Communication Breakdown

My wife Lynda and I were recently celebrating our honeymoon, driving around Scotland.

I am old-school, and a man, so I refused the GPS and chose to operate with a map and my inbuilt sense of direction and spatial awareness. Which meant that there were times when, after I had driven around long enough to completely frustrate Lynda, I had to stop and ask a local person for directions.

If you have had much interaction with the Scots, you can guess how things went. Besides the Edinburgh and, in particular, Glasgow brogues (accents) being very difficult for even me – a Brit – to understand, the Scots use a high level of colloquial words and phrases. Combine this with a verbal delivery pace that exceeds that of the late John F. Kennedy, and you are faced with a torrent of information, using terms and an accent that you struggle to understand, talking about a subject – the roads of the Scottish highlands – about which you know very little.

When we – experts in our field and fully up on the latest terms and acronyms – speak with our clients, colleagues and associates, do we sometime replicate the experience described above? I will put my hand up and say Yes.

The best directions that Lynda and I received were from the concierge at the Glasgow Hilton. He took us through the five mains steps to get from the hotel onto the highway to Loch Lomond. He didn't use any non-English words or phrases. He spoke slowly. And he repeated the instructions in summary form at the end.

I think that in our desire to prove to clients and colleagues our experience, intelligence, worth, general all-round brilliance, we often try too hard to be overly clever in our communication. Or maybe we simply don't realize that we are doing it. Most of our clients do not know what TOGAF or the DAMA DMBoK are. They are starting to grasp Big Data, because they see blogs on it every other day. Our clients are experts in what they do. But they are not experts in our field. So let's keep it simple. Let's try using sentences that don't have any acronyms. If we do use industry terms, explain them. Stay on topic. Pace/limit the information we deliver at any one time.

As a footnote, I once presented a two-day training course in Seoul, South Korea. I had to use an interpreter. I spoke for thirty seconds, then the interpreter translated into Korean and delivered what I had just said. I quickly learned that I needed to be really succinct in the words that I used and to make everything I said clear and understandable. I still had a massive headache at the end of each day.

I truly believe the cliché "It's all about communication". It really is. So let's make it better.

P.S. Apologies to the Scottish.

P.P.S. If you do want to find out about TOGAF, DAMA and Big Data, we have a few people at Citisoft who really are experts in this field and would be very happy to talk with you.

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David Yardley

David is a Citisoft Managing Director with over 30 years of experience in the investment management industry as a consultant, client, and vendor. He is skilled in program management, advisory and strategic initiatives, enterprise data management, and solution architecture, spanning the front, middle, and back office. David is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and has successfully managed complex programs in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Bermuda, and Asia.