Communication is really important and really hard

Often putting information available or sending an email is the thing people think to be enough communication in organizations. For me, communication is never about making information available, but about getting people to understand the message. Too often communication is seen to be broadcasting information to all and not caring if anyone is receiving the message or not. I see this as both inefficient and unnecessary communication.

People receive messages differently so there needs to be many different ways the message can be received. This is the part that it is so easy to underestimate. It is easy to get communication out of the way by publishing information to be available. I've never seen this to really work. Only the cases where ones work continuation is in question, as larger layoffs, publishing information might be enough. For any other communication, there are always too many distractions to lose the message to all the other noise.

It's not only about the noise, that prevents communication going through. People also receive the messages differently. Some people need to see the big picture in order to understand the message, others need to get the details for understanding. For some people it is important to know the reasoning behind something, for others goal might be the most important thing. This needs to be kept in mind when communication is planned.

Communication is one of the hardest topics in organizations. The value of the communication is hard to measure, but fails in communication are easy to point out. Often improving efficiency in communication, could increase many things in the organization. Better communication would need to be done so that it won't take much time out from people other tasks and still makes sure people receive the message.

The rule, using more time in the planning, will save time at the end, suits communication really well. The better person or small team plans communication and uses time to prepare it, the more time will be saved from everybody else. The bigger the organization, the larger the savings.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Nonviolent Communication

This time I got quite different type of book to myself to read. Marshall B. Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life was really interesting book about communication. It is one of those books that hopefully changes the way I communicate with others.

Basics of nonviolent communication is observing clearly, understanding the feeling, recognizing the needs and making clear request. I explained it myself even more simply, try to, without judgment, understand what other is saying and why, then make sure you are understood as well. As easy and basics it might sound, I believe no one can always communicate that clearly and honestly.

The book explains with lots of good examples from quite normal and really extraordinary situations how communication can be the key to progress in many situations. M.B Rosenberg has seen really difficult situations, but seems to have handled those well with nonviolent communication methods.

Understanding these methods is not hard. On the other hand learning to use these in everyday communication can take years or decades. We are so learned to use judgments on our communication that communicating with open heart and mind can be difficult. We are so built to seek for acceptance, that we can't understand the true needs behind the things we say and do.

This book is easy to read, but it requires courage to digest. It requires a journey to one's inner feelings and needs. As much of I would like to recommend this to anyone, I feel that to get the benefits of this, one needs to be open enough for the softer values of live. If you've read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and liked it, this might be a good book for you.

I hope that I would learn to communicate with rules of nonviolent communication in the future. I'm especially keen on trying to use these methods with my daughters. As a parent it is so easy to use authority and judgment to get through wishes. I do know that it requires more than one book to understand and start using this methodology effectively. I added other books of nonviolent communication to my reading list to come to the subject later on also. Now it's the time to start practicing.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Why there is so much Business Jargon?

I'm nowadays working in business to business environment. There, even more than b2c, everything is said with business jargon. It seems to be much better to say things with terms that doesn't really mean anything or are hard to understand. I keep on wondering , what is the point of that?

I define business jargon as explaining things more complicated than what they really are. For example email could be defined in business jargon as rich multi point communication platform enabling visual messaging between small or large groups. And camera would be a small carryable technical device, with possibilities on capturing thousand of moments to visual images anywhere in the world.

I hope you understand what I mean with business jargon with those examples It's hard to pick examples without embarrassing anyone, but the main point is that business jargon is saying easy things in really complex ways. If you want to check some examples there are many companies creating services or products in b2b sector that have some level of business jargon visible in their website.

I honestly don't understand it. Why couldn't things be said as those are. The same happens often in b2c business also. Take the mobile world as an example. Everybody is talking about, that there will LTE or 4G in this and that device. What they should say, there's going to be 10 times faster network speed on those devices. For normal people LTE doesn't mean anything.

Companies are often quite bad with communication. I believe one problem is the center of universe effect I blogged few weeks ago. They think that they need to tell every little detail on themselves, rather than focusing on getting the basic message through. Another thing is, that people in an industry get so familiar with their terminology they believe that everyone knows the terminology. That problem is part of business jargon effect. People are using terms that other people don't understand.

I've been doing lot of communication material in my new job at Product Manager at Contribyte. That's the reason communication issues have been in my mind lately. In few weeks we going to release some of the material to public. It will fun to hear and see how well I've managed to tackle the center of universe and business jargon effects. Maybe I have walked to the exact traps I'm saying everyone else does. Maybe that's too common to avoid. I at least know that those effects exists. Let's soon see what people think about those.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Communication flaws - Center of a universe effect

It is really common that companies think that they are much more important than they really are. I've seen it happen almost with every company I've worked with. Companies often think, that everyone is interested on them, tries to find their secrets and their products are the most important in the world. I call this center of a universe effect.

This effect is a real problem with many companies. It can be seen in presentations, websites and basically with any communication. Companies think that their brands and products are in a center of universe and they need to tell every little detail of their doings to everyone. This is where they go wrong. Communication should be focused on basics and delivering the most important aspects, not all the minor details. The few companies, like Apple, who could be said to be in the center of the universe, they seem to still focus on telling only the most important things. Maybe that's their secret.

The same goes with secrecy. Companies tend to use millions of Euros for keeping things secret. That's so funny, since there isn't that many companies who's doings are so important, that exposing those secrets would actually make any difference to anyone. Sure many companies have something they consider competitive advantage and want to keep it secret, but most often they are really exaggerating how interesting their secrets really are.

Companies should learn that they are not in the center of a universe. Communication should start from basics and focus on the basics. Definitely there are company fanboys, that want to learn more than just ordinary people, but communication shouldn't be focusing on them, but on the basics. Even big and well known companies need to focus on telling what their product is for. Too often companies think that everyone already knows them and their products and waste time on communicating details that other end doesn't understand due to lack of basic knowledge.

Center of universe effect is related to business jargon. When these two are put together we get presentations in conferences, articles in web and printed brochures that no one really understands. I'm sure you have read or seen these ones. For example someone can speak for 30 minutes without people understanding a word. The same goes with articles, there can be 20 pages about a subject in a such a strange point of view that no one really understands anything. This would be fine if those would be meant for specific audience, but in many cases those are for potential customers. And if potential customers don't understand what you are saying, you are in trouble.

Anyone who is related to communication or sales inside a company know what I'm talking about. It's so easy to slip on the other side of line, to believe that others know every piece of you. Just remember, you are not the center of the universe.
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Positive disturbance

I've admired now for some weeks one of my new colleagues, who have turned the very basic disturbing phone call question around. He asks in phone calls, that "Is it a good moment for you?" I amongst many others tend to ask the question other way around, " is it a bad moment for you?" The intention with both questions is the same, finding out if other person wants to talk with you or not. Doing it in the first way may just make the moment to be more suitable.

I've known couple of other persons who have this capability to disturb without really disturbing. It's a good asset for person who needs to cooperate a lot with others. It's not only about how you place your words, but it's also about how you present your subject you were disturbing for in the first place. If you still, after disturbing, present your subject as if you would be sorry for disturbing, then the one disturbed can feel annoyed about disturbance. If you continue as if you were entitled for this disturbance because the importance of the subject, then it's less annoying.

Being positive and believing your subject has a positive effect on communication. People tend to be much more receptive and cooperative if you believe what you say is important and worth of the moment other gives to it. The saying: "Don't shoot the messenger" isn't always right. Poor messenger might not get the message through or make the message to be less important that it really is.

Everyone knows how to speak, good communication skills on the other hand is a luxury of a few. That's the reason I try to observe others and learn from their habits, in good and bad. It takes ages to learn to communicate with different audiences and with different technologies.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learnings and tips from crowdsourcing project within company

Couple weeks ago I was asked to start up a crowdsourcing type of project inside the company. I was given sponsorship from our management, but I had to recruit the people myself and organize the actual work myself. I really liked the challenge and got up to speed quickly. I had only couple of weeks to finish this and I knew I had to get couple hundred people working on this on voluntary basis.

Now that the project has turned out quite well, I wanted to share my learning's from this journey to you and to analyze and learn from those myself also better. I at least analyze better written than only in my head.

Get it up and running
The first thing was to decide how much preparations I would do before really starting the project. I had basically two alternatives, (1) create proper web or tool based mechanism to divide the the work and create reporting tool or then (2) use good old excel and email based mechanism. Due to limited timeline, I selected the latter one. Within one day from announcing the project, I already had tens of people working on the actual work items.

This was a tough choice and I believe in some cases more elegant systems would help on coordinating the work and results. Of course I had a good plan also, just the tools were ancient. I juts believed that in this situation the best thing was to but the wheels running fast. That' was the way to get more time for our volunteers and fast feedback on my methods. So off I went.

Recruiting people
Like said, this was a company internal project and it has it's own challenges on recruiting people to join. I had to get sponsorship from our management (my manager did this for me, thanks for that), but I had to convince line managers around to give this a go and then convince the actual people to join to help a common goal.

Only tip I can say about this phase is, that be honest and transparent. Tell exactly how much of a time it might take from volunteer, what's the timeline and when results are expected. Also be clear what are the prerequisites people have to fulfill to join. And remember to tell the goal of the exercise clearly and understandably. Keys to get people to join are that they understand what they work for and what they exactly need to do.

Walk trough the whole chain
Before you roll up your sleeves and put the ball running; walk the whole chain trough once. What I do first, how do I instruct people, how do I get the results back, what do I do with the results, how the results are shown, who are the key people to know about the results, when this thing will finished and so forth.

Make an easy walk trough of the most important steps you expect you will face during the project. It won't take more than 15-30 minutes for this exercise, but it will definitely help you to see whole.

Test your instructions
This is the part I learned a lot. I made the perfect instructions at first. I looked the subject from many directions, answered all the questions in advance, made pictures with explanations on those and walked through the chain with my instructions. Then I asked few of my colleagues to check those. They found some minor tweaks to those, but after those, the instructions we ready to rock. Or so I thought.

I still decided to take one more cautious step before rolling the instructions to everyone. I decided to use target group for verifying those. When the first voluntaries arrived, I gave the instructions for the first tens of people and paused the roll out for a while. I asked my target group to immediately report any misunderstanding and clarification needs from my instructions. What happened was, that within the first day, I did four major updates to my thought to be perfect instructions. I congratulated myself for using this focus group approach. It turned out I really needed it.

Do not assume
In the first set of instructions I made two assumptions, that (1) some things are common knowledge and  (2) that it is obvious that I expected people to communicate back to me with certain way. Both of those turned out to be false ones.

I learned that I should never assume, that things are commonly known, because me and my close colleagues are familiar with the subject in advance. I had to make updates to my instructions about these really basic issues. I had actually explained the harder parts really well, but then the easy ones I had failed to explain well enough.

Biggest mistake of this whole project was, that I didn't specify the way people should communicate back to me. I assumed everyone would get the idea from my instructions, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. I got contacted with so many different ways and so many different formats, that I had to use lot of time on standardizing the results together. This is where the more advanced reporting tools would have become handy. I made conscious decision to stick with simple tools and get it running faster. It would have easily taken 2-3 days of my project to develop those tools, so I still think I made the right call with excel and email. Next time I just must use more time to explain how I want the results to be communicated to me.

Emphasize possibility to ask for more information
This was a learning from past similar projects. Some people need to be encouraged to ask for more info. Some people are naturally shy and they try to find information from sources they are familiar with. This easily leads to false information due to uncertainties and misunderstandings. So I encourage to put an extra emphasis on ways and possibilities to ask for clarifying questions. Tools like email and IM chat's work well for naturally shyer people.

Friends are the worst ones
I've done these type of projects couple of times in smaller scale and based of those and the project in question, I can tell that friends are the worst ones. Those people who you now quite well and who you do have a relationship with, easily don't obey the deadlines and read the instructions nearly as well enough as the ones you don't know in advance. Somehow the friendship status makes people to be more careless and they don't use the attention needed to successfully complete the tasks given. Of course there are exceptions to this and some friends can be even used for help. Overall I still think that friends are the worst ones in this type of projects. 

Have a realistic schedule
Before making a target schedule for your project, think about the scale. If there's 100 people involved, completing a project in 2 days is a big challenge. From 100 persons, there's easily ten  who come up with something more urgent to deal with and it might be hard to get replacement for so many in such short notice. I don't have any rule of thumb here, but just think of how long the task might take, double it and then give still some buffer. People always works in different ways and different situations.

When you give people a deadline, don't put it to the last day you want it to complete. Have it at least 1 or 2 days in advance and this gives you the possibility to be flexible, when people come to you to ask for more time. They are happy and you will still get your results on time.

Have a good plan of follow-up
As Stephen Covey advised in his book 7 Habits of highly effective people: "Habit 2 - Start with the end in mind", and so you should do here also. Always keep in mind what is the purpose of this all. Is the way people are working the important thing or do you care only about the results. Or are the results actually just a side note and the purpose of this all is to come up with actions from the results. Or are actually the meaning of all this to fix some underlying problem and you are just the step towards it.

So think carefully why it is done and what are the things you need to care for most. There's going to be problems in the way that something doesn't go as planned, or some results might not be as accurate as you would like those to be. Just try to reflect those to the purpose of your exercise. Like life in general, you can't win all the fights, instead try to win the war.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen