Emad Alashi’s Blog

It’s a waste of time trying to explain how important communication is in life, whether it is at work or personal life. So I will start immediately in group of points I find it to be basics when it comes to successful communication in general, and verbal communication in specific.

Here is the list of actions you need to take in order to explain your thoughts as clear as and descriptive as possible. I tried to put them in their proper order considering the communication process, though they can overlap:

1. At the beginning of the conversation, make sure that the goal of the conversation is clear
   e.g. “the goal of this discussion is to discuss the problem x, and to find a proper solution for it”
2. Put the listener in the context instantly
   e.g. “Remember the remark our client made on the page where we list his system users?”
3. Unify the terms used in the discussion; giving special words to commonly used meanings and expressions
   e.g.  “users who are still work for the company but for some reason they are not available we will call them Deactivated Users, users who don’t work for the company anymore will be called Deleted Users”
4. Start from common ground of information
   e.g. “As you already know, this list is too long and a scrollbar shows, and you know too that the architecture team provided us with a tool for paging, now the problem is…”
5. Sequence of thoughts is highly important; you should start from the most intrinsic and basic thought and build on it to conclude to the next, each thought should be a building block for the next
   “we are advised to use tool x for this problem, tool x uses technology y, technology y requires us to buy that license, and we cannot afford it right now, so what we can do is…”
6. Aside from the terms in point 3, use language words that are understandable by the listener; don’t use a unique dialect for example. For this point I will give a negative example:
   e.g. An aussie would say “Don’t get your knickers in a knot”, when he really means “Don’t upset yourself”
7. Don’t deviate from the subject or add information that is useless to the subject; the more you talk about irrelevant subjects, the closer to failure the communication would be. This point too should be explained with bad example:
   e.g. “Yes, this can be fixed but it only requires a small action from Ahmad, who happens to be working with the architecture team right now, on a new feature in the framework that might add a new challenge to our application because we will have to change the….”! 
8. Don’t try to over explain the idea more than it needs; use short expressive words.
   e.g. “I get server error exception” rather than “I get error showing tags and line of code in the vb file where the error happened because it is an error from the server as you know”!
9. Talk in digestible speed, a speed that suits the listener not you; reminding to point 5, thoughts are delivered in sequence, make sure the listener digested the current before you move to the next
10. Ask questions that help the listener to understand, when you already know the answer, but you want to reach certain point with the question where the listener will have to think clearly about it
    “When request a page, what happens on the server?”
11. Confirm that the listener is following right by asking regularly
    “are you following?”
12. if the listener failed to understand at some point do the following:
    1. ask what part exactly he didn’t understand in order to take the proper action
    2. DON’T REPEATE THE SAME SENTENCE! rephrase the sentence in a more understandable way (needs a lot of training, I agree)
    3. Step one level back in your sequence of thoughts, probably the listener didn’t understand because of failure in explaining the previous though

By this I end the basics of successful communication, it’s not easy to follow these steps I am sure, it needs a lot of practice, especially when it comes to choosing words and preparing the sequence of thoughts. But if you practice enough and  you master it, your life will be much easier

I hope you benefit and have a nice discussions around