Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
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
Without trying to vitriolic, I did say start reading CIO magazine or whatever it takes. Managers read magazines, talk to their peers, or watch the news etc. to find out what is happening in the world, and they are more often motivated by the CIO (due to SarbOx rules) than anything else lately. If you don't EDUCATE yourself in order to communicate on their levels you will never get through to them no matter how elegant or cost efficient your proposal is.
I'm not going to tell you to trust me on this, but I will say that if you don't learn to communicate effectively with the audience that you are trying to appeal to, you will never get anywhere no matter what your message is. This is why we see so much political posturing during elections; they are trying to appeal to the voters - their audience.
At every level of business, you have to be political. The absolutely largest part of politics is relating to your intended audience. If you need to take speaking classes, finance classes, whatever... do something so that you can relate to your audience in a way that is EASY for them to understand.
Is that a bit more clear?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
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
As much as I hate it, zappepcs is exactly right on this. Management will not adjust itself to your terms. You need to adjust to their terms and concepts, or find new management (e.g. change jobs ... yeah, there are vast differences in managers).
Things to especially keep in mind include: 1: Express the issue in business terms, including short and long term costs, impact on revenues and sales, legal liabilities, and a thorough risk analysis (risks not only of a paradigm shift in technology, but also a shift in markets, staffing, etc). ... and 2: Give managers choices, but not too many. Two choices can usually work. Three or Four choices is better, even if one or two are obviously bad choices. More than that is probaby too many (depending on the complexity of the issue).
Put it in writing. Summarize entirely in not more than one page, better if it is one or two paragraphs. The whole report shouldn't be more than 2 to 6 pages, shorter is better. Then just say the full details can be made available if needed (they usually don't want it, but some will). And include your recommendation and why in one paragraph. The higher level the manager is, the shorter all this usually needs to be.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars