The ease by which we now communicate with each other also compounds the potential for misunderstandings.
Last week I was told that I was both “pompous and largely pointless.”
Now, ‘pointless’ I could have handled. After all, I’m in the communications business, helping companies to be a bit more impactful with their messaging, and I guess, that in the great scheme of things, then that could be seen as pointless. After all, it’s not exactly saving lives is it.
But pompous – Moi?
I’ve always seen myself as being a pretty down to earth kinda guy, bit of a straight talker.
So, here I am, reading an e-mail on my Nokia version of the Blackberry, and the first line reads: ” Like you, pompous and largely pointless.”
Gut wrenchingly I read on, wondering what else my so-called ‘friend’ was about to throw at me. And then I breathed a sigh of relief. Because it wasn’t about me at all. In fact he was responding to my previous blog about corporate speak.
What he actually said was: ” Like you, pompous and largely pointless management consultancy speak drives me to distraction.”
So, having finally calmed down with a large drink, it got me thinking about how easy it is - in this age of rapid, instant communications - to get the wrong end of the stick.
Even as professional communicators, who should be caring about every word we write, we are guilty of firing out e-mails, twitters, texts, blogs etc without really thinking through how they might be construed.
Particularly as we know that the recipient of the message is also likely to be doing everything at pace, including the way that they read and respond to the hundreds of communications they receive on a daily basis.
We also need to think more carefully about how recipients receive our messages. Line-by-line on a small screen is probably now the most likely medium. This means that clarity and concision have never ever been so important. We need to recognise this and adapt accordingly.
How many of us truly do this? I know I don’t, but I will try harder from now on.
The story, I’m pleased to say, has a very happy ending. My good friend also told me about the best piece of corporate speak he’d ever heard. This apparently came from the US Navy where ‘climatic aberration at the air/sea interface’ was ultimately understood to mean - a rough sea.
How’s that for clarity and concision?
