Information is not communication
How do you know the other side has understood something?
Daily musings #586 - Tuesday, 30 August 2022
I follow a lot of thoughts and different perspectives on various forums. Today’s writeup from Michael Kusters on LinkedIn was extremely resonating, so I felt his thoughts on #communication should be shared here…
#Communication is so much more than providing information.
In a larger context, there could be so many things going wrong on the recipient's side:
- Information doesn't arrive
- Information Dead on Arrival
- Unclear that the information is addressed to them
- Relevance unclear
- Urgency unclear
- Misunderstanding the intent
- Misunderstanding the content
- Need for action unclear
- Doing the wrong thing based on the information
- Doing the right thing wrong based on the information
All of this can be changed with a simple communication hack:
Ask the recipient: "What are you going to do with this?"
If the answer doesn't match what you think it should, you need to improve the communication.
Never take for granted that just because you said it, it's clear.