Having spent 20+ years working in the information business, I\u2019ve noticed two distinct groups of people; those who can consistently, accurately process information and those who seem to constantly misread, misunderstand or otherwise fail to successfully consume information.<\/p>\n
When you have 1-2 people who occasionally misread something, that can be a small annoyance. But when you have an organization, of scores or hundreds of people, skimming written correspondence and making decisions based on an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the message\/intent, that leads to mistakes, miscommunication, wasted time and rework on a large scale<\/p>\n
My theory it is people who get\u00a0complacent<\/strong>\u00a0(aka lazy) and rather than concentrating and taking the requisite time required to internalize a message, they simply fly through it<\/p>\n I also think people are\u00a0over-confident<\/strong>\u00a0in their reading comprehension and they consistently over-estimate their ability fully understand a message without missing anything. This tendency can easily be seen on social media, where people jump to respond to something they thought was said, when in reality it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Left unchecked, this tendency can degrade internal communications. This is a particularly acute problem with customer facing team members, who wind up frustrating customers by asking unnecessary questions, misunderstanding problems and ignoring key questions.<\/p>\n The Israeli intelligence services use a small caliber service pistol and train all of their assets to employ a double-tap approach when dispatching targets. Tap-tap. Because one tap is often not going to be enough, two-taps is essential for getting the job done.<\/p>\n The solution to processing emails is similar. I require that all new employees get in the habit of reading everything three times. Tap-tap-tap<\/p>\n Remediation<\/strong><\/p>\n When I mentor people who consistently fail to adequately communicate, based on the fact they don\u2019t understand instructions, directions, questions etc., we apply this system. When the problem invariably re-surfaces, I ask them if they have read the message three times. After they tell me \u201cyes\u201d, I ask them again and this time to tell me the truth. When we finally determine that they haven\u2019t, we re-apply the expectations and repeat until improvements are realized.<\/p>\n I have never worked with anyone who didn\u2019t improve decisively and on a sustained basis, when applying this simple system<\/p>\n Although I\u2019ve tested very high in English competency and reading comprehension, I apply this same rule myself. So yes, I generally read everything at least three times, and sometimes more, especially before replying. It may seem like a waste of time, but by eliminating miscommunication, false-starts and other problems, over the long haul there is a significant net saving in time<\/p>\n In addition to reading messages 3x, I require all customer facing and relevant internal correspondence to be processed consistently and systematically, following these rules<\/p>\n All questions (or issues) need to be\u00a0addressed separately<\/strong>. So if you get an email with 4 questions, you should have 4 distinct answers, not 3, not 2. Seems obvious, but 90% of the time, if a customer asks more than 2 questions, at least one is ignored. I\u2019ve seen that time and time again.<\/p>\n All questions should be answered\u00a0in-line<\/strong>. This makes it virtually impossible to forget to respond to a particular question embedded in an email, or otherwise ignore some part of a message. It also provides for systematic readability, so you can flow through the correspondence matching each answer directly with the question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having spent 20+ years working in the information business, I\u2019ve noticed two distinct groups of people; those who can consistently, accurately process information and those who seem to constantly misread, misunderstand or otherwise fail to successfully consume information. When you have 1-2 people who occasionally misread something, that can be a small annoyance. But when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nConsequences<\/h3>\n
Two taps<\/h3>\n
Solution<\/h3>\n
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My own approach<\/h3>\n
Other<\/h3>\n