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Better Communication with Non-Technical People?
tinpan asks: "I've got a communication problem. When non-technical managers ask me to explain technical choices, they often make choices I recommend against and they later regret. I can tell that they do not understand their choice because of how they are explaining things to each other, but they usually refuse further explanation. So, it's time for some education. I want to get better at communicating technical subjects to non-technical people. More accurately, I want to get better at helping non-technical people make better technical decisions and I'm willing to accept it may include some understanding of 'selling your idea.' What advice do my fellow readers have in accomplishing this? What books, online courses and/or seminars do you recommend and why?"
Give your manager 3 choices. The first choice won't quite solve the problem. The second choice costs way too much. The third choice is the one you want him to pick.
is to learn to communicate....
No, seriously. You need to learn how to communicate to those in charge, those above you, and those below you. If you are unable to communicate to those you need to, it is YOU that has a problem. Start reading CIO magazine, read SEC reports, do what you need to do so that you are able to communicate what is required in a way that your audience understands.
I'm not bashing you, or supporting management that is intolerant of the tech savvy crowd. I'm simply saying that if you have to, try some education to get your point across effectively. In the end, it is YOU who gains, not just the company.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
For talking to a non-technical minded person, the easiest way I've found to communicate with them is to put it in terms that they understand.
However, you'll need to make sure that you have a good understanding of what you're trying to express and a fair understanding of the terms you're trying to express it with. Otherwise, everything will be like a series of tubes...
unless it's a girl. then just lie. it's not flamebait, it's a corporate strategy!
I have been in the same situation before and many times I've found the best way to get your ideas across is the be authoritative and not back down when you think they are making the wrong choice. That obviously depends on the type of environment you're in, but for me I find that sometimes it just takes standing up for your ideas to convince those in charge they are worth looking into.
Work in a retail environment, preferably on commission. In about 6 months you'll either learn how to sell ice to eskimos, or starve.
Seriously, this was the best exposure I had to the non-technical user, and I've utilized the learned salesmanship in later interviews and technical presentations. I recommend spending some time selling something to everyone.
--
$tar -xvf
Absolutely. Typically, when someone is non-technical and asks me a technical question, I ask them why they want to know. When they tell me the problem, I tell them how to solve it. When they ask if there is another way to solve it, I say I wouldn't recommend any other way. Even if I have a few alternatives up my sleeve, I don't offer them.. it only confuses the non-technical person.
The worst is when the non-technical person asks a room full of technical people for a solution to a problem. You usually get a whole lot of really poorly thought out solutions. Sometimes, however, you will get one good solution.. and the non-technical person will ask a lot of questions about how this is going to effect business needs of some description. This is bad. If this is your solution, you should immediately suggest that you will follow up with the non-technical person at a later time.. or immediately take them out of the room.
Because you know what's coming? An alternative. Typically a worse alternative. This happens all the time. Technical people love to bring up poor solutions to problems and contrast them against the better solution. They think the non-technical person is going to see why the best solution is better if they can see the reasoning behind why the worse solutions are worse. They want to elevate the conversation out of talking about business needs and back into the technical realm. This is guarenteed to confuse the non-technical person.
The result of which will be the wrong decision. And who gets to clean up the mess? Yeah, we do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Go out with your friends, join an organization in the community, do anything where you interact with others. Just talk to people. Talk about anything besides tech. If you can talk about it in polite company or at the dinner table, talk about it if they're interested. Once you're better able to relate to people, you'll find that explaining a technical concept will become a lot easier.
My Sysadmin Blog
I don't understand you, could you rephrase the question?
When you say that you have no problem communicating with technical folk, what you're actually saying is that you are very comfortable talking to people who are in the same professional area as you are, those who share the same technical lexicon. To these people you do not have to make an extra effort to communicate - your profession provides you with the tools (journals, newsgroups, magazines) and vocabulary to do so.
If you needed to explain to a 'technical' guy from a different profession - say economics or electrical engineering I bet you'd have the same problem.
Well there are books written about it but basics are simple: to communicate to anyone you need to be in the other person's shoes, understand her frames of reference, her obejctives and drives and make sure you can talk at *that* level. As an exercise, pick an arbitrary person (your neighbour, a cousin etc) and try to explain to him what you do in five minutes. :)
Of course, not everyone has the skill and in fact most highly creative professionals don't. Which is why hiring people with complementary strengths is such a good strategy
Guaranteed or your bandwidth back!
Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion might be what you're looking for.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Non-technical people (read: bean counters) like to have slow, soothing explanations, not a lot of jargon laden speechifying. Sometimes, it takes some leveling of your personal technical hubris to ratchet it down a notch, but if you want your IT life to be simple, you have to explain things in terms they'll understand.
None of this requires a book, a seminar or a conference. It's internal, and if you don't learn it intuitively, you won't use it properly.
-jim
Typically, when someone is non-technical and asks me a technical question, I ask them why they want to know.
:-)
Perhaps because they're curious, and they want to learn and move beyond being spoon-fed 'solutions' by you?
Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!
http://www.toastmasters.org/
Find your local toastmasters club and practice. Since joining toastmasters, I have had many comments from people in both my work and personal life about how much my verbal communication has improved.
Each speech will give you supportive and constructive feedback from multiple people, from multiple experience levels, and from multiple walks of life. I now find myself re-thinking how I explain quite a few technical things to others and catch myself when I am talking to non-technical people and I start to use the jargon that is so automatic among technical folks. I still pause and think about how to appropriately re-phrase what I was about to say to make it more appropriate to the people that I am talking to, but at least I am catching myself now when I used to rattle on and lose them long before I realized that they weren't getting it.
Besides, the dues are about the same as a magazine subscription. It is quite inexpensive for what you get.
Typically, when I'm working with non-technical folk (as an IT Business Analyst, I normally spend about 75% facing the Business), I learn to first understand their language (verbiage, etc), and then use that when I'm talking to them. As another poster mentioned, simple analogies.
.25 | 4 | 1 | 2 .35 | 3 | 3 | 2 .4 | 5 | 4 | 4
However, I would take this one step further (as I often do). Figure out the different alternatives, figure out their critical success factors, and give them a weighted decision criteria (sorry for the misaligned table, as it typically looks better in PowerPoint or Excel):
| weight |alt 1|alt 2|alt 3
criteria 1|
criteria 2|
criteria 3|
total | 4.05 | 3.65| 2.8 |
Get more than three criteria, but no more than six. Use a five point scale and assess based on the marketing literature, industry feedback, anecdotal evidence, and what Gartner says about it. Hell, everyone loves Gartner... Be sure you explain that you're using a five point scale, and why you've assigned rankings to each one. Basically, explain it to them like you're trying to convince your child. Assume that they know nothing (which shouldn't be too hard).
Effectively, you need to show them that the software/hardware you've selected meets the critical success factors they've developed. Show your research. Be a good little school boy and provide them with references.
It sounds to me like these Manager peers of yours are basically trying to legitimize their decision making power. Give them the evidence that you've developed and find some way to show your peers and their minions that it was them who made the decision, and you're the one who just enabled them to make this decision. Remember, IT is about enabling the Business, and recommendations (be it a business case, gap analysis, or business requirements documents) are always laden with politics.
And yeah, I hate it when others take credit for my work too. But we learn to deal with it, as IT is there to enable the business. But then again, whenever I need help (typically with a crotchety old luser who doesn't want to give me requirements), I know that I have friends in high places.
I had to write a research paper last year for my freshman English class, and I chose to write the paper on Digital Rights Management (and why it's bad). Obviously I had to defend my stance, which wasn't hard, except for the "making it easy to understand for non-technical people" part. It was easy finding a real world (non-technical) situation that a non-technical reader to relate to, but explaining, say, applications of DRM to digital music and rootkits (to explain the big Sony BMG rootkit fiasco).
I know I'm a pretty bad writer anyway, but having to explain things to a big general audience that are easily understood by fellow peers is, well, hard. The best thing for technical people to do is to read a dictionary regularly...or at least learn new words frequently. The more ways you're able to express something the easier it'll be for you to when your boss asks you why you can't, I dunno, plug a toaster into a computer.
I've had a couple of bosses who were very ignorant of the technological aspects of the work the company did. They were CIO's and were hired primarily because the company owner thought that a good manager should be able to manage anything.
One had some promise. He understood that he was, to be kind, completely devoid of any real understanding of the technology. He relied heavily on the knowledge of the staff and focused on the client facing and staff management aspects of the job. All was well, until it turned out he was a paranoid nut who started playing a variety of political games instead of doing the job, but until then, he was able to do well. He'd demonstrated that a good manger really can manage something of which they have limited understanding.
Another manager was the flip side. He had no understanding of the technology, and was, to be kind, a hand wringing, spineless jellyfish. The thought of pushing for the cash for a major hardware upgrade was beyond his capabilities, and all of our insistence that the system was dying fell on deaf ears because "Well, it's working now, isn't it?"
And when I say "hand wringing" I mean it literally. He would walk around wringing his hands like he was washing them. Walt helps Locke out of the pit. Charlie drowns when Mikhail blows up the underwater station. Jack attempts to contact Kate in flash-forwards off the island. And whenever we discussed budgets or the need for new servers, our manager would get a terrified "Deer in the headlights" look in his eyes.
While he accomplished literally nothing and was, through his inaction, responsible for several major system crashes, he lasted a VERY long time, because he always told the owner what he wanted to hear, and blamed the IT staff when something went wrong, something the owner was apt to accept at face value.
I was born with awful communication skills, and found this sort of thing very difficult. After I was diagnosed with ADD, I read a lot of material about communication and related skills and learned some soft skills, and it was very useful (as well as very interesting in a geeky kind of way - if you think computers can be interesting, the way people work will blow your mind...).
:-)). It also works wonders on your personal relationships.
Everyone should learn how to communicate with people. Essentially, this means understanding different viewpoints, which means being able to understand how people are different. There are different communication styles even between people who are ostensibly similar, which can get in the way of clear communication. I find it very frustrating that techies cannot seem to abandon the idea that there is true and false and nothing else, from which logically follows that if you don't agree with me you are wrong. Of course, in most day-to-day situations things are way more complicated than that. Is it a fact that it is rude to ignore me for two minutes when I approach your desk to talk to you? Yes, of course, I have feelings and a hello costs nothing. No, of course not, I am only dumping the contents of my brain into my IDE so I can give you my full, undivided attention.
Understanding people's reasons for their actions and reactions, and seeing through their eyes, enables you to persuade people to do the right thing, which is good for both your employer and for you. It is not being Macheavellian, or turning into a sales weasel (as long as it is used for good
I would recommend Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury, about win-win negociation; I'm OK, You're OK by Thomas A. Harris, Games People Play by Eric Berne, and TA Today by Ian Stewart and Vann Joines, about Transactional Analysis; and the works of Deborah Tannen, especially Talking From 9 to 5. Look into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators too. I would also recommend asking your company to send you on a course or two about communicating assertively and negociation skills.
What luck for rulers that men do not think. - Adolf Hitler
I've been climbing this hill for nearly the last two decades.
:)
You simply have to put yourself in their shoes and explain things in a way that means something to them and their own priorities, agendas, etc. This means knowing quite a bit about other jobs and what drives the people you are attempting to 'educate', of course.
Again, put things in their terms, focusing on what your idea/plan/suggestion is going to do to help them solve whatever it is that happens to be important to them at that time. Not yours...
Then, as mentioned above, give them three suggestions, your favorite last, in such a way that they will turn from one and two. Let them take whatever time they need to mull things over - some people need minutes and some need days. Once you laid things out and done your best to cache things on their terms, relax and let them come around. Be available to follow-ups, but don't get in their face or they will be prone to reacting negatively, as I'm sure you already know
Probably the best book, particularly since it deals with mostly software technology is Geoffrey Moore, "Crossing the Chasm". Emminently readable as well.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
I've had the same problem. I subcontracted an editor, a popular fiction writer (non technical) who was great at marketing to broad technical audiences. When worked as a consultant, my editor (and MBTI INFJ) who would read the material I sent (especially critical emails) and smooth off the technical sharp edges. It sometime took some face-to-face time with the editor to get her to understand, and she would re-write the stuff for the managers types.
I'm not aware of any training or education specifically designed to help technical people communicate more effectively with non-technical people. You are more specifically interested in communicating with decision makers, which is far more specific than say talking to your family or non-technical friends. Being more specific in some ways makes it easier. I'm guessing that your difficulty lies not so much in not communicating technical details or ideas adequately, but not understanding the decision making process being used. One of my primary job functions is being a liaison between the technical and non-technical sides of the company, and I even talk to customers/partners who know nothing about technology. Point being, I am good at it now--I am complimented on this often--but this was not always so. Meaning that yes, it's something you can get better at.
... enterprise ... leveraging" in (b), or the particulars about what enterprise-class means and mentioning competitors in (c)?
Given that, here's what I can tell you:
1) Detail is enemy #1. Technical work has lots and lots of details to it, and we often get absorbed in them and like to talk about them. This will ruin your efforts again and again, you *must* train yourself to hold back details unless specifically asked. For example, if somebody asks what an acronym means, you probably shouldn't tell them what it stands for. Also, when pressed for details, try and give only the details relevant to your audience. For example, if somebody asks you what "WebSphere" is, do you tell them:
a) "WebSphere is a proprietary J2EE server. I recommend we go with JBoss instead since it is open source and does everything we need. It's cheaper and easier too."
b) "WebSphere is an IBM product designed for an enterprise computing environment leveraging Java technology. You might use it for serving web pages."
c) "WebSphere is one of many enterprise level, server-side Java solutions. It's a complete J2EE server, supporting all server-side Java standards, like servlets, JSPs, and enterprise java beans. It is intended to provide scalability, robustness, clustering, fail-over, up-time guarantees, and other things expected from an enterprise class product. You might choose it for the same reasons you would choose Oracle over other databases. BEA, Oracle, Sun and JBoss all provide competing products providing almost identical functionality at different price points and service levels."
All three are reasonable answers depending on the context. Does your audience want to hear "cheaper and easier" in (a), "IBM product
2) Decision makers often have to make decisions regarding things they do not personally know. As you have observed, this often leads to making sub-optimal decisions. In debate class, relying on an authority rather than having a good argument might get you marked down. In the real world, quoting an authority is often (maybe even usually) more important, as the decision maker might not understand the actual argument. I experienced this repeatedly and to great frustration earlier in my career, where a manager would pretend to listen to me, only to do what a more senior, trusted person recommended. In some cases there will be other hidden agendas, and often times you won't know what the decision makers parameters are. For example, you might recommend Vendor A for price/performance reasons, and the manager chooses Vendor B because B is a "safe" choice and the decision maker is in a difficult position with his or her boss.
3) This leads to: you'll need to understand the chain of command. Often times, the person that you get to talk to does not have the final say. Instead, that person has to sell the decision to other business people and the people who control the purse strings. So in some cases you are educating someone who is really just a champion, not a final decision maker. In this case, you must prep them to d
If your managers are not technically competent, then they shouldn't be taking those decisions.
First, take away the technical choices and leave them with business options. Deciding what functionality is provided in a product is a business option; deciding on the design patterns is a technical choice, as is screen layouts (although customer input is a good idea!). So the options you provide only allow business decisions to be made - the relevant technical decisions are implicit.
Gray areas include choice of technology / development platform (the business needs to retain the relevant skills); and use of third-party libraries (compare cost/risk against in-house development and you can often reduce it to a technical choice).
Second, do the work for them, and make it clear that you have the capacity to make the right choice. Start by presenting the options in quantitative summary form: Option X = % functionality provided, estimated cost, estimated time, estimated risk (% of cost/time). Include a terse description of what distinguishes that option from the others.
Demarcate your area of expertise, and make sure you are and expert. Never argue marketing or financial points with your manager - on the contrary, make it clear that those points are outside your area of expertise. But stand your ground on technical issues.
Third, if you are forced into a position where you have to explain or justify a technical choice (note: not explain an option, but justify a decision you have already taken) then use examples and metaphors.
Examples are where you point out how it has been done that way by Microsoft and Google, and millions of people are familiar with it, so it's The Right Thing.
Metaphors are where you find a real-life tale within your manager's experience that focuses on the distinction between technical options, driving a wedge into the gap between them to make it easier for a non-technical person to identify and understand the differences.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
The best way to communicate something is in terms of how that someone understands things.
If you're talking to a business person, explain your solution / idea / objection in business terms. If you're talking to your doctor, explain it in medical terms. If you're talking to your 3-year-old, explain how SpongeBob would do whatever it is you're trying to do. If you don't really understand what you're trying to convey then you'll have a hard time with this, but if you do know what's going on it's not usually too hard to explain in someone else's frame of mind.
This is something I always try to put on my resume - Communicates complex ideas in understandable terms regardless of audience. If you really understand whatever it is that you're presenting you can re-frame it in terms that your target will also understand. The added bonus is that they'll appreciate that you didn't give them geeky technobabble when they asked you a "simple" question, and you can usually impress them with your knowledge AND let them feel smart for understanding at the same time.
What I have often felt is that non-technical people think that techies don't understand business and that they understand both business and technical issues. But whenever I have asked a business person if they could give an estimate of the profits of a certain functionality, they often simply stated that it was needed to win a customer. Yet at the same time they often demand that I give an accurate estimation of the development effort (costs).
But the reality is that software is usually bought by non-technical persons (both private as commecial), and that features are more important than functionality. Often it is sufficient that a certain functionality can be demonstrated, not that it is really working or adding something to the product. How the product looks is always more important than how it works. (And once the product is sold, it is usually the helpdesk that is required to help the customer work around all the "features".)
My conclusion is that software development is mostly driven by prospects not by existing customers.
In the process of getting a teachers degree, you normally (at least here) have some courses where they specifically teach you how to explain things on a level BELOW your own understanding. Well, that's what the point of being a teacher is of course : being able to explain things you understand but the other person doesn't, in a way that they
* want to listen
* become interested/keep their interest in the subject
* build their own interpretation of the matter
* hopefully can give a crude but mostly correct explanation about it to someone else
* ideal: they can use it to understand other new things AND/OR be creative with it
if you want your non-technical decision-makers to listen to you, i think this is a good step (it has helped me to do this, and it works pretty good)
oh and something else: a good preparation of
* what you want to say
* what you think they will ask
* what YOU will ask
* what you DONT want to say
_in writing_ (even purely schematically will do) will also take you a big step forward (but ok, i admit that that is also something they teach you in the courses i talked about above)
As a few of the posts mention elliptically, what you mean by "non-technical people" are actually dullards.
They are stupider than you which is why they are managers and they are definitely stupider then you if they can't choose the right product on their own. The very existence of your job illustrates that they realise they are stupider than you and hence need help choosing things. The final damning piece of evidence is that, after hiring you to help them make the decisions they are too dick witted to do on their own, they ignore your advice.
This puts the whole question onto a different footing: "How can I communicate with the stupid without giving them a lengthy training session to bring them up to my level of understanding?" It might sound harsh and a little bit arrogant but it's the truth. If you start off thinking that these people are anything other than totally random nonsense spouting idiots then you'll end up doing the wrong thing.
This means the first thing to ditch is logical reasoning. Nothing scares a dullard more than a carefully thought out, well researched, evidence based piece of research. I suggest finding out who their friends are, then making up some opinions and attributing them to these friends. Don't bother worrying about getting found out. Managers only have a 10minutes attention span so they won't follow it up.
Next: Draw a graph. It doesn't matter what of, just make it have a line that goes up at the end. This is known as the "hockey stick" and is something managers are trained to spot (and fund)
Next: Remove any word longer than 5 letters from your report.
Next: Find out your managers outside interests. This is probably golf and marital infidelity. Try to include allusions to these things in your report. Something like "This product is so good, its the Nick Faldo of paper shredders" (NB: I am not a golfer so please insert the name of a currently successful golfer to avoid embarrassment). Its more dangerous putting in references to the second activity.
Next: Buy him a donut. Dullards think firstly with their wallets, secondly with their stomachs.
I can well recognize situation - however yet managed to get my recommendation chosen. One reason for that to happen is, of course, certain track record where what I formerly have said, turned to be true. That is trust, you have to be build to be trusted, not questioned in the first place. It comes with time, naturally.
Another thing is providing clear summary information about possible choises: come down to several of the most obvious solutions to problem, describe each by understandible strengths and weak sides (one performs better, another costs more to use, being safe choice in terms of being popular solution, third has best cost/performance/engineering balance). I do obviously state what my choice would be in this set. If there are additional questions - have them answered, and I do not see how decision maker could deviate far from my recommendation, me being expert in my field. Of course he could, if basing on something, that he considers critically important - like cheapest purchase is best. But, then, what future this business will have is well worth of considering seriously.
Servant of karma
Retail. Nothing teaches you how to explain all the various choices better than working the electronics section in a retail store, because the lowest common denominator will come in with no information and expect you to teach them everything they need to know. But there are some basics to it that you can use:
1: Use the full terminology, then expand it in a simplified manner until they understand it. Don't be afraid to repeat yourself several times. Your goal is educating them on their best option, and using comparisons to other options help as well. You said that they repeat it wrong amongst themselves. This means you did not provide an accurate enough description in terms they understand.
2: Explain exactly why choice X would be better than choice Y in that instance. Emphasize the problems that would arise from using Y.
3: Most importantly, remain calm, level-headed, and patient. Unlike most Slashdotters, most personnel in a company see the computer world from a "I want to do this, but I don't know how" perspective, rather than a "I'm going to hunt around until I figure out how to do this" mentality. It would often take me 15 minutes to describe the differences between the PS2, XBOX, and Gamecube in a way that the average consumer needed to know in order to make their decision. But they left the store happy that they made the right choice and likely to return and ask me about something else they'd like. And those skills have carried over to where I am now, the #1 technician at a battalion-size element's G6 office.
...since your answer, while being technically correct, is completely and utterly useless.
What you need to do is be really really technical about it, start talking about the most little details, then start drawing little sketches that no one would actually understand and chose one strong point in favor of your solution, one that he can understand, and always fall back on that point so he thinks he understands what you are talking about.
After about an hour, start suggesting him your solution more and more, gently point out his mistakes at first, then put more and more stress on his/her shortcomings, making him really really feel bad about them.
After a while, start telling him your solution will not only be useful for the problem, but will also stop aids, make him a better sex partner (or a better mother), and generate world peace.
Finally, make him buy old books for thousands of dollars and regularly meet with him again just to make sure his brainwashing is up to date.
This method is flawless, you might even be recognized as a religion in a few years, and make your bosses call you Master!
Give them 3 choices, and each choice ends with "...and a new Porsche for me."
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
There are no magic bullets for solving the problem you are dealing with. A lot depends on what your audience is trying to accomplish, what kind of constraints they feel they have to work within, and how much they know about the subject matter. High level managers and executives can't be experts on everything they need to make decisions on. The span of their decision making is to large and their ultimate focus has to be on bottom line issues like controlling costs, building revenue, and delivering on time. Note that none of those things are technical issues.
You may find considerable value in reading a book on making presentations (the kind they use in basic speech courses in college). There are a number of excellent choices out there. I'm particularly fond of Presentations In Everyday Life: Strategies For Effective Speaking, by Engleberg and Daly, because I think their recommendations are well researched. This kind of text is usually a goldmine of organizational strategies for presentations, any one of which may be right depending on the managers you are addressing and the type of recommendations you are trying to make.
The most important chapters in these books (make sure they have them) are the chapters on researching the audience and listening. Hardly anybody really learns how to do these things, but they are the key to making effective presentations to overburdened managers and executives, who often have to make difficult, risky, and expensive decisions based on one or a few ten minute meetings. What you need to find out, before you even walk into the room, are the following things:
Research. Listen. Listen to the staff you ask questions. Listen to the people who've presented. Take notes. Ask questions. Make sure you understand what you hear. I generally recommend that you do each of the following things as you listen:
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
Practice of any kind is good. This is practice in a somewhat structured format. Added bonus: You will probably learn more by listening to others' speches and evaluating them (good ones and bad ones) than you will practicing on your own.
Disclaimer: I'm not still a member, and not likely to be again for awhile.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Always try to turn your techno mumbo jumbo into a car analogy. People love car analogies.
This guy's the limit!
Advice: 1) Work for a few months in technical customer support, best by phone. Choose a place where you will receive training for this. After a few weeks, you will know how to advise people on things they have no knowledge about. (Warning: this is an enlightening experience, but not fun.) 2) Take courses. Anything related to teaching, communication, motivation, rhethorics, psychology etc. will help. 3) Practice communication in places where you get feedback. Somebody mentioned Toastmasters. Discussion groups are also a nice idea. Rhethorics courses where your performance is recorded by camera for you later to see is helpful, too. 4) Learn to listen. Let friends tell you about things that you have no knowledge about whatsoever and are not interested in. 5) Get to know how managers decide and why. Allow me to comment on your problem the way I see it: Obviously, your superiors do not possess the necessary knowledge to make a right choice. That's ok, that's what tech people are for. Just keep in mind not to present a wrong choice to your superiors as an option, because it is not. If there is really just one way to go, tell them so. I guess eventually, it boils down to taking on more responsibility. One more thing: From my experience, many communication issues between tech people and managers stem from the correctness and precision tech people have learned to exercise. An example: Your manager's computer refuses to work and you are asked for help. You're not sure what the problem is, but you are confident that the graphics adapter is the problem and a driver update will do the job. But because you have learned to be precise, you tell the manager: "It is impossible to say for certain what the problem is. Maybe the graphics adapter is not working, we can try a driver update." What your manager probably understands, however, is this: . o O { My technician doesn't know either! Now, do I trust my hard drive full of valuable corporate data to his hunch or mine? } O o . Needless to say, he will trust his own hunch. What you should have told him would have been more authoritative, maybe along the line of: "The graphics adapter is not working. We will do a driver update." No "maybe", no "try".
... just don't say "are you sure?" after one of us does manage to explain it. It's annoying enough that you already interrupting our workflow, just to have us decipher your ignorance, so don't push your luck. (Especially if you are underpaying us, or treat us as expendable.)
8==8 Bones 8==8
The way to communicate better is to learn to communicate better. Take some technical writing and editing classes. They'll help immensely. The technical writing classes will help you learn how to communicate technical ideas in plain English that (nearly) everyone can understand. The editing classes will help you learn to cut sentences and explanations down to just the essentials. Trust me, they work. Plus you get to review some of the more esoteric aspects of grammar that your 17-year-old mind didn't want to attempt to grasp the last time you took any English/grammar classes.
This guy's the limit!
Use Pony analogies.
is to listen better.
Listening is active. Consider what they are saying; don't get disgusted with stupid questions, elicit better ones.
If you want people to understand you, you have to know what their concerns are, then build understanding on that framework.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Since they are not technical people, it's a waste of time to try to explain what's in the Blackbox at hand. Focus instead on the consequences of the choices offered. As in "If you go with choice number 1, it'll cost the company 2 millions dollars and there is a high risk of delay. Choice number two, on the other hand, means good integration with our infrastructure, cost less and offers better chances of success." They can understand these choices.
Find a local Dale Carnegie Course ("Effective Communications and Human Relations"), and take it. http://www.dalecarnegie.com/
Say what you are going to say, say it, then say what you've said. In each of these sections explain that you favor a particular choice and in discussing the other choices you are just being informational. This way your role as advisor is always up front. Say it is OK to snooze on the parts you are including for "fairness" or "balance" because the issues you're covering are really expert issues.
In this kind of situation you are providing technical advice, not technical information so have the advice be the thing said at the beginning, middle and end while leaving the details to the middle.
I think you can learn most by asking for feedback once each decision is made. If it goes against your advice, find out why, it it goes with your advice, find out why. In the first case you need to see if there were other considerations that weren't shared with you. If that is the case, in future you need to ask for more information about the decision space before providing advice. That way you can address those considerations. In the second case, you need to find out if your advice was influential and how. This helps you know what is working. It could be that the question you are answering is not the question you were being asked because the questioner did not put the question in a way you could catch the first time through.
Finally, it is important to remember that seeking advice is not a commitment to take it. Be polite and thank people for taking the time to listen. Remember, repeat yourself. Hope this helps and thanks for asking.
The IT equivalent of a Bush appointee. All problems are purely technical. Arrogance unbounded. The alternatives to your solution never to be openly and honestly presented.
Why are people who do not understand what they are making decisions about the ones making the decisions?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
I'm not sure if there's a book or a class that will truly help more than a few in your position. It takes work, time, and honest self-evaluation, not a tutorial. (although for all I know, mentoring from a more experienced person might be the best way of all - sadly, I never came across anyone in a technically-oriented position who wasn't as least as bad as me)
What about your social circle - are they all techies or do you spend time with folks outside your area of expertise? How do you talk to them? I cultivate and maintain friendships with people as different from me as I can find, just to try and keep my sense of perspective pried open a tad, because I've learned that without constant work my worldview shrinks to a sliver pointed straight back into my own head...
Keep the other person's viewpoint in mind, and if you don't know what it is, ask them. Feel free to admit that you may need help in crafting your answer in a way that will help them solve the problem, because in all probability you're used to looking at things on an entirely different level. Encourage them to ask questions for anything they don't feel clear about. Encourage them strongly - lots of people are hesitant to question someone they view as an "expert" and will put the blame on themselves for not understanding.
Some people seem to be born with effortless social skills; the rest of us either have to invest a lot of work, or live with a language barrier between us and our colleagues. Keep at it. Give it a few years. And in between talking to people, think back over past conversations and try to use the wisdom of hindsight to decide how you could've handled them better.
Perfectly Normal Industries
No, really. If you can explain to your mom how your exceptionally technical recommendations work, no PHB will be able to stand against you. As a bonus, mom might finally figure out that you are not twelve any more.
The stuff they most easily understand are these. a manager would be inclined to take a sweet deal a vendor is offering despite its risk, but if you put what carnage would a security con would result in, they will see the light. Problems generally happen to be that way. Vendors who are selling solid stuff rarely need to offer "sweet deals".
Read radical news here
Talk in terms they understand. No one cares about technology but techies. This means you must explain things in terms of:
I am a consultant at a vast private company (if it were public, it would be in the top 25 of the Fortune 500). They like to send their internal people to the Dale Carnegie classes.
Other options would include:
taking business writing and classes at a local community college.
Toastmasters (while they are about public speaking, they also help develop communications skills).
You might check out a local community college or public university to see who their technical/business writing professors are and contact one of them for additional resources.
excellent real world response on the topic thread
Others have said it in pieces and parts, but let me recommend that you approach it at their level. At a manager's level. Empathize with what it takes to be a manager who comes to an IT guy looking for answers. They do not really want (nor need) to understand what it is you're suggesting. They merely want 'Business Objective A' to be met, and want to leverage technology to do it.
If you were that manager, and held the same things to be important as they do, what would be important to you? What criteria would you need to decide it?
Then, depending again on your audience, give a couple of options with pros and cons targeted towards those manager's concerns.
BE CAREFUL though, as they can spot your naiveté as well as you can spot theirs. Don't get cocky. Just play it straight and be ready to accept that they know their job better than you do. Again, remember that the reverse is certainly true.
By the way, this situation is why there is supposed to me a technical manager between you and them. Someone who walks in both worlds that can translate between the two...
I quit!
I was comfortable speaking in front of a crowd as long as I was talking about computers and speaking in technical jargon. What didn't occur to me was whether or not the people understood what I was saying.
There are specific items in Toastmasters that will apply directly to what you're seeking. Overall the ability to listen well and speak directly to your audiences' needs regardless of their level of understanding.
Impromptu speaking: the ability to provide an intelligent, concise answer on the spot, or the ability to deflect it until you can provide an answer. This is a phenomenal skill when dealing with supervisors or when interviewing.
Structured thinking: you'll start writing speeches in a structure (opening, body, conclusion) and have nested structure within that. Before long it will affect your thinking and you'll find yourself telling people exactly what they need to know in a clear, easy to follow manner.
Time saving: due to time limitations of speeches, you'll put emphasis on getting your point across. In addition with practice and removal of crutch words (ah, um, so) and unnecessary pauses, you'll be able to say more in a shorter period of time.
Meeting management: perform certain tasks in a timely manner, ensure things run smoothly and accomplish all tasks/goals expected. This can apply to a formal business meeting or even a "hallway hijacking."
Leadership skills: you learn to take the helm especially when there is no apparent leader and you learn how to steer any situation in the right direction to accomplish a goal.
There are advanced projects that will help you with this specific issue: speaking to management, speaking to inform and technical presentations.
Obviously this will not happen overnight, but I am quite certain that in a good, healthy club you'll notice immediate changes within six months.
Hit the http://toastmasters.org/ website and use the "Find a club" button to locate a club near you. Visit several clubs just to get a feel for the environment and find out which ones are healthy clubs. You might even find one with numerous technical members. If you'd like specific assistance finding a club or want to know more, send me a private message. I'd be glad to help.
The biggest mistake I tend to see technical types make is that they don't look at it from a financial standpoint. Although they say "this more expensive method is better", they don't lay that out as a good financial choice. So you'll see managers choose another method because it, for all intents and purposes since that's how it was explained to them, is financially better.
Lay out the various options with detailed cost justifications and return on investment times. Show ways that they'll save money, increase efficiency (and how that then saves money), and ways it will save money in the future. Especially when it comes to technical things, many non-technical types don't automatically see the financial aspects of all the technical details. Techies will understand the financial ramifications without further explanation, but that doesn't mean your manager will too.
Where I work we hired a Network Admin that had this very problem. And he notoriously got projects rejected. We eventually helped him understand what he needed to detail in his requests, and in some cases had manager's excited about some of his ideas for change.
There are likely other issues involved, but this is one of the largest that I'm aware of.
Car analogies really are great. About a year ago I had to design a website, which isn't that big of a deal, but there was a lot of information to organize. I did 13 layouts and usability testing before I could say that I had found the absolute best one. It really was a great layout. More importantly, it made use of common web UI standards. For example, where is the link back to the homepage? Click the logo. Where do you expect to see the search box? At the top of the page somewhere.
For some reason, you can take a great website and shoot it up on a wall with a projector and people will start picking it apart in ways that they wouldn't do if they were actually using the site. So people were actually saying things like, "what? Click the logo? Nobody will figure that out!"
So here was my car analogy: If I showed you a car on paper, and you'd never driven one before, you wouldn't believe that it was going to work. "what? I make it go forward by putting my foot on something?? That's insane!" you'd say. But you'd be wrong.
What's the riskier proposition here:
1: Rule out the bad solutions and present the best solution given the requirements and assume that the requirements are accurate
--OR--
2: Give the complete list of alternatives to someone who can't distinguish between the alternatives
There's a reason why the people who give the best advice also give the shortest answers.
*sigh* back to work...
If this is the case, better communication will not help. Rather, work on cultivating an attitude of acceptance, and consider whether you should change jobs.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
what you mean by "non-technical people" are actually dullards.
/. every time a legal issue is discussed, I think law is to nerds as IT is to PHBs). Would that lawyer be right to think " I can't be bothered explaining things to this dullard, because bring him up to my level of understanding is impossible. I'll just draw a diagram".
Really? So anyone who is not an expert in your subject is a dullard, correct? The idea that the just lack expert knowledge, and that the expert in front of them is not very good at explaining things, never enters your head.
I am sick to death of the attitude amongst a certain segment of the geek population that anyone who does not understand IT issues is dumb. I used to work front line tech support, and a lot of the techies in that office would regularly rant about "dumb users". Very few users are dumb. Rather, they are ignorant about IT, just as I am ignorant about motor vehicle mechanics, structural engineering and baseball. It doesn't mean I'm dumb, anymore than it means baseball fans are all smart.
the very existence of your job illustrates that they realise they are stupider than you and hence need help choosing things
Maybe the existence of his job illustrates that the company's primary focus is not IT, but they realise that they need to use computers to achieve other goals. That being the case, they took the really smart decision to hire IT people who could explain the issues to them and allow them to make an informed decision.
How can I communicate with the stupid without giving them a lengthy training session to bring them up to my level of understanding?"
Do you know anything about: bricklaying, plumbing, landscape gardening, heart surgery, or tort law? If yes, do consider your understanding of them to be on the same level as an expert in the field? If a pipe in your house burst, would undergo lengthy training so you could converse with an expert on a level playing field? If you needed legal advice, would your lawyer be justified in thinking you an idiot because you are do not have his understanding of the law (and quite frankly, given some of the rubbish modded to +5 on
I am not a golfer so please insert the name of a currently successful golfer to avoid embarrassment)
You don't know anything about golf? Dullard. Now replace Golf with IT in the preceding sentence, and try and realise how patronizing and insulting you sounded in your little rant.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
I would recommend the following resources:
1. Technical Writing Textbook, free online, which covers the basics.
2. Writing Technical Papers, also free online, a good introduction to the process.
3. Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, not free but very good on the details. Even if you hate Microsoft... they did a good job on this one. Maybe they did steal it from Apple. I don't know. I like this book.
4. IBM Style Guideliness, free on the web, see disclaimer above if AIX raped your dog.
5. Sun Style Guide, not free, but worthy. See disclaimer above if you call Solaris "Slowlaris."
I also maintain a blog called User Advocacy: Technical Writing and Technical Communications in which I detail links and other useful information for people wanting to get into technical writing.
For developers and others who want to explain things to people of varying technical ability, the skills of technical communications (the "new" name for technical writing) are invaluable. If you have any questions, please contact me through the profile link above.
technical writing / development
OK, so your basic problem here is that you are trying to explain something that they don't care about, don't know about, but want to understand in order to run their business. This is a tough position, but it could be worse (most teachers for example have to deal with don't know, don't care, don't desire to learn. You at least have desire to work with.).
.... option B was too expensive and option D was dumb." Most meetings don't start with suggestions, we try to be democratic about it and open for general discussion. If you suggest rather than ask you will: save time, have a better chance of getting what you want, appear as a leader.
Starting from there, I'd offer a few tips.
1. Don't talk about choices that don't matter.
If you have a set of 6 choices, but you know that 4 of them really aren't options, or maybe they are similar enough to each other that they don't need discussion, don't talk about them. It's really easy to distract them with other information. Don't.
2. Only tell them the least they need to know.
If you are comparing two technologies, think about it ahead of time and try to come up with a short list (of maybe three) things that you want to use for comparison. Say, time to implement, maintainability in the long term, and if you have the talent to implement in house or not. Don't talk about technical details that don't really matter to them. You know them, your team needs to know them, your financial department doesn't. (Think of it this way, how much of your yearly financials do you really care about? Me, I just want to see the bottom line, the profit for the year, and my bonus calculation; the rest is important to the bean counters, but not to me.)
3. Then you can talk in terms that they understand.
"Solution A will be better in the long term, and it will cost marginally more, but we do not have talent in house to start the project for at least two months. Solution B can be started right away, and has a lower time to completion, but we'll have to hire someone in a year to blah blah blah." These are business decisions that they are familiar with.
4. If you have to talk tech, start at 50,000 feet and go down.
Sometimes you have to get nerdy. If this is one of those times, take a few steps back. Explain the general problem that you are trying to solve. Then, explain *general* technology options (not specific technologies, just general fields of technologies) and how they might be used to solve your problem. Then come down to the decision that you have to make now, explain how each choice fits into a general technology pattern, and how each choice or pattern addresses your current business problem. Basically what you're doing here is your walking them through the issue from their office, to your program managers office, to your desk. Don't start at your desk - it's too much information at once.
5. Present a suggestion, not an option.
Take some extra time before the meeting and try to figure out what decision you think is best. Then, suggest one technology strongly before talking about the others. Rather than saying "We could go with options A, B, C or D; let me explain the differences," you say "Option C is the best way to solve this issue and here's why. I examined options A, B and D but I found that option A was lacking
6. Practice talking to other people.
Sales is a great way to improve these skills. Teaching is a good way to improve these skills. Basically, anywhere you talk to other people is a good way to improve these skills. Take some time and practice explaining stuff to people. If you have kids, pull one of them aside for an afternoon and explain something (how to make a web page, why the sky is blue, the difference between a goose and a gander, etc.). Kids are smart, and they are useful for explanations because they ask all kinds of weird questions, and then get bored and start playing with their toes. If you don't have access to a kid, try your parents, show them how to use skype, or their digital camera. Volun
Your manager doesn't want choices. They want the right decision. Going technical doesn't help them make the right decision. Neither is giving them choices (though using the Decoy effect is very efficient).
Give them the right choice. You know what the requirements are. You know if it's too expensive, or too difficult, or too time consuming. So make the right choice and then give it to your manager.
Give them the explanation only if they ask for it.
Give them the alternatives only if they ask for them.
GPL Deconstructed
There's a few very simple rules you need to keep in mind when trying to explain technical matters to those who have less exposure to such matters.
First of all, you need to remember that most people don't like to appear as if they don't know something, so they may not tell when they don't understand you.
Second of all, never assume that people are unwilling or incapable of learning. Sometimes, people just need to be shown that the problem which is giving them a headache is simpler than it appears at first glance.
Third of all, you need to have a certain amount of patience, because you may have to go all the way back to binary before your explanation gets around to contemporary technology.
Fourth, don't talk down to people. We were all newbies in any given field at some point.
I don't think it's really a stretch to posit that many technical people are possessed of little in the way of social skills. Conversely, many people with highly developed social skills have little to no technical knowledge. What you need to bear in mind here is that each type of person here has an advanced skill set of some type, but they are in different fields. People on both sides of the issue need to approach the conversation as an opportunity to share knowledge.
Remember, a computer is nothing more than a glorified light switch. All it can do is "on" and "off". It's just that it can do it several billion times a second, and this gives it the appearance of complexity.
It doesn't get much easier because everyone is different and different people interpret things differently. What does get easier is how you react to those interpretations. That takes practice and experience. That only comes with time. Many posters have already stated that.
Things I have taken away from my similar experiences might be of some help. I have three major things to look at that will make my presentation of my idea more efficient in a sense.
First off, since all non-technical people are different, you have to know how to read people. This is not easy. I've spent a good deal of time just sitting back and listening to people, watching mannerisms and interactions. You start to pick up on behavioral patterns. This isn't always an easy thing to do for many people. However, people fascinate me and I can watch people for hours. One of the best places to do it is a bar. Sit in a corner where you can see most of the bar and just watch people. A bar is where people will be the most deceitful about who they are to gain...well, you know what they are looking for, it doesn't have to be spelled out. Anyhow, you can learn to pick up just from body language who is uncomfortable, nervous, speculative, wary and of course deceitful. It actually transfers to a work environment because picking up a date in a bar is just like trying to wrestle office politics and gain favor from the higher-ups. The same body language, facial expressions and vocal cues are there. You just have to know how to look for them. If you see people are confused, bored or put off by your presentation, change it up right then and there. Don't keep going to the end. At that point, they will feel like they already wasted enough time and they want out of the uncomfortable conference room chair ASAP. Not good for your presentation and not good for you!
Make your presentation interesting. Engage your audience. This is not easy to do and you have to keep it professional. The easiest way to do this is to play to their sensibilities. They don't understand processors and materials and graphical displays and such. They understand money, personnel concerns, the bottom line and just general business health. They pay you to understand the technical stuff for them so they don't have to worry about it. Do you homework before your presentation. Look past the technical stuff and show them where the savings will be and what the benefits will be. Give them an idea of how long it will take for positive results to be noticeable. You don't need to have a detailed technical view. Your job is to understand that and then tell them what they need to do and why they should do it. They don't want to know how they should do it, that's why they hired you. Tell them why they should do it. If they want to know what they will have to do to do it, give them a high level view and answer questions. If you can speak to them about what needs to be done in a language they can understand, they will be much more trusting to let you do your thing because it will be obvious to them that you know your job and understand the business. That's all they want. A kick-ass team player.
Sometimes you can't get around technical stuff and they need to know about it and understand it without a shadow of a doubt. I find that in instances like this, demonstrations work best. Demonstrations give visual representation of what is going on and how things work. People tend to understand a complex idea better if they can see it in action. It may take a bit more preparation but the warm-fuzzy it can give will shave tons of time off of your project time and even your development cycle. It also helps because a demonstration is entirely engaging. Something is happening to keep attention and they will look at what you are doing. They will ask questions and the best thing you can do is answer as many question as you can as they come up. If you know the question will be answered later in the presentation, tell them something like "Hey now, don't jump ahead to the good parts!" or something equally witt
I once, a long time ago, took a course to meet a liberal arts requirement in college. It was a 'Technical Writing' course. I have found that what I learned in that class has greatly improved my abilities in explaining very technical things to people who barely understand that the 'computer' is not the monitor.
In thinking back on the class, one exercise stands out in my memory. In a nutshell you had to select an item from a list provided (hammer, pry-bar, scissors/snips, stapler (construction or for paper), etc...) and write not only instructions on how to use it, but why to use it and when it was appropriate to use it. The target audience was 'aboriginals who have never seen this item before and don't know its name or function' One assumption was made: The target audience had the ability to read at a 3rd grade level with the exception that their vocabulary did not include this item or any synonym or antonym of it as found in miriam-websters thesaurus. We had a week to write it. It was a great exercise in attempting to think and understand like someone else.
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. -Ronald Reagan
I tend to use analogies explaining things to non-techies, and it works well. Frame the conversation in things that they'll understand, avoid techie words, and don't go into too much detail. And most importantly, don't let them get sidetracked trying to understand minute but interesting details. Give them a quick, broad overview, and slowly work in details if they ask about them.
/actually/ magical, it shows. If you're holding the servers together with chewing gum and an oscillating desk fan, when they go down, no-one says "Good work on keeping that piece of junk running for another year", they say "Well... just make it work! It's your job to keep it running and now it's not!"
For instance (happened to me yesterday):
Q: "Why can't my boyfriend send me emails? I keep getting these stupid 'rejected by the content filter' messages??"
A: "The email thingy looks for bad words. If it sees too many bad words, it blocks the email because it thinks it might be spam or something"
or
Q: "How come whenever I type this into Excel it goes all weird??"
A: "Because it's stupid. Put a single quote in front of it to tell it not to be stupid"
Most importantly when dealing with decision makers... don't give them an out! I know it's hard, when they say "Well, instead of a server, can we just take a desktop and use it just for now?"... technically, yes, you could, but you must resist the urge to agree or validate! Instead, reframe the conversation: "Desktops aren't designed to be servers. They're different inside. If we use a desktop, things will be slow, it'll break easy, and we'll lose lots of money when it goes down. Servers are servers because they're tough and reliable. That's what we need."
Remember... every "temporary" solution will become permanent. Every "well, just make do with what you have" will come back to haunt you. Give them the worst-case scenario, use language they can understand, and don't be afraid to say "No, that's not right".
You're the expert here, not them. Don't let them go on a tangent thinking they know what they're talking about. Stop them, tell them they're wrong (don't get into details on how, just that they're wrong), and tell them what the right thing to do is. If they argue with you, remind them, you're the expert.
And, finally, as much as I hate to say it... don't be afraid to break something. In places where they've cobbled together their infrastructure and refused to replace it because "it's working, ain't it?", I've identified non-critical systems and 'encouraged' them to have accidents. Things go down, everyone panics, I get it back up and running, but then I have ammunition to go in and say "phew, we were lucky that was just System X. If it was System Y, we'd all be not working for 3 days and we'd lose Z dollars. You know, if we just spent (1/10 * Z) dollars we could ensure that we don't have to worry about X and Y for a long time."
Or, in a place that was a maze of 4 and 8 port routers supporting almost 200 people, there was one key router with a bad fan, it needed to be smacked occasionally to keep going. They wouldn't pay for rewiring, wouldn't even let me replace that key router, just expected me to keep struggling along troubleshooting all these routers and their crappy, crappy wire. Eventually I just stopped smacking the router. I told them the consequences of not doing things properly, they decided not to do things properly, and the consequences happened. And, lo and behold, when I actually put in a proper network stack and rewired the bad segments, all the benefits I told them would happen (faster, more reliable, less of my time spent troubleshooting) actually happened, and I gained credibility for my other ideas (like "a 486 in a closet is not an ideal DNS/DHCP server")
The point of it is that yes, we're magicians, but you can't be expected to keep doing that daily. Draw the line, so that when you do something
And returning to the original question... don't get mired in jargon, use analogies, don't be afraid to NOT explain things when the situation doesn't require it, and don't be afraid to assert yourself as the expert. It's what they pay you for, you might as well do it.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
It's called "willful" ignorance for a reason. What the submitter wants and what his illiterate bosses want are totally disparate things. They want to be assured their decision is the right one, without having to learn anything or actually think at all, and want that assurance to come from someone that knows what they're doing so if anything goes wrong, guess who is at fault. He wants to give them the ability to make sound decisions, so when they FAIL to do so, he's not at fault. Instead of trying to help these idiots, he should be actively documenting their incompetence in order to ensure they can't continue making ignorant, uninformed decisions. The problem isn't with tech people, or the submitter in this case, it's with his (and other) lazy, incompetent imbecile people that are assumed to know how to make these decisions, but obviously do not. If they can't do their job, they should be fired, not coddled by the IT staff.
> Because you know what's coming? An alternative. Typically a worse alternative. This happens all the time. Technical people love to bring up poor solutions to problems and contrast them against the better solution.
You're assuming that all technical people are created equal, which is wrong! Poor solutions often come up, because the other technical people aren't savvy enough to identify the good solution and want to ensure that they are comfortable with the direction of the work.
Absolutely. I have used this approach for several years and it works for me just fine. I will go through all of the various options and scenarios with my peers and then present it to my manager. Get your ducks in a row and then ask. Works much better that way.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
People have already suggested speaking with authority, etc One up in a similar vein: don't trust the opinions and assumptions of others. Your response is the correct one. As long as your audience doesn't have a false sense of power (ie: project managers that think they understand your job), such a stance will generally garner you a considerable amount of respect from your colleagues. Of course, it's a risky proposition -- in order for it to be right, you have to be right almost all of the time. Being an opportunistic team player however can deflect any accusations from the occasional slip. Your more sensitive colleagues may also pick up on this sort of behavior and either garner a strong dislike of you or become totally cowed. There's a good and a bad with everything. In the end, it's about presence. Make suggestions, even make suggestions that are really just decisions disguised in such a way. It'll make them feel like they know what they're doing and in the end you can take the ego-stroking when they realize how amazing you are to have around.
These posts are too long. Can you guys summarize, possibly include a .ppt or .vsd please.
Thanks
[signature.vcf]
I know we're mostly good nerds who love to solve problems, so everyone's coming up with great ideas of how to deal with moron managers. This has bugged me all my work life, 30 years- the managers pay me for my knowledge and expertise, but THEY make the decisions? Based on what _I_ tell them? If I decide to become a good game player, I can present things in such a way as to lead them to the decision I want them to make. Feels wrong, like cheating or something worse.
So, how about: we tech. types make the decisions! Yay! Problem solved.
Above post is exactly right. The most helpful way to talk with non-technical people about technical solutions is to give them ONE answer - preferably on paper.
;)
This is key. Non-technical people truly don't understand a word you are saying. If you work thru a solution out loud, and they are in the room, they hear all these different words and all of these words just keep getting stuck in their head. Suddenly they have a bunch of buzzwords and technical words that mean very specific things, and they don't have a single idea what these truly mean in the big picture.
So you fix this by being an expert. When your boss needs a solution? Give him one fully thought out expert opinion - on paper. Something he can go to another person with and say "how much will it cost to do exactly THIS?"
If you don't know the answer - and you are sure your boss doesn't either - ask to get back to him in one hour, and then lock yourself in a room with your peers and hash out a solution. This way you get to work out alternatives while presenting only a polished opinion at the end.
- DaftShadow
p.s. Here's another lesson I learned, which goes slightly the other way. Never Discuss Financial Things with Engineers. Ever.
Ummm that is not what "router" does, a router routes traffic. Now a router may have NAT or DHCP implemented on it but your description is not what a router is. Seven years of dial-up support and that is what you call knowledgeable? I'd figure somebody like yourself would be jumping on Wikipedia before posting such a clueless post to make yourself seem more knowledgeable than you really are. Your use of subnet shows you really don't understand it either. Maybe somebody needs some help entering their password or setting up Winsock on Window 3.1?
Of course it's not really what a router does, but it's close enough that somebody who barely knows how to handle a mouse is going to understand it, and that's the important thing here. BTW, that was Dial-up, ISDN, cable, DSL and satellite if you don't mind. About the only type of connections I didn't work with were T1 an up.
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Ummm all the things you describe involve no more thought than programming a microwave or VCR. Your description of a router and your use of subnet did show that you aren't as knowledgeable as you'd like to think you are.
Either that, or I have a much better understanding of what my callers can follow and what they need to know.
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You aren't doing tech support on Slashdot and your other posts point to what you really know ;-). Stop trying to weasel.
Of course I'm not doing tech support on Slashdot. However, unlike you, I'm well aware that the topic is communicating with non-technical people. I'm using analogies that they can understand. Of course, like all analogies, they're not completely accurate, but the ones I use gave my callers the information they needed. I very seriously doubt that the highly-technical explanations you'd have given would have done the same; in fact, I doubt they'd have been understood at all, or that you'd have been kept working on the phones for very long because you don't seem to have the ability to communicate well with callers. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you have the tech skills, but if you can't make the callers understand what they need, it doesn't matter how much you know.
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You gave a poor analogy, it was incorrect. A router routes traffic like a pbx routes calls. How is that for non-technical numb nuts? You tried to act like you knew more than you did, your arguing reinforces this.
I think you and I are focusing on two different aspects of the router. I'm only interested in that part that the average ISP customer needs to understand why they need a router to connect three or four computers to their DSL/cable modem, and my analogy's just fine for that. They neither need to know, nor would understand your far more technical explanation of things they're not interested in. As I've been saying, I know my audience, I know what they need, what they can understand and how to explain that to them, things you clearly not only don't know, you don't even suspect.
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I work for a very small company, eight people. I am a jack of all trades including tech support because when you are that small you have to. I dumb things down all the time for people, so I don't need a lecture from you. Your protests belie your claims and your analogy was a poor one and incorrect.
Your router implements a service called NAT which allows one address to be shared among many computers. You can have one Internet Address and have multiple computers connected to the Internet through the router.
See that is nice and easy and not a wrong statement and didn't bring up a PBX which the user may not even know about. So are you arguing that you have to make incorrect statements to be non-technical?
And how, except for the analogy to a phone system, is that different from what I said? Your way brings in technical terms that the caller doesn't know, mine doesn't. As far as knowing what a PBX/Centrix system is, I ask first. Even people who've never worked with them have experience calling companies that have one public phone number and many extensions, and can easily get the picture.
I think the main trouble here is that you think there's One True Way to do everything, and I'm flexible enough to find out what a caller knows and fit my explanation to that. If so, there will never be a meeting of the minds here.
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You said a router provided a mapping of one to many ip addresses, a router doesn't do that. You think PBX is an everyday term? I don't believe in one true way, you do. After all, you and your friends are the key holders to what is good coffee and what is a good analogy among many other things I'm sure. You still doing tech support?