Clear communication is very important….
timing is good too!
Quite often when we communicate to others, we tend to present our ideas from our own particular point of reference and view. It’s no wonder that we can get mixed up, and in the process mix other people up as well. Let me relate to you an excellent exercise we adopted at the technical call center where I used to work. It was borrowed from an old IBM strategy, but it still holds merit today. I would have either a group of 4 or 8 agents, and they would sit across from each other with a table in the middle. I would tape a piece of cardboard in the center of the table at about neck level to the agents, so they could not see what the other agent was doing from the shoulders down.
Then, we would take pieces of lego, you remember lego don’t you? Its the little plastic building blocks that kids play with that have little interconnecting dimples on them so you can make various shapes with the blocks. Each agent would have a pre-determined amount of pieces, and everyone had exactly the same pieces to work with. One side of the table was supposed to make the most unusual, bizarre, strange, unique and fantastic invention they could out of the lego blocks. When they were finished, the agent on the other side of the cardboard had to ask a series of well placed, open and closed ended questions in order to re-construct with their logo blocks what the other agent had built.
There of course were a lot of laughs, and interesting contraptions that were built as well, but it showed that one wrong question placed in the beginning of the conversation could have devastating results at the end. It demonstrated that technical agents and clients had to have extremely clear communication on both sides every step of the way. Most of the time, we as humans don’t take the time to paint a proper mental picture of what we want or need the other person to do. You may understand what you are talking about, but, if the person you are talking to has no strong reference point that they can anchor to, it can be very frustrating. So, our jobs as humans is to understand the human system and all of its variances. Enjoy the podcast. Rick
