Divide Until Trivial

Acronyms are a very quick way to let misunderstanding slip into your communications. For anyone to understand an acronym, they need to know something before hand. Further more, that knowledge is context sensitive. For example, if I said my ROI was very high right now, what might I be talking about? Here are some choices:

• Return on Investment
• Rate of Interest
• Risk of Incarceration

(taken from the Acronym Finder)

If I’m talking about a deal I’ve just done, then I’m probably talking about Return on Investment. However, if that deal is with some local drug dealers, then perhaps I really mean Risk of Incarceration? Perhaps I’m worried about the Loan Shark’s rates?

If you’re working in an office environment, then your colleagues are unlikely to get jailed for the work they’re doing, nor are your company directors likely to get their legs broken for late repayments. However, I’m sure it’s pretty obvious how misunderstandings can creep in. Often, companies make up their own acronyms for internal activities; this again can lead to confusion, particularly with newer employees, or customers, suppliers or whatever. Essentially, we’re talking different languages, but they sound the same.

The problem with acronyms is that they’re often pretty catchy. They seem like a quicker way of saying things than saying the actual words. There’s also some psychology that suggests companies and departments deliberately invent their own languages to maintain exclusivity, value and differentiation. In short, no matter how hard you try, you’ll probably end up using acronyms for things. The key is to remember that you’re doing it, and to explain when you need to.

Actually, I find properly written communication a good way to both educate and optimise. It’s easy to follow some simple rules, such as, the first time you use an acronym, explain it. For example:

On completion, I’d expect my Return on Investment (ROI) to be very high.

From that point on in the document you can continue to say “ROI” as much as you like, without too much risk of confusion. Of course, this only works if you’re writing something fairly lengthy. An Instant Message type of medium isn’t always the best for such things, but it’s worth getting a little verbose if you think your audience might not know what you’re talking about (and as with most electronic communication, you don’t see confused looks back from your audience to tell you you’re losing them!).

A friend sent this to a few people by email:

”Two men look at each other and start to argue. They make a phone call. One man leaves for home and the other begins to dig in a different place.”

(click here for a solution – it’s rather under-whelming!)

In such situations, the quintessential Geek looks at the request, and determines that it is either:

• hard in ways he is not proficient (eg. is emotionally based, rather than logical)
• has an imprecise answer
• requires subject matter that is unfamiliar and deemed to be of low quality (such as popular culture, celebrity gossip, etc.)

…upon this determination, the Geek simply dismisses the request as “pointless”, or “beneath him” or abhorrent in some other way. If pressed for an answer, the Geek will attempt to change the rules of engagement in some way, so as to make the problem more suitable for him. If even this is impossible, the Geek will most likely offer a series of different answers, each innovative and defensible, but often opposed to each other, as a demonstration of the perceived poor quality of the request.

On receipt of this sort of behaviour, the person making the request will probably feel like they’ve been “told off”, and won’t feel like they should ever come back and ask anything else ever again. Worse than that, they won’t have got the answer they were looking for.

I’ve seen this sort of thing myself. I’ve asked technical specialists things that I think are perfectly reasonable requests, only to be rewarded with a barrage of snide “put me downs”. I’ve often felt rather aggrieved by this, but then went back and asked again, rephrasing my request and perhaps taking out some aspects of it that weren’t really that important. I’ve then been given a well researched, articulate and precise answer with all the detail I could want. I’ve been left to assemble this information and some of the things I already know myself, but ultimately have a far better result than expected.

I’ve seen others struggle with this too. At the end of the day, it all comes down to making your request easy to fulfil. Sometimes when talking to technical people this requires skills we’re not used to using, but if we make the effort, we find that actually those people we thought were “hard to reach” are actually some of our best assets.

I’ve introduced the idea of “brain space” in an earlier post. It seems that we apply our ‘brain space’ in different ways. That means that sometimes we think someone else has no ‘brain space’, when in fact they’ve got lots – they just use it in a different way to us.

One easy difference is what I’ll describe as “horizontal versus vertical thinking”. Horizontal thinkers are those that look at the entire job at once, which naturally means they can’t think of all of the details of all parts of the job. Involving them in the finer details is temporary, because they will feel like they’re going to forget some important steps in the job if they expend too much of their brain space on small details.

Vertical thinkers look at the whole job, but then concentrate on the first major task and consider all of it’s finer details. Getting them to think about later tasks is hard because they’ll want to work out all of the details of all of the intermediate work, which will exhaust their available brain space.

This difference is often the cause of poor communication. If you’ve ever witnessed sales people talking to engineers, you may have seen this problem first-hand. Although there are exceptions, in general, sales people tend to be horizontal thinkers, where as engineers tend to be vertical. You’ll often hear engineers saying that sales people just don’t understand, and you’ll hear sales people saying that engineers are constantly putting barriers in the way of sales deals.

If you think about this for a moment, it’s actually easy to see how this age-old problem comes about. As an example, the sales person may have identified a customer who’ll buy widgets, so long as they do “X”, which they don’t do currently. Since the sales person doesn’t consider the fine details of getting from point A to point B, they can’t really make a realistic judgement of how easy or hard getting the widget adjusted may be. They then talk to the engineers, to see what they can do. All the while though, the sales person is thinking about his bonus, and the new car he’s going to buy with it once the customer he’s found buys millions of these new super-widgets.

The engineer, on the other hand, immediately works out all of the finer details of getting the widget to do “X”. Some of those details present some significant challenges, which will take some further investigation to see if they’re even possible. Quite probably, the engineer is mentally solving those hard problems, without any regard to what “X” is, or the possible significance of the opportunity the sales person thinks they may have.

Here is where the poor communication comes in. You have two people concentrating on very different things. In fact, they’re so different that they’re almost invisible to each other. We’ve got one person thinking about sports cars and bonuses, and we’ve got the other thinking about nuts and bolts. It’s no wonder these two people will have a bad experience if they try and talk about this! They probably both have the same amount of “brain space”, and they’re probably both equally dedicated, it’s just that they apply themselves differently.

So the key here is empathy – the capability to share and understand another’s emotions and feelings. In this case, it’s a sort of professional empathy, in so much as both parties need to try and understand the other’s professional responsibilities and position (things like cross-departmental training might help). However, both parties would also do well to understand that the other thinks differently, and has different concerns, and isn’t misunderstanding anything, they’re just understanding it differently.

If you look around a bit you’ll find plenty of examples of how teaming these two types of people together can result in real gains. Really successful companies have learned that you have to marry up sales and engineering, so that the products you make are easily saleable, and that sales know what is possible with the product and what isn’t. Bringing different types of people together isn’t easy, and it takes a lot of effort from everyone concerned, but it might just be worth trying.

Here’s an old article about why communication skills don’t work. It reminds us that such skills are no use on their own. It’s obvious when you think about it, but having all the communications skills in the world mean nothing if you’re not actually doing something for the person you’re talking to.

The example they give is customer service skills; clearly, listening carefully, and making sure you’ve understood your customer is pointless unless you actually intend to fix their problem or otherwise take care of their issues.

In my experience, most technically minded people are actually very keen to help people. However, technical people often cloud that desire by communicating badly (either intentionally, or unintentionally). As a result, the person asking for help will probably feel that they’re being obtuse, or deliberately unhelpful. This is where the “cultures collide”, and all because of some basic misunderstandings.

I got into a London black cab last night. The drivers are of course famously good at navigating London, sometimes using the vaguest information from the people they drive about.

I was reminded that we (Westerners) think about an address in the reverse that you’d think about getting there. For example, a favourite restaurant of mine is at 447 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton, London, England. If you wanted to get there, you’d first go to England, then find London, take the tube to Brixton and then walk around to Coldharbour Lane and then number 447.

In other words, if you want to help out your cabbie, tell ‘em your address in reverse ;-)

(The real point of this post was to illustrate that sometimes things we are used to, and take for granted, aren’t necessarily the ‘optimum’ way of doing things)

A friend of mine sent me this (old) video, the Microsoft iPod parody (apparently created by Microsoft to demonstrate the problems they have with packaging and the like). This got me to thinking about “too much detail”.

There is something I’m going to call “brain space”. It’s essentially how big one’s brain is – not in intellect or agility, but in capacity. By this I mean one’s ability to comprehend something fully. To do this, we need to understand the concept we’re dealing with, and appreciate all of it’s details – but we need to do this all at once. I’m not sure if this is psychologically true, but it seems there’s a limit to how many details a person’s brain can hold at once. This limit depends on the person, the ‘type’ of person they are, how busy they are today, if they’ve had enough sleep last night, and probably dozens of other factors.

Have you ever been working with someone, and asked them what to do about a particular point, only to be told “I can’t think of that right now”? It seems to me that this is because the person’s “brain space” was full, and they couldn’t fit any more details in at the moment.

Of course, pushing a task away so that you can concentrate on the job at hand isn’t anything particularly radical. It’s easily attributed to being busy, or stressed, or just focussed elsewhere.

When we think about things, we often need to be able to think about the whole problem, and all of the currently available details. As problems get bigger, we tend to break them down and think about sub-sections at a time. This, I’d say, is because our “brain space” isn’t big enough to consider the whole thing at once.

I personally find that I sometimes need a bit of time to get used to something. By that, I mean if I discover a raft of fresh details one day, then I might not be in a good position to accept more details immediately. Often I find that “sleeping on it” helps, or else just making some notes, or doing a completely different thing for a few minutes makes me more able to take on more details.

Being aware of someone’s brain space when you talk to them is important. They might not be at their peak, they might just have a smaller brain space than you, or they might have lots of other details already in their brains, so not have much left for you. Either way, when we communicate, we have to watch out that we don’t ‘overload’ the audience, either with too many details, or with “too much, too soon”.

I was reminded of this cartoon, whilst reading some of the comments here (which is completely unrelated). The important bit is this:

> I found myself pulling on a door clearly marked Push.

That is actually just an UI bug in the door. If you want people to push a door, you should use a handle that is like a plate, where you can easily put your hand against and push it. If you want people to pull the door open, you need to use vertical rod as a handle, where people can easily grab on to pull it. With this very small change, you don’t even need to push/pull texts on the doors.

This raises a question… If you find yourself pushing on a “pull door”, is it because you’re stupid, or is it because the door is not communicating clearly?

Assumptions are probably the single biggest barrier to good communication. The problem is, that we all assume things, and then don’t bother to check the details. This happens everywhere, and all the time. We all do it! The problem with assumptions is that they leave details unsaid. In a great number of cases, this leads to someone doing something they don’t need to do (over-working), or something being missed entirely.

As a trivial example, imagine you asked me to paint your bathroom. If I assume that your bathroom is about the same size as mine (quite small), and that you want it painted like mine (a light creamy colour), then I might be able to give you an estimate for the cost of the work. I happen to have some of that cream paint left over, so I can do it cheaply for you. Now imagine that when I come over to do the work, your bathroom is bigger than my entire house, and you actually want it painted blue. Clearly, my original estimates are going to be completely wrong. Now I either need to do lots of work without getting paid, or we need to agree that actually you want it a creamy colour instead of blue, or you need to pay far more than you expected.

All that’s a pretty obvious problem. A lot of people would intuitively be able to look at the decorating “problem” and work out that size and colour are important details, so we’d be careful to point them out. However, there are of course all sorts of other details about decorating we don’t intuitively know, and so won’t think to pass them on. When problems get more complex, we don’t have the same amount of intuitive knowledge, so we don’t know so much about the solution, and we don’t know which details are important.

What we can see from all this is that the recipient of our information makes assumptions because we (the sender) make assumptions on their behalf, and probably do so without thinking about it. We unwittingly direct our audience to formulate incomplete conclusions in a way that we want them to. We’d probably be happy a that point, merrily believing that everyone had all the information they needed, and that everything was well managed. The odd thing is that this exuberance is often sub-consciously passed on to our audience, so they probably also think they have all the information they need. It’s only when they start looking at it in detail that they’ll realise they don’t know nearly enough.

The point here is that bad assumptions lead to bad things happening. As the sender of information, we need to be careful about what we assume the receiver knows, doesn’t know and needs to know. As the receiver, we need to be careful about what we assume about what we’re being told, and we also need to be sure to evalute what we’re being told carefully, and not to “add” to it with our own imagination. In short, we’ve got to be careful not to project ourselves into the actual content of what’s being discussed.

Presenting to an audience is something of an art form. At some point in our professional lives, we’re bound to have to present something to at least a small group of our colleagues. A couple of Internet searches will turn up a number of good resources on how to prepare and how to talk (for example, here and here). In my experience though, almost everyone talks about using Microsoft Powerpoint. That’s not always a good thing.

A number of years ago, I worked at a semiconductor company, which had regular engineering “update” meetings. Back then, we used to use an OHP and slides to present, as computer projectors were still rare and expensive. We used to have a bit of a saying, which was something like “the more colourful the slide, the less they have to say”. In short, the engineers who were busy just knocked up some rough slides, printed them quickly in black and white and presented off them. The people who had nothing much to report spent their time getting the colour printers to work (probably because they weren’t busy doing actual work!?), and hoped a bit of glitz would make up for their lack of content.

The point here is that regardless of the visual presentation, the content is by far the most important thing. That said though, what you do visually can really help get your point across, so it’s worth thinking about it, particularly if your presentation is a “one chance” sort of thing, and it matters to you that you’re successful.

I personally think Powerpoint (and OpenOffice Impress, Apple Keynote, and most others) offer the skilled presenter the tools to do a reasonable job. They also offer the inexperienced presenter far, far more features than they should use. There’s an expression that says “perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away“. As a general rule, steer clear of slide transitions, sounds, and even clipart, unless it’s actually adding something to the message you’re trying to get across. If you do use any of these things, make sure they work in the place you’ll present. Lots of visual effects don’t work very well on projectors, web meetings, etc.

There’s something else: Sometimes slides actually constrain your thinking. If you’re planning out a presentation, it’s often best not to load up your presentation application (Powerpoint, et al) – instead, just think about what you’re going to be talking about. Let that decide how you’re going to present. There’s no rule that says you must use slides at all, perhaps all you need is a single, inspirational picture? Perhaps you need people to think about things in a new way, which might suggest using a different visual, perhaps a video, or something like Prezi?

Either way, whatever you do, make sure you use the right tool for the job. Make sure you’re comfortable with it, make sure you like your presentation, and make sure it’s not the way it is because you think someone else wants it that way. Sometimes this means telling your boss you’d prefer to do things a different way, which might be hard (or even impossible). Just make sure your medium doesn’t get in the way of your message.

If we talk to someone, we implicitly make assumptions about the ‘connection’ between us. That is, if both people speak English as a first language (for example), then we assume we can use complex English grammar, or colloquialisms. If we’re speaking to someone who’s obviously a foreigner, then perhaps we use simpler words and sentence construction. In other words, we are sensitive to the medium of our communication (also called the channel of communication).

That said, we frequently assume too much, or too little about the communication medium. This almost always leads to poor communication and misunderstandings. This sort of thing is well documented in other communications literature, so I won’t elaborate much further. However, there’s another facet to the medium which gets forgotten: the medium can obstruct the message – for the audience this makes it harder to understand whatever the message is trying to say.

I’ll put this into some context by talking about a common example (stick with it, I’ll be back on topic any moment!).

As a British person, I can say with some authority that we are terrible at talking to tourists. This is because we assume far too much about the medium of communication. We assume everyone speaks English, and moreover, our particular style of English, be it Cockney, Northern, West Country or whatever. Since some people don’t speak perfect English, we compensate for the difficulties in the medium by tending to raise our voices and stopping using the “small words” in sentences. Something like this, perhaps:

YOU GO… DOWN TO CORNER… TURN LEFT… WALK 10 MINUTES… SEE BIG GLASS BUILDING… HOTEL BEHIND!

(We might also be waving our arms around at this point, trying to be visually helpful)

This well meaning, although slightly misguided approach partly works. In truth though, we’d be better off trying to talk like a BBC newscaster, and just use simple sentence construction. After all, that’s how people learn English!

The point of all this is that we get the core of our message across, but all of the extra information is lost. The receiver (the tourist) will hopefully get to their hotel, but they won’t think we’re all lovely and very helpful, they also won’t know that tomorrow, they can walk 5 minutes and find some majestic landmark and know exactly where they are, and they won’t be able to explain where they’ve been today.

Of course, if we’re asked for directions, we’re not trying to give people a lesson about our wonderful home town. Honestly, we’re just trying to get them somewhere close to where they’re going and then we want to get rid of them. However, because the medium is difficult, we stop trying to deliver anything other than the very core of the message.

So the lesson here is that when we communicate, our medium affects our message. In some cases, it might diminish our message (possibly badly enough to destroy our message entirely!). As a result, we need to be careful to pick our medium carefully and to know it’s limitations. Today’s electronic world gives us more choices of medium than ever before, but that really means we just need to pick more carefully.

As an IT industry worker, I’m very aware that we use Instant Messenger, Email and other electronic tools far more than we should. I’m also aware we don’t use the telephone much, and we definitely don’t physically go and visit people at their places of work nearly enough. This is because we’re thinking about our time (and that of our audience), and giving that preference to our message (as an industry, we’re also not famed for our social skills!). That’s actually fine in a lot of cases (and really does save time, or money, or both) but it means we don’t spot the times when this isn’t appropriate, and then we don’t spot when we’ve communicated badly.