fluency. The infamous memo related to the Challenger accident is an example of this major problem (Figure 1.5).
The reader did not read in the first few sentences the answer to the dilemma with which he was faced and for which he was requesting an answer: Should the Challenger be launched as scheduled. As a result, the reader thought the memo did not provide the information he needed to know: that if the temperature dropped below 50 degrees, the secondary seal would not reseat. (The temperature was well below 50 degrees when the Challenger blasted off from Cape Canaveral before it exploded.) A text needs to provide readers with accurate cues for predicting what they will read.
Depending on their knowledge of the topic and field under discussion, readers fall into three categories: experts, generalists, and novices. Although readers may be experts in their own fields, they may not be experts on a topic discussed in a document. While LaPlante was an expert in financial matters, he knew little about engineering, which was the topic of the memo.
When readers do not have knowledge or experience in a topic, they are far more likely to misinterpret a message. Generalists who have only some knowledge of a field and novices who have no knowledge of the field under discussion need background information that an expert already knows. They also need to have technical terminology defined or replaced by nontechnical words. For instance, when the members of the President's Commission on the Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident wrote their report for the president, Congress, and the general public, they knew they would be writing for readers who were novices in the nuclear field. They spent five pages at the beginning of the account of the accident explaining how a nuclear reactor works so readers could understand what was happening when the problems were described. The commission members also defined such technical terms as "trip" ("a sudden shutdown of a piece of machinery"), terms that are common knowledge to experts in the field but that probably mean nothing or something else to the president, the members of Congress, and the general public, all of whom are novices in the field of nuclear physics.
Recognizing the Purpose of a Message Affects the Reader's Response to a Message
Based on his previous experience in reading similar memos, LaPlante knew that the purpose of the memo was to approve a request so that it could be put out to bid. He responded almost mechanically, without taking the time to consider the implications of the information. For LaPlante to understand that the purpose of the memo was to obtain immediate action without waiting for a bid, Koncza would have had to indicate this in the subject line and first paragraph as well as follow Chicago City Hall transmission protocol by handing the memorandum to LaPlante in person rather than sending it through interoffice mail.
The Context in Which a Reader Reads a Document Affects the Reader's Interpretation of the Message
Although LaPlante was very much aware of the economic advantages of bidding out a project as well as of the political necessity of doing so, his lack of knowledge concerning the location of the Kinzie Street Bridge and the areas affected by the tunnels' flooding caused him to misinterpret the importance of putting out a bid on this project. Richard Daley — the present mayor, LaPlante's boss — was up for reelection. He and other city officials had been criticized in the past for giving jobs to their friends, for paying higher fees than necessary for a job, and for failing to provide jobs to minority- and women-owned businesses. By putting the job out for bid, LaPlante was making sure that the cost of the project would be as low as possible and that the mayor's administration would not be criticized. However, the results of the flooding in the financial district and the "million-dollar mile" retail district not only cost the city far more than would have been incurred by either of the high bids, but also cost the mayor political mileage with a disenchanted citizenry.
The city's businesses and citizens became irate at the city's inability to prevent the flood, causing a great deal of political damage in terms of the mayor's candidacy for reelection. Had LaPlante understood these economic and political consequences, he might very well have made a different decision.
Although Koncza commented on the revenue that the city was receiving from renting sections of the tunnel system, he also needed to include information related to the international financial hub along with the multimillion-dollar retail area under which the tunnels ran so that LaPlante could understand the full economic consequences of the problem.
Readers' Reading Styles and Patterns Determine the Information Readers Obtain
Because LaPlante had read many memos requesting approval to fix something, he simply skimmed Koncza's memo, imagining it was similar to others that requested repairs to pavements or potholes. Because it isn't until the third paragraph that Koncza indicates any sense of urgency for repairing the leak, LaPlante may not have even noticed it. In fact, he may not have read that far since he would have had to read through the history of finding the leak, information he didn't really need to know in order to make a decision to approve the repair.
To ensure that LaPlante would read the message rather than cursorily dismiss it, Koncza needed to indicate in the subject line that the problem was critical and repairs needed to begin immediately. Then in the first paragraph he needed to present the problem and his request for immediate action so that, even if Koncza did not read further, he would know what needed to be done and why.
Koncza needed to reorganize his memo so that the information was presented from most to least important rather than chronologically. The request to repair the tunnel wall should have been foremost, and the explanation of why this was necessary should have followed immediately. The history of how the leak was found would have been more appropriately placed toward the end. The estimated cost could have been placed either in the first paragraph with the request or at the end.
The reading styles and behaviors for reading business documents differ markedly from those used to reading a textbook or a piece of literature. Readers do not read page by page or word for word. Rather they skip around in a text; read only the first or last paragraphs of a section; search for specific information; and use a table of contents or index to guide their search. They may read only the abstract or executive summary of a hundred-page report or they may read one or two sections, probably the introduction and conclusion of it. When they receive a memo, they usually look at who it is from and the subject. If they decide they should open the memo, they will quickly read the first paragraph. They may or may not read further.
Readers engage in a variety of reading styles — skimming, scanning, searching, understanding, and evaluating — depending on their purposes and the importance of a document to them. Readers usually simply scan a brief, routine memo, or letter to pick out the specific information they need (e.g., the date and time of a meeting, a writer's specific request, information they requested). They look for headings and subheadings, type that jumps out at them because it is in boldface or italics or all-capital letters or a different style, size, or color. They may skim through a brief report, reading the first paragraph and the final one, or scan a table of contents to learn the major areas covered in a document. They may search through a report to locate information specifically related to their project or division. Readers will only spend the time reading to understand and evaluate a document if they need the information to work on a project of their own.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Risk Communication and Miscommunication by Carolyn R. Boiarsky. Copyright © 2016 Carolyn R. Boiarsky. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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