OR/MS Today - February 2000 - Was It Something I Said?

February 2000

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

By Vijay Mehrotra

Communication styles. This is exactly the kind of thing that most OR people tend to quickly dismiss as trivial. Nevertheless, in my experience, I've found it to be very important, important enough to be the subject of this month's column.

I was first introduced to the concept of contrasting communications styles many years ago during Freshmen Orientation Week. I found myself in a lecture from a forward-thinking mathematics educator who explained that there was a growing body of cognitive research about communication styles; how different people respond and retain things very differently, depending on how they are presented. By way of example, he explained how things worked in his office:

"Linda [his office mate] likes e-mail, likes notes, but tends to forget what I tell her. Me, I've almost got to scream at her to 'give it to me orally.' I like it that way!"

This off-color faux pas precipitated a big laugh, and a very funny skit at a subsequent Freshman Week dinner. But to me the point was made quite clearly and memorably as a result of his verbal slip-up: the same approach that works brilliantly for one person or situation will perform quite poorly for another.

A close friend of mine just started working at one of them darn .com companies a few weeks ago. While she has degrees in Humanities and Social Sciences, this job has her positioned as one of the company's key day-to-day technical interfaces with its largest and most demanding customers.

One day after work a couple of weeks ago she gives me a call. "I've had the most rollercoaster day! I've been trying to get these issues resolved and I couldn't get anyone's attention, particularly Curt, the senior marketing executive who had the capability to really solve the key ones. I had a bunch of e-mails out, but I just couldn't get a reply from Curt." Long lists of unresolved technical issues and inattentive, overburdened staff members are a common phenomenon at software companies these days.

She continued, "I got out and walked around the block a couple of times, and then I just stormed into Curt's office. I figured he'd be mad at having me in there, but he was all ears. We worked through all of it in about 20 minutes, no sweat."

Last week, this same friend tells me that she is "really able to get a lot more done on this job than a lot of my peers, just because I have good writing skills. It's really remarkable." The story of Curt was still ringing in my ears, so I asked her to elaborate. She explained: "Trying to solve problems that require lots of different types of people, here and on the client side, means that you usually have to sift through a lot of junk to figure out what's going on and who the right person is to help you solve it. And most of the time those people are so buried that they are really grateful — and responsive — when someone lays out the problem and the proposed solution for them clearly in a written e-mail."

Over the last 12 months, my consulting group has been doing a lot of work with a vendor of forecasting and scheduling software. Our partner's salespeople sell an enterprise software product that is easy to use, but there is an up-front modeling, training and consulting phase that is critical to the success of the customer organization.

Prior to the initial product launch, we developed a two-part methodology. Via conference calls and e-mails, we would gather information from the customer about their operations and use this to design the model of their operations upon which the forecasting and scheduling solution would be built. Then, once the software had been installed, we would visit the customer site and provide a combination of consulting and training to put them in a position to incorporate the product into their business operations.

The consultants on my team had an in-depth knowledge of the software's capabilities, limitations and underlying mathematical methods, as well as solid communication skills. We first tried to deliver standard training courses, with overhead slides, flipcharts and exercises, during the first half of our site visits. This worked well in many cases, but several customers balked at this — they wanted only to work on their problem, with their specific data and their own special business rules.

We then adapted our methodology to a learning-by-doing model in which we would train the customers while working them through models of their operations. This worked far better, especially when the group being trained was very small. It is my belief that most adult learners need context that is familiar to them to build on, sometimes merely to keep their interest, but in a number of our evaluations we heard comments like, "We got a lot out of the visit, but we really wanted classroom training, handouts and exercises."

More and more of us are finding ourselves as nodes in "knowledge supply chains" (or, if you must, spiders weaving "communications webs"). While "good communications skills" seem to have been a mandatory last bullet point in every job posting since the beginning of time, these skills are becoming increasingly important in today's fast-paced business environment.

And a big part of this is figuring out how best to approach each situation in order to be most effective, something that technical people are almost never trained to do. Historically, we seem to plow ahead with our standard message, regardless of who we are talking. Such hastily designed user-interfaces can really limit our effectiveness.

Vijay Mehrotra is the CEO of Onward Inc., an operations management consulting firm based in Mountain View, Calf. He can be reached at vijay@onward-net.com.

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