What are you trying to tell me?
Why you don’t understand me?
Have you ever wondered who is responsible that communication work? Let’s say conversation. Person who is speaking, or the one listening?
He doesn’t understand me, he doesn’t listen, he’s not smart enough to get me.
It is easy to walk the road of blaming others, to say that if someone doesn’t get what we’re saying, it is their fault. But that is simply not correct, because only the speaker knows what he wants to say. And even if the speaker sends a clear message and the other person doesn’t understand, it is the responsibility of the speaker to repeat the process and communicate it differently, even more clearly and simply. Only he can change communication pattern. If needed, take a pen, draw a picture, a diagram, a map; be clear about what you really want.
“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
To make things more clear and easy, let’s break down the basics of communication: the audience, the purpose, and the limits.
To whom I’m communicating? Who is listening?
An audience is a person or group of persons to whom you want to communicate the message. Be strict on this one, before any communication ask yourself question “To whom I’m communicating”?
Without a clear understanding of your audience, your words might get lost in the vast expanse of miscommunication. For example, you can’t communicate application issue details in the same way to the software developer and to the manager or god forbid, customer.
Real-life example:
Imagine a situation when a bug in the code cause a critical application issue which needs to be resolved as soon as possible. What would you say to the developer and what to the
Manager? Probably you would not have the same conversation with them. At least I hope so.
A typical conversation with a colleague developer would be something like: Hey, there is a database connection issue caused in that specific part of code which occurred in a some specific use case. I reviewed the code, but I’m unable to pinpoint the exact issue, can you please take a look?
While conversation with the manager would be completely different and something like: Hi there, we’re tackling issues and anticipate having it resolved by today, around 4:00 PM. We know issue is important, therefore we will keep you in the loop in hourly basis.
Practice: How and what would you communicate application issue to the customer?
The audience Software developer needs completely different information than the audience Manager. One need detailed technical information to resolve the issue while other need about the progress and expected delivery timeline. Sending the same message to those two audiences would result in confusion and possible misunderstanding of the situation. Can you imagine provide same information to the developer and customers?
Same issue, same goal but two completely different perspectives. It may sounds natural but it is one of the most common communication issues.
There are more audiences but for the simplicity of this article we will cover only the following:
- General audiences
- Managers and decision-makers
- Expert
General audience is not specialized in a particular topic. They are usually interested in a topic just for their enjoyment. Provide them with practical information, use anecdotes, examples, etc, and don’t include too many details.
Communication with the general audience about the above real-life example would be Hey, there is a production issue. We are fixing it right now, we will keep you in the loop with progress, but until then, functionality X does not work. As temporary solution please use workaround X. Practical information without too many details.
Managers and decision makers audience is more than in details interested in effects, costs and timelines. Rather than detail explanation provide them summary reports and recommendations. If details are required provide them as appendix.
Expert audience have extended expertise in specific domain. Provide them with additional information and enough details. More is better.
What we want to achieve, what is the point?
Many meetings are quite hard to follow due to a lack of a clear definition of the communication purpose. During the conversation, we always need to be clear “What do we want to accomplish, what is the point?” Are we seeking a solution, clarifying the present situation, investigating why we are in the present situation? Almost always the lines between these aspects become blurred during the meeting, resulting in confusing discussions.
Is is vital to establish a clear communication purpose. It is common to mix different purposes within a meeting, but it is important to have clear boundaries between them. By doing so, a meeting will result in more effective and purposeful discussions.
The purpose is an answer to the question “What do you want to accomplish?”. In communication theory, there are four basic purposes:
- Persuasion
- Exposition
- Narration
- Description
Persuasion is convincing others to feel, act or think differently than they currently do. It is presenting how things could be. Usually is used when presenting solutions for specific issues. The solution must be presented clearly and understandable to audience.
Exposition is presenting the objective facts with no subjective details if possible. This form is using when presenting the knowledge gap between you and the audience (meeting minute, technical presentations, etc). For example, if you want to present difference between two frameworks you would typically communicate objective advantages and disadvantage of each framework. It is important that information are well organized (e.g. advantage / disadvantage table).
Narration is presenting a chronology of events that led to the current state. It is important to include only needed details and represent how event occurred in time. Typically usage would be explaining what series of event caused missing the deadline.
Description is presenting a detailed picture of how things looks like. You should include needed details and also present the big picture to the audience. The most typically usage of this form is product documentation.
Real-life example:
The project is behind schedule. Managers organize meetings with business analytics and lead developers to discuss what to do. When communication isn’t clear, things will get chaotic. Developers might want to brainstorm solutions, business analysts might try to clear out picture of the application current state, and managers could be looking at timelines and ways to get projects timeline back on tracks. And some, if not majority of the participants will just be lost in conversation.
A better way is to establish an agenda. The first step is to draw a clear picture of the present state using description purpose. If it is important to understand the series of events leading to the present state use narration purpose. Typically is next step proposing a solution proposal using persuasion purpose. Hopefully, there is more than one solution that should be communicated using exposition purpose. But make sure that there are clear borders between purposes. For example, at the end of description you can say We described and explain the issue, now we will start brainstorming as many different ideas as possible. At the moment, we will not decide which one is the best, we will just collect as many of them as possible. With this simple man words we clearly distinguishes phase of collecting ideas and taking decisions – That is vital for mind imagination processes.
Constraints
Constraints are simply limitations in communication. And we will touch only the most obvious one. Time. It happened way too often that meeting with is scheduled with a way to tight time frame. This will result in much lower focus and attention, particularly because they might have other meetings or work tasks lined up. We can all relate to the frustration when a meeting, especially one right before lunch, ends up stretching longer than expected. Hungry people will often agree with everything just to wrap things up and head to lunch.
“There is no problem so complex, nor crisis so grave
that it cannot be satisfactorily resolved within 20 minutes.”
by Winston Churchill
Listen people with your ears, eyes and heart
Are you really listening?
Effective communication isn’t just about speaking; that’s only one side of the coin, while the other is being an excellent listener. Do you listen just words or also emotions, body language and tonality? We will cover that topic in separate article, but for now, just pay attention to how people speak. When you truly listen, you will understand people and be able to read between the lines. Also, you will better understand the communication patterns of your closest people.
I had the privilege to work with an excellent developer who often underestimate the time needed to complete tasks. He would always say it’s 80% complete and promise to finish by the next morning, yet reality rarely matched these promises. His 80% were usually more like 50% to 60% which was frustration trigger for one of the senior managers.
After the second or third escalation (shitshow), I realized that he consistently provided valuable information. It was just a matter of interpreting it correctly. After this realization I know we have to do just two things:
- Interpret his estimations correctly (quick win)
- Understand why he is underestimating and coach him to be more precise (long term win)
After we understood his reasons for underestimating, it was easy to coach him. And we were able to do that only because we truly listen to him.
“We have two ears and one mouth
so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
by Epictetus