What did you say? Communications are #1.

Welcome to my first blog! On my first trip to Taiwan I sat in a meeting and wondered about the presentation being shown to me. I asked the guy next to me, “Can you understand him?” He said “nope, you?” So I raised my hand and started to ask questions. At the end of the meeting and after a few questions I found that ~60% of our team and ~80% of theirs did not get the meaning of most of the material presented. If you think that is staggering, 90% of the acronyms we used did not translate, and if your industry is like mine, most of what you say is an acronym. To help offset our need for acronyms, I ended up sitting down with my counter part and developed a quick definitions page. This took about 20 minutes, but really saved us a lot of time in future meetings. The funny thing is, I found out that out of the ~100 definitions I knew only the exact meaning of about 50% and while I knew the intent of all of them I could not give you the exact meaning.

I sat in a meeting last week and presented to a couple of people and the whole time they nodded theirs heads, yes (or north-south for you ex-military folks), but what that really meant was “yes I hear you.” Not “yes I understand you.” So make sure and get people to repeat back to you what they heard. People whose first language is not English (and sometimes even if it is!) will try and figure out what you are saying on their own, so reinforce what your point is and loop back often.

With all of that said, what I have learned is remember the acronym “KIS” or Keep It Simple when making presentations. So use short direct words and don’t dance around the issues! Say what you mean and reinforce it. Have the participants repeat back-brief you on the context and meaning of the presentation. Stay away from industry and company acronyms, and try to stay away from subtleties. Bottom line is without clear communications and understanding nothing will go as planned.