Foot-in-Mouth disease? The habit of saying things in an out loud voice, that should have stayed inside the brain for a few seconds of vital additional processing. I have worked with a few people that habitually spoke their thoughts out loud, accidentally. They were very entertaining, and often said exactly what other people were thinking, but not saying. This usually resulted in lots of broken ice and moved things along. However, there is a different type of foot-in-mouth, where communication doesn’t get as much thought as it needed and “comes out all wrong”.

“A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over.”
- Benjamin Franklin

The quote may have been inspired during his French travels, as there is an old proverb “better a slip of the foot than a slip of the tongue”. There is even a site, The think before you send, collecting email disaster stories, complete with a hall of shame – thanks for the pointer Sam. If you trip over, you can pick yourself up. If you miscommunicate, the recovery can be a long journey. Adding email into the equation creates the ability to accidentally offend millions of people at the click of a button.

Part of the asymmetric nature of email is that it is quicker to make a mistake, than to fix it. There is no edit-undo, even a ‘recall’ function it isn’t going to save you. Make these checks before you hit send:

• Check the “to:” field. Is that the right person and address? Is that phone number going to Nigel in sales or Nigel at your competitor?
• Check the “cc:” field. Does it need a trim, or to grow?
• Check the subject. Does it have the right meaning, out of context, for the recipients?
• Check the body. One more read through. If the content is emotive or emotional, call or meet instead.

Here’s to an end to Foot-in-Mouth, as well as Foot and Mouth, disease.

(more on email mistakes here: 7 Common e-mail mistakes).

Related Posts

• Speeding Your E-mail
• E-mail 2.0
• 7 Common E-mail Mistakes and How Not To Make Them
• e-mailing your way to oblivion
• Winning battles – starting with the inbox

This was all sparked by an interesting post over on Web Worker Daily on the merits of instant messaging versus email, which lead to quite a few comments. It reminded me of how easy it is to forget the basis of good communication. There is a good maxim:

• Walk over and talk with the person face to face…
• If you can’t do that, pick up the phone…
• If you can’t get them on the phone, then, and only then, write to them.

I’m sure someone must have written this somewhere, but I’ve yet to find a source. It is great advice, for some very simple reasons. Modern communications are blurring some of the issues, but when selecting your means of communication there are still some basics to bear in mind.

Speed!

If you were sad enough to look up words per minute on wikipedia and dig around a bit, you would find that:

• People handwrite at about 31 words per minute (wpm).
• A basic typist can reach 50-95 wpm, an advanced one above 120 wpm.
• Conversations are around 200 wpm
  (adults can listen with full comprehension at 300 wpm – so that means most people have about 100 wpm of ‘not listening’ capacity!)
• The average adult reads text at about 250 to 300 words per minute.

So, whilst we take in the most with reading, we output the most with speaking. That makes conversation the fastest mode of two-way communication that there is. That said, the fastest of typists can get close! If you rely on typing for your communication, invest in getting good at it.

Working on a daily basis with people in the area of perceptual psychology leads to the occasional discussion about the quality of communication, rather than the quantity. Communication is much more than the number of words per minute exchanged, and much has been written on that subject. There are many aspects to human communication, such as:

• Verbal cues. Your voice, tonality, pitch, volume etc… Provide much additional information.
• Visual (non-verbal) clues, from subtle ones like body language, to less subtle guestures and the use of physical props (drawings etc…).

These cues can provide emotional information that can be critical to the communication. Many of these things are just not present with im, email and phones. Unless you try to put them back in of course!

Words are generally only meaningful with some context around them. A common physical location, or an existing relationship can provide context. References to relevant past conversations, meetings or assumptions, also provide context.

An employee walks up and says “I want a copy of my job description.” – You might drawn one conclusion if it came after a dispute about an assignment, and they look tearful and angry. You might draw a very different conclusion if they were asking just after a conversation about the exciting new role you had just given them, with a happy smile on their face and a spring in their step.

Context provides reference points that help the listener to draw correct conclusions. Without this, the listener can come to the wrong conclusions and what needs doing, doesn’t get done. Context and emotional content help to provide the intent of the communication, which is critical to a sucessful outcome.

Maximise your communications…

Use the highest bandwidth possible - talk face to face whenever you can. It minimises misunderstandings and enables miscommunication to be dealt with straight away. Use a good quality communications link – a desk phone beats a mobile/cell phone conversation any day. Try to provide visual communication, even if you can’t talk face to face. Video conferencing, or even forwarding a diagram can work wonders.

Provide context for your communication – Explain the purpose of the communication, and verify that the background is understood. If it is not, then supply it. Explain your emotions too, if they are not clear and it is appropriate.

I have enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you, I hope they help!

Related Posts

• No Related Post

E-mail lacks so many of the visual and auditory cues that we need to communicate effectively, yet people write less clearly and deliberately than they would in a letter.

The opportunity for mis-communication and emotional trauma is almost endless. Recently I have been comparing the organizational effectiveness of e-mail, phone calls, conference calls and face to face communication. I am sure you won’t be surprised to hear that e-mail comes out bottom in terms of results achieved against time invested.

My conclusions?

• If you can pick up the phone and get hold of the person, pick up the phone. In the long run it is actually quicker and cheaper.
• A conference call will achieve more than an email storm almost any day.
• If something has emotional element (e.g. might cause a strong emotional reaction), then the communication does not belong on email.

Related Posts

• E-mail 2.0
• Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?
• Communication – Becoming Fluid by Getting Uncomfortable
• A Perspective on Community
• Social Media Week London

The steady state of an inbox isn’t empty. It is full. Really full.

That doesn’t make me feel good. How can you fix that?

Lets look at the system and optimise it or change it! Why is it full? Well, because there’s more stuff coming in than going out. Okay. Not genius I know, but bear with me. There are two ways we can fix the problem:

LESS IN

MORE OUT

Well, less in is tricky. Have less friends/co-workers, or get ones who don’t email? May be not. Send less emails so there aren’t so many replies? May be. But that might mean being even less proactive. Not good. However, you could pick up the phone. It saves those explosive email threads that generate text at a volume of knots. Sometimes you can’t reach the person on the phone. Next solution please!

More out. Read faster? Delete faster? Actually. For me, the issue is to read less. How MANY TIMES do you look at each email in your inbox? If the answer is once, you are in great shape. If it is more than once, then you have a huge opportunity to get better results and be more efficient. Read emails once then delete , forward or reply! (or archive them, in an unstructured system, if that is what your job requires). Problem solved. For most of us, or at least for me it used to be, that any given email was read many many times. Even if we don’t reread it, we still trip over that email again and again each time we are looking for another one, and we don’t deal with it. Why? For me it is mostly these:

• This will take too long to do right now.
  • Ok. If it is really going to take that long, then put a time in the diary to process it. File the email – I drag it straight on to my outlook calendar. Or, reply to the email saying you aren’t able to commit to helping right now, if you can’t.
• Might do this later.
  • Deadly! Will you really do it laterer? Why not now? Be brutal: Delete it or do it. Done.
• Might need this one day.
  • Well, file it then, if you really must!
• Might forward this to some one.
  • Well, do it then! Right now.

OK. Hopefully we have the building blocks of a better system. Now, that should work for you – even if you use a blackberry like I did in the past. I ditched that. That’s another story. Now, just the small question of how to get from here to there. That is from the 1,000+ emails, to the empty inbox. Set a “high water mark”. Commit to having ‘n’ less emails in your inbox at the end of the day than there were at the beginning. Make sure that ‘n’ is a reasonable number. Something achievable, but enough to make a difference on those 1,000 emails within your lifetime!

The essence is this: MAKE PROGRESS. NOW!

OK. Time for me to eat my own therapy…

What’s stopping your inbox from being empty? What can you do about it?

Related Posts

• Speeding Your E-mail
• E-mail 2.0
• 7 Common E-mail Mistakes and How Not To Make Them
• Preventing The Next Foot-in-Mouth Outbreak
• e-mailing your way to oblivion