We communicate at work using a variety of means such as email, text, presentations, word-processed documents, WhatsApp messages, Wiki pages, and spreadsheets, to name a few. However, it happens oftentimes that the people we communicated to completely missed the point, misunderstood or just did not even notice some of the things we hoped they would. But we can sympathize with the situation as we ourselves have on many occasions not paid enough attention to the messages that come to us because we were distracted, disinterested, got sidetracked, felt drowsy, or just did not have time to carefully go through. There are numerous strategies that one could adopt to mitigate the effect of miscommunication, but what if there is a mismatch in terms of preferences and beliefs?
Let me first explain the last sentence of the previous paragraph. Some strategies one could use in written communication are: boldface, CAPITALIZING, underlining, and italicizing. One could take it up a notch by including color, highlight, quotes and special characters (now that we are all used to it while creating passwords). While these are excellent strategies to grab the attention of the reader, they may not be considered “professional” or even appropriate in a formal document. If the reader has a strong preference in terms of how a formal document is written, then you have lost that reader by over-emphasizing. In face some may even find it insulting (although my guess is that most would not) that we felt the need to emphasize.
Further, when we move from presenting written material to presenting numbers, there are a lot of things to consider. Do we present the information in a table or as a visual? Do we write a formula or shall we say it in words? Also, while presenting information in a table or spreadsheet do we use background color to map the magnitude to a color scheme. Then, there are a ton of visualization tools where we could do a phenomenal job of presenting information pictorially. On one hand, these things appear to be a no-brainer as after all “a picture is worth a thousand words” and formulas are difficult to understand. On the other hand, your audience may not want to be deceived (remember there are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics) or your audience just wants to dig deeper.
While there are many ways to get your point across, the main emphasis of this article is what we can do to reduce miscommunication. Here are three thoughts:
1. Know your audience
In many situations due to our own preferences, belief systems and upbringing, we tend to communicate in a certain way. For example, I like to use formulae over anything else because it offers precision that oftentimes language fails to do. However, if the audience is not a big fan of formulas, then what do we do? One option is to take the middle ground. For example, we could say average_speed = total_distance/total_time instead of writing notation such as v = s/t where v is the average speed, etc. The downside is if the formula is very long, it gets unwieldy. But the main point is that it is important to understand your audience and adapt. If you know your audience, give them like how they like (e.g. a spreadsheet, and not a figure). For all this it is crucial to understand who your audience is and what they would prefer. Also, it is better to ask than assume, or also adapt as you go if you could not ask.
2. Mix it up a little
It is well accepted in education that there are different types of learners: some are visual, some experiential, some auditory, etc. Say we do not have the luxury of knowing our audience in advance, or have a wide variety in the audience, or cannot see our audience (as they are over Zoom with their video off) thereby making it impossible to improvise on the fly. Then you mix up your contents a little bit, or provide all options that are feasible. For example, you could use both words and formulas, both tables and charts, both audio/video and text, or both color and black/white, to name a few. Of course, not everything can be mixed around. However, it may be possible to present in the most optimal manner or even repeat in multiple formats.
3. Keep your audience engaged
Thanks for coming this far along! I understand I am being hypocritical when I say some of these things next that are clearly not applied to this article. There are many ways to keep your audience engaged. You can use comedy by throwing some jokes in or bringing impromptu humor can be extremely effective in many circumstances. You can create a listening through such means as comedy. Another thing is to find ways to break the monotony. One way is to take a physical break and return. Another is to ask questions (especially in a classroom setting) or ask your audience if there are questions. It also helps, especially in pre-recorded videos to use voice modulation. It may be useful to tell the audience what to expect (e.g. saying upfront there are 4 things to talk about or putting up an agenda slide).
In summary, the key point is to take the focus away from ourselves and our agenda. Instead think how best to be effective with the audience. It would greatly improve the ability to get our points across. I welcome your thoughts.