Today I turn our project management book review lens to If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face?, by Alan Alda. Now, this is a somewhat unorthodox choice for a project management book review — Alan Alda is not a project manager and this book does not claim to speak to project managers or career pivoters. I picked it up because I LOVE Alan Alda, and his name caught my eye in the business section of the library because I figured it must have been miscategorized.
But it wasn’t. Alan Alda is an actor, but I didn’t know that he is an actor who adapts improvisation techniques to teach scientists how to communicate well. In fact, he founded the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. And this entire book is about the pitfalls of what happens when we communicate poorly, and the magic that can happen when we communicate well. So while this isn’t technically a book about project management, I was probably about twenty pages into it by the time I knew I would be writing about it here.
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If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face?, by Alan Alda
The tagline of this book is “My adventures in the art and science of relating and communicating” (between the longform title and the subtitle I’m starting to think Alan Alda is as bad as I am at being concise). There’s a lot to unpack there, but where I want to really zoom in is Alda placing “relating” before communicating.
The heart of this book is really that we can’t truly communicate with someone without first connecting with them. Alda makes the point a number of times throughout the book that the person doing the speaking is ultimately the one responsible for evaluating whether the message has been received — and for tweaking the message depending on the other person’s skills, abilities, interests, background, and other factors affecting their ability to receive and ultimately understand the message.
This is such a foundational lesson for project managers to learn. One of the truest distillations of our roles is taking a complex, interrelated amount of information and figuring out what pieces of it to communicate, to who, when, and how we’ll do that in order to make sure the message is received. We can imagine blockers along each piece of that chain (“how do I know who needs to receive the information?”) and we can also imagine obstacles to resolving those blockers (“I’ve already communicated that, how could they not have understood it?”).
Now, certainly sometimes a project manager needs to offer coaching. And it’s also true that of course everyone on the project team (and most stakeholders) share some degree of accountability for what does and doesn’t get done. But it’s also true that at the end of the day, what project managers are striving to create is a healthy, harmonious project environment where work gets done on time and on budget. So if we can use communication skills to diagnose issues and tweak our work accordingly (i.e., understanding that Joe Smith is simply not going to retain information that you send via Slack after 3pm, but that he will respond enthusiastically and happily if you swing by his desk), this is often the way to go, rather than wondering why Joe Smith is even on payroll in the first place, does his boss know how bad he is about responding to Slack messages, etc etc etc.
Moreover, there are higher-stakes examples than Joe Smith’s “bad at Slack” example. There are CEOs who insist that they’re “bad with tech” and will tune out the second you use the phrase “CRM”… even if you are working on implementing a CRM as a company-wide project. So you need to find a way to talk about CRMs in a way that doesn’t trigger that shut-down. What does CRM stand for? Customer relationship management. What are we really doing when we use a CRM? We’re tracking and organizing the ways that our different customers are connected to us. That last sentence doesn’t use any “tech” language at all. It takes a couple seconds longer to say, so you might not use it on someone comfortable with technology… but if you use it on the CEO, you’re going to get back the two minutes it takes them to get back on track after they tune out because you triggered their “bad at tech” reflex.
(“Someone couldn’t get to be a CEO if they were bad enough at tech that just saying CRM makes them tune out!” you say, to which I say… let that be your reminder that anyone can do anything.)
Anyway, I loved reading this book. It was a joyful read, and while it started out easy, I actually found by the middle of the book that Alda’s examples were engaging and thoughtful enough that I wasn’t ripping through the book anymore, and that I was chewing on a lot of the material he was throwing out.
Who Should Read This Book?
This is a great read for anyone practicing speaking conversationally about the value of communication in project management. Alda gives a ton of very vivid examples throughout the book about how powerful it is to connect with others through communication, but he does it without fluff (which is meaningless to people who speak strategy) or jargon (which is unhelpful to someone looking to practice speaking about value in a humanizing way). If you’re feeling great about the foundational principles of PM, and you’re looking to round out your perspective and practice framing your soft skills in interviews, this is a slam dunk of a read.
I would particularly recommend this book if you’ve had a lot of experience in your career with stakeholder management, or if you’re looking to go into a field like marketing communications, product design, or any other field where a careful understanding of human psychology informs the technical outputs and deliverables of project work. (This is most of my own career, which may be why this book resonated with me so strongly.)
If many of your strongest examples of times you’ve already worked on project management work revolve around stakeholder management or relationship-building, this book will help you articulate why this is important… and you’ll also probably learn a thing or two about how to sharpen your own professional skillset. (I read it while I was working on APM content and I genuinely think the content is stronger for it.)
Who Might Put This On Their “Save For Later” List?
If your time is quite limited and you’re still trying to master the fundamental building blocks of project management, I’d skip this for now. I think this is going to give the most value to people who have a clear understanding of how their experience relates to the next step in their careers, and how they can talk about and frame the work they’re doing from a perspective of communication and stakeholder management. I’d also skip this if you’re looking to spend your time sharpening a technical skillset rather than a soft skillset.
The Bottom Line
If I Understood You is a great way to balance a read that’s fun, engaging, and genuinely joyful (though seriously what else would we expect from the man the myth the legend) with a book that also left me feeling like I’d just taken a really great workshop and learned something new. I checked it out from the library but I actually bought it to keep on my own shelf (how’s that for putting my money where my mouth is? haha) because I felt like it was that relevant. If you read it, let me know what you think!
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