How many times have you said something to someone only to find that that fell on deaf ears? No matter how many times you repeat it, nothing gets through. What is wrong with them? Wrong. The one rule you need to know to communicate more effectively is this. It's up to you to communicate in a way that achieves your intended result. It's not up to the person you're talking to. It's up to you. You've got to communicate to others in a way that is meaningful to them. Say it the way you need to say it so the person you're talking to really gets your point, really gets it and will act on it. Saying it the way you want when it doesn't get the result you want, that's a waste of time. Just bang your head against the wall anyway. How you communicate with someone should be heavily influenced by the best methods that work and not your own or any preferred way of doing so. It's as simple as that. Why is it so difficult? You tell your kid to clean up the room and it turns out that it's not clean. We've all dealt with that as parents, and we scream at the kid, we blame the kid. It's not the kid's fault. It's your fault. You, we, I, we need to be able to find the right way to convey this to a kid, and that's just the way it is. Put the honest responsibility on yourself for any type of communication. How do you talk to a scientist in a lab? Is that going to be the same way you're going to talk to a manager on your team? Or how about scientists more generally? Engineers and scientists, I've seen this over the years. Really smart people. They figured, they've got it. They know the answer. They figure it out, they understand it, and they assume everybody else is going to get it, and so they don't communicate effectively. I know a lot of universities actually, and there's been some mixed results with this. But a lot of universities that are helping scientists, technical experts, communicate their genius ideas, their discoveries more effectively because they want people to use them to understand them and to go somewhere with that. This happens also, when you think about start-ups, how many start-ups have been created with people when one of the founders is a tech expert and is the scientist? You trot the scientist out to explain what she's come up with or what he's come up with. The communication is just not there. It's going to hurt you. It's really remarkable because it's seen as a lower level of skill set. You know what, I get that compared to discovering something in the lab, whether it's an IT, or a biotech, or what have you, I could imagine it requires less pure IQ, I get that. But if you're not able to communicate, if the people don't understand it, then you're not going to be able to get it into the conversation, get it used, maybe create a company out of it. You've got to customize your message to the person you're talking to, and you need to train people to be able to do that. The onus of responsibility is really on the messenger to get it right. Here's a practical tip. Always think about and answer the question, what's in it for me? Why should anyone care? Whoever you're talking to, wherever you're communicating, whatever that message is, you want to think about, what's in their head? Why should they care? Why should they buy whatever it is you're selling? Why should they listen? Then you have to think about, well, how can I craft my message so that it connects with my target listener in the way I want? To connect the dots a little, answering the what's in it for me question, requires empathy, doesn't it? A customer focus where the customer is the person whose behavior you want to see change. This relates closely in fact to design thinking, which is a topic we took up in course 2 in the sequence, the art and science of making great decisions actually in Module 1. Communication, there are bunch of people think, why we even spend any time on that? It's so simple and so obvious. Then there's other people that make a way too complicated. The one rule you really want to know is, you have to communicate in a way that achieves your intended message and everything else is on you. The next application exercise will walk you through a step by step approach to following this one rule of communication. But this time for real, an opportunity to practice and apply this lesson to a situation you're dealing with right now.
