Communication is one of the topics I end up talking about regularly. My job is to help companies make decisions and I need to provide them with lots of information to do that. The exchange of information is often the single biggest point of failure in the process and often it fails because the words chosen to express it don’t match the intent. Some common examples:
- Including lots of footnotes, clarifications and qualifications to a statement often render that statement meaningless to a listener. In actuality you are trying to provide realism but you are instead defeating the statement you are trying to make.
- Over-complicating a simple answer. Many simple answers require complicated work to get to the answer. Just because you’ve done a month’s worth of work to get to a one sentence answer doesn’t mean you should turn that one sentence into a dissertation.
- Over-simplifying a complicated answer. Some answers cannot be simply given due to situations or the lack of a clear preferable option. Many people will take this answer and try to make it easily accessible. This is a time for making sure the complications are known because simplification may be implying a “pick one and run with it” response.
Three common situations that I encounter all the time. How you choose to relay your information can render all of the work you’ve done useless before you even realize what you’ve done.