Listening for language clues.

Language impacts the way people think and behave. Last week Andy McAfee published a thoughtful blog post on the topic of the word “social” as it relates to business. It generated a lot of interesting comments.  I hope you read it.  Terminology is important, and I describe my thoughts about this (and in particular the word “social”)  in the talk I gave last month at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt. Gil Yehuda: Preparing Your Workplace for Enterprise 2.0 .  It’s about 30 minutes long — the stuff about language is in the first half.

In that talk, I also suggested that Enterprise 2.0 practitioners must listen twice. I explained — we have first to listen for what the client really needs — since needs differ significantly from client to client (see: There is no Enterprise 2.0). Then we have to listen to what clients hear us say. This extra level of active listening is critical — as I explained in the video.   It’s about developing trust and making sure that you are working together with shared understanding. We use terminology in ways that help foster understanding from the perspective of our clients.

I pay attention to words, since they reveal biases. I’ll share three recent stories that highlight how language provides clues.

Intranet as Broadcast Medium.  I’m working with a client who uses the term “intranet producer” to describe someone who uses the intranet to create and share content with others. The term “intranet producer” reveals something about this company.  Producers create intranet content that employees are expected to read.  Their intranet is a broadcast medium – like a TV station that employees must pay attention to while working.  Most of the content is related to work (to the extent the producers understand the work that people really do).  Unfortunately the producers don’t coordinate their production processes with each other.  So the quality and consistency of the intranet is poor.  So even if  using an intranet as a broadcast medium made sense, it’s not really working well for them.

One of the underlying problems is that they are missing out on the use of the intranet as a mechanism for non-producer employees to create, collaborate, share, or even to provide feedback.  And this has resulted in all sorts of costly workplace inefficiencies.  Now, this company is in the process of thinking beyond the “I speak and you listen” model of intranets, and will hopefully provide mechanisms for all employees to listen, observe, and interact with content and with each other using this intranet they have invested in.  When this happens, the term “intranet producer” will be as anachronistic as “dialing a number” on a modern (non-rotary) phone.

Where is your computer? I am helping another (non-technical) client with some technology and work process consulting. One day a snow storm threatened to keep my client at home.  He was advised by his IT department to connect to his company’s VPN so that he could work from home.  Fortunately he had his company-issued laptop which had the software he needed.  The problem was that he did not know how to connect his computer to the Internet.  Now, he had a personal computer that was connected via his cable modem, but he did not have a wireless router to connect his laptop to the modem.  His IT support person suggested that he take his network cable from his desktop and simply use it for his laptop for the day.  Sounds simple enough, but my client could not figure out how to do this.  He reported to IT that he looked behind his computer and only found two thick wires, but nothing that looks like a networking cable.  He was totally frustrated.

I later learned what happened.  When my client said that “he looked behind his computer” he was looking behind his monitor (and found the video and power cables).  To him — the word computer meant the monitor — it’s the thing he looks at when he looks at his computer.  I cannot blame him, but, yes, we both had a laugh at it.  This guy is not technically-minded at all.  Yet he is great at what he does for a living.  Is it his fault that he misunderstood “look behind your computer” — when we also use the phrase “look at your computer”?  Think about it.

Email or Fax? I was helping a client by introducing them to an E2.0 vendor that I think they should be looking at.  We were preparing the vendor for a demo that we want to set up next month.  This, by the way is something I love to do, since I can add tons of value to the client and the vendor by helping them figure out how to match terminology so that they have a very effective demo.  Anyway, the vendor asked my client if there was some documentation of requirements or use cases that would help clarify what is really important to them.  My client said — “sure, we have such a document, I can fax it over to you if you like.”  She then caught herself and realized how silly it is to print and fax a document (especially to an E2.0 software vendor).  But the reality is that my client operates in an environment where printing and faxing a document makes sense.  And the use of language revealed this reality.

People use and understand language in ways that reveal a lot about how they see the world.  I’ll spare you the college philosophy class — but if you recall, this is what a lot of modern philosophers wrestled with, and for good reason, I think. Anyway, I’m sharing this because I believe sensitivity to language will help consultants be better consultants.  Listening to the words your client uses will help you understand them.  Listening “twice” will help you learn what they heard you say — so that you can take measures to help bridge understanding.

Tagged as: confusion, expert, presentation, success story