Communication in the Wild

BACK TO THE SCENES

Let's go back to the American engineering firm after the tense phone call between Dave and Constantin had concluded. Even after four months of collaboration, communication between the two offices was still a problem.

"I don't understand why those guys don't just simply know what to do!" said Jim, one of the American engineers, after the cross-continental meeting had ended.

Another engineer, Bob, remarked that if they could only work together face to face, they wouldn't have these communication problems, and many others nodded. The reality was that traveling to work face to face was too expensive. Maybe an executive or two could go to a distant work site. Not the whole engineering team, though.

Lee, an American engineer, suggested a solution to us when we interviewed him later: "We just need to be more direct and clear."

Direct and clear. It's worth spending some time with Lee's idea. Could the American, Brazilian, Indian, and Romanian engineers understand each other better if they were direct and clear? To an engineer, this sounds plausible.

To many other people, his suggestion might seem reasonable as well. We had heard something similar from engineers in other offices: "Let's make what we say — or write in emails — unambiguous." But we knew enough about communication to be doubtful. Many people think that directness, clarity, and lack of ambiguity make for good communication, and that a good communicator is someone with those traits. But once you dig into this suggestion, you realize that it's not so workable after all. You also might start to see that it's not the only assumption that people hold about communication. In our work, we collected a lot of these assumptions, many of which don't match what people communicating with digital tools in the global workplace need to know about culture and communication.

One red flag that's raised by Lee's suggestion is, Can an utterance really be made "neutral," and can information really stand alone? Lee has assumed that information other than a key message is unnecessary and confuses people. His idea assumes that information can be abstracted out of one context or situation, reorganized clearly, and then delivered concisely and without ambiguity in another. But take the following sentence as an example: Jim asks Dumitru, "Where are those engineering drawings you were going to send me?" What the speaker really means by this sentence doesn't exist anywhere in the sentence. In this case, key information isn't located in the words themselves but rather in the surrounding context as well as in people's memories of other such sentences and how they played out. The speaker is not asking for a precise location of the drawings, but rather is making a complaint that something promised wasn't delivered. A perfectly coherent answer might be: "Oh sorry, I'm running behind." An impudent or joking answer would be the exact location (seemingly) asked for — for example, "Right here on my desk." How can it be that the coherent answer is the one that doesn't answer "where" but instead answers "why" or even "when"? Isn't "where" what was asked for? And how in the world can the answer to the real content ("where") be impudent?

Lee thinks that a good communicator can create an utterance that's decipherable by any audience if it's clear and direct. We can see that this view looks to be in trouble. It ignores many aspects of the ways that people really communicate with each other, notably the role of context and cultural conventions and habits. In this case, using the question "Where are the drawings?" potentially avoids conflict by using a question about location. The utterance's intended action or impact is to get the other person to send the drawing as soon as possible, to express one's disappointment at the unexpected delay, and also to preserve the relationship.

Lee might disagree. As an engineer, he might point out that clarity and directness do matter in technical fields like science and engineering, where engineering knowledge is thought to be easily detached from an engineer and his surrounding culture. Engineers tend to think that mathematical symbols make up a universal language that's culture-independent. While it's true that math symbols are a universal means of communicating certain types of relationships, people who study math education know that culture still has a role to play. For instance, there's no single way to do mathematics procedures like counting, ordering, sorting, measuring, and weighing; each culture has its own procedures. You can see this in something as simple as numerical ordering for the date. In the European system, it's day-month-year (e.g., 20–6–2015), while Americans use month-day-year (6–20–2015). There are dates of the year that can easily be confused with each other if you don't understand which system the numbers stand for. And these number differences were confused by the Americans and the Romanians we studied. After several costly mishaps about delivery dates, they decided to use the word for the day of the month instead of the numeral.

It turns out that technical and professional knowledge is not easily pulled from its cultural context after all. Even though the Indian engineers, like the other engineers, considered engineering to be universally understandable because it's "all math," they told us one story that they thought illustrated some communication problems they'd been having. The story was about one American company's confusing way of categorizing drawings. It turns out that the professional knowledge they all shared about engineering design was wrapped in other information they didn't share. The American company used two similar labels for two different stages of a technical document: "issued for comments" and "issued for checking." The Indian engineer explained to us that from his point of view, there was no difference between issuing a drawing for comments and issuing it for checking. In both cases, engineers checked the work and made comments. As he explained, "If you find something that needs to becommented on, you comment." After multiple misunderstandings about how and when to make comments on drawings, the Indians sought clarification from the Americans but didn't get a satisfactory answer. They still got in trouble for doing the wrong thing. Ultimately they figured out on their own that the Americans' terms denoted two different types of drawings in an important sequence. First a drawing was made and issued for comments, then a comment cycle followed, and then the drawing was returned to the design team. Then it was fixed and "issued for checking." Misunderstandings had occurred because the engineers in Kolkata had described a drawing as "issued for checking" when it was really still in the comment stage, and therefore the wrong conclusions were drawn as to how much work had been accomplished...