Layers of Communication

 It's a fairly widely known statistic that only about 7-10% of what is communicated in a face-to-face conversation is conveyed by the verbal content and the language itself. An additional 40% of the entire message is communicated in tone of voice, and about another 50% is communicated through body language. Though many of us have heard this, we are not always conscious of this when we are communicating to others at a distance via technology. It is better to show than tell, however, so below is an exercise in which the exact same message is communicated in three different ways: Through email, voice mail, and face-to-face:

http://mym.cdn.laureate-media.com/2dett4d/Walden/EDUC/6145/03/mm/aoc/index.html

Just reading the email alone, it reads as a genuine but urgent request for an ETA on a project that may affect the deadline of a colleague. There is reassurance in the email, in phrases such as "I know you're busy.." but it is hard to tell if this is "true" reassurance and understanding, or merely "couching language," or language used to pad or prep the reader for the upcoming discomfort. What comes across most in this first exchange, to me, was "worry." She really needs this ETA or she'll miss her deadline. She's likely using couching language to mask her desperation...

Then, I listened to the phone message. In the phone message, the reassurance comes across more strongly, and I got less of an impression of worry or urgency, though it is still there. Hearing the actual voice allows certain words to be emphasized. The "I really appreciate your help" comes across strongly. Most of the voice mail sounds as though she's reading from a cue card, which reduces the sense of urgency in the message.

Finally, the face-to-face message was least alarming. The tone of voice sounds even more calm than the voice recording (unfortunately this may be due to the fact that they are different actresses/voices for the voice mail and face-to-face, which is an unfortunate variable in the experiment). In the face-to-face communication, she begins with a polite smile and has a relaxed body pressure. The feeling of worry that I got from the first message does not come across here. Her level of deference makes me want to fulfill her request sooner, rather than feeling obligated to as the email made me feel.

This exercise is an important reminder to choose your method of communication wisely. If you are working in a group, discussing sensitive subjects with more emotional gravitas should probably be left for face-to-face or a Skype call (or Adobe connect, etc.). However, email is expedient and is great for task-oriented messages, so long as the sender remembers that a lot of the intended tone could or will be lost in translation.

For your consideration: Here is another similar experiment that I think has better controls. It concerns "the halo effect" as it relates to attraction. A male actor reads the exact same words that are a sample dating profile to be filmed on a webcam for potential dates to view. In one version, he reads the words with a negative tone of voice (and facial expression to match). In the second version, he reads the words with an upbeat tone. One group of girls watches the first video. A second group of girls watches the second video. The experiment and there reactions can be found here: 

How to Paint a Project into a Corner

Some projects, when you are finished with them, you can take a look back and feel a sense of satisfaction that you accomplished something, and that all of your efforts will pay off in making a situation better for yourself and those around you. And then there are some projects that are marked by a certain, “If only I knew then what I knew now” feeling. These are the projects that are less than enjoyable to take a look back on, but they are often the most instructional if we do take the time to examine them.

For my bachelor’s program, I had to come up with a training module that would resolve a real-world problem that myself or someone I knew was facing, and create the training module. I often have difficulty coming up with these sorts of projects because I am not in a position where a lot of these issues are easy to find. I was not even a graduate assistant at the time—I was and am working at a hotel as a painter. The paint room was incredibly disorganized with over a hundred different paints and stains in the paint room and only a loose organization as to what went where. The paint chart that explained what paints went where was a series of chicken-scratched papers on a clipboard, and it was very difficult to tell what information was most current. Further, I was told that there was an issue with engineers painting the wrong color on the walls—that engineers would just grab a color that looks right and paint a surface with it only to find out that it was the wrong color in the morning. To meet the requirements of my course project, I had to include certain multimedia elements into the project, and this pushed to me to do more than what I felt the issue at hand merited. Perhaps a lot more…

The former painter seemed to believe the problem was simply one of motivation—that people did not keep the area organized by putting things back where they belonged. To help with this, and to clear up the confusion about which paint corresponded with which surface, I created a paint chart catalog with pictures and number callouts that showed the paint that belonged on each surface in the hotel. It was basically a job aid on steroids as well as a way to organize the paint room. I also created a system of labeling the shelves with “warehouse locations,” and the binder with the paint chart showed where each paint was located on the shelf. It’s an alphanumeric coding system that’s used by the military warehouses as well as other warehouses the world over. Throughout most of this project I didn’t really consult with anyone on the details. I mostly saw this project as my prerogative to fix the paint situation.

As a result, it has more or less remained my project. I didn’t really get buy-in from anyone, and now that the project is finished, most of the engineers complain that the location system and the binder is “too complicated.” I tried to make the project scalable in case the organization caught on, so I added more letters and numbers than what was needed for the shelves in the paint room, and most people never bother to take the time to figure out what the location breakdown means. Now that I have been doing the painting detail for a while, I’ve also begun to realize that engineers rarely paint the walls the wrong color. What this turned out to be was one of two things: 1. Someone ordered the wrong sheen of paint or type of paint. For example, the paint was supposed to be Eg-Shel, and someone ordered flat instead, or it was supposed to be the “Mack Creek” color from the “Harmony” Sherwin Williams product line of paint, but they got the “Direct to Metal” Sherwin Williams paint instead, etc. Both of these have an effect on how the paint looks on the walls and makes it look like the “wrong color.” And 2. It is very difficult to mix a gallon of paint to be exactly the same color batch after batch from one gallon to the next. For more reasons than I can name, Sherwin Williams will often give us a paint that is “slightly off,” because they change the formula of their colors or have minor variations in the paint, etc. Also, if the walls haven’t been painted in a long time, the wall’s color can fade, and when applying the new paint it can leave an undesired contrast where the touching up occurred. In both cases, the only real way to fix this is to repaint the entire surface, and make sure that the paint is the right sheen and type to begin with.

In reviewing the questions regarding projects “post-mortem” by Greer (2010), I think there are some beneficial pieces of my project deliverable—the paint chart catalog. However, not getting buy-in from others in advance means that redoing the catalog ordering system is likely in order to make things appear less complex to others who might use the paints, rather than just asking me where something is. There were warning signs of this, and rather than halting the project I moved forward because I was also completing the project for the course grade. Perhaps that was the first  mistake.

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! Laureate

Education, Inc.: Minneapolis, MN. 

EDUC 6145 Project Management for Training and ID

Hello everyone. If you'd like to follow me, leave a comment below.

Best,
~Nathaniel