I enjoyed this blog post on the Lighthouse Consulting blog, originally written by author Larry Wilson, entitled, "The Two-Tunnel Trap." Wilson tells the story of engineers digging a tunnel through a mountain: one team on one side, and one team on the other, with the objective to meet squarely in the middle. If successful, these teams will dig one continuous tunnel–but if not, they will dig two tunnels leading into the middle of the mountain.

Wilson prescribes a formula of "simple, familiar, and dramatic" to help people avoid two-tunnel communications. For regular speaking or writing, this is a winning formula for communicating new ideas. And for the business communications that we generate in our project-based work, I add "organized" to the list.

By "organized," I mean "ordered and structured in a fashion that allows team members to find what they seek." Without organization, teams have no platform for sorting through or communicating the many events and messages that are part of a project. This requirement is easy to grasp, but difficult to deliver without one centralized system. I emphasize "one" because multiple systems are like multiple tunnels into the mountain.

In the extreme, multiple disconnected systems result in a MESS (meetings, email, and spreadsheets) that is (to use Larry Wilson’s words) neither simple, nor is it familiar to all users–although the results can be dramatic in that they lead to chaos and drama in the workplace.

Even in our own company, we have seen many tunnels into the mountain. When each manager used to attend a status meeting with his or her own spreadsheet of project information, costs and revenue, each group was able to show success and profit. However, in the aggregate, when you look at the consolidated picture it was never as rosy as the individual managers had painted it with their spreadsheets. It was amazing how people could interpret and manipulate the data. As a customer put it: "Many business executives and project managers are experts at the movement of costs, but not the reduction of them."

This is just an example of how one centralized project workforce management system enables the members of a team to dig one, and only one, tunnel through the mountain. A unified platform is the key to avoiding slow (or fast) death by manipulated spreadsheets; and making sure that communication–in the sense that we communicate in business–connects people on all sides.