Divide Until Trivial

Posts Tagged ‘details’

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.

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.