Karen: [00:00:06] Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: [00:00:13] I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:00:14] And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:00:16] Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "How many times do I have to say this?"

Karen: [00:00:26] So we've been thinking about an episode back from episode 155, where we talked about how important it is to get a base of shared knowledge. So the things that I know, that relate to the thing we're going to have to decide, maybe make sure that the group knows. Or if I'm facilitating the things that various people in the room know, get to a place where we have a shared understanding of the facts, the data, the content related to what we're doing.

Karen: [00:00:52] And Paul was pointing out that we didn't talk as much as we might have in that episode about actual transfer of knowledge. What does it take to not just to say it because that's what we think it should take? If I said it and they said they understood it, I'm good. And it turns out that's often not true.

Karen: [00:01:11] So the question this week is "How many times do I have to say this?" And the answer is, probably a lot more than you'd think you would. And what's more, you probably have to say it in a number of different ways. And get them to say it.

Speaker3: [00:01:29] Mhm.

Paul: [00:01:31] Yeah. My favorite phrase, by which I mean I don't like it at all, that I hear a bunch from some of the leaders that I work with, and some organizations is "Well, we've communicated this and people just don't seem to get it." And what I often come back with is, "Well, I think what you mean is that you said it. And that people don't seem to get it." 

Paul: [00:01:49] Because communication implies more than just saying it. And so I think it's yeah, how many times do we need to say this? Probably more than you think you ought to. And also probably in a different way. And you probably also need to do some asking in addition to some saying.

Paul: [00:02:06] So one of the things that I encourage people to do a lot when they have something important that they're trying to get other people to understand. So like, we're trying to build a shared understanding of this problem that we're going to go solve together. Or as I sometimes hear, you know, we have "This is our strategy. This is where we're moving forward," right? And the person who's developed the strategy or the small group has been working on it for a while, know it really, really well. And so they said, "We're going to communicate this strategy to people so that they can use it to solve problems in their day to day." And then they get back a "Well, what's our strategy? Do we have a strategy?"

Paul: [00:02:39] And the thing that I usually ask in situations like that is "So after you've explained the strategy to people, and you've asked them to explain it back to you, what do they say?" And usually what they say is, "Well, I didn't ask them to do that." And that's, that's part of I think what's really important here, is recognizing that when we communicate something, when we say something, we want to actually check for other people's understanding of it.

Paul: [00:03:02] Checking for understanding for me is one of those key tools of "Great, I've said some things and they make sense to me in my head because of all the contacts that I have." But you are coming to it from a very different place and I've said some things and I don't know what has landed. And so I need to check your understanding of the thing that I've just said. And so I coach people in a variety of different ways of how to do that. But fundamentally, I said some things and I have no idea if any of them actually landed.

Karen: [00:03:32] Yeah, and that gets even more complicated as soon as you add any kind of hierarchy. Or any kind of pressure, or job pressure or frankly, even social dynamics, because unfortunately, we grew up in schools where you were supposed to know the answer. And if someone in authority said, "Do you understand me?" There was only one correct answer. And so unless there's a really clear counter process going on, the default will always be "Uh huh. Uh huh. Yes, I understand." That's just what they're going to do.

Karen: [00:04:11] And they aren't meaning to be dishonest. In fact, probably they aren't asking themselves, Do I understand? Nothing seemed confusing. Nothing seemed difficult. It all sort of flowed. "Yep. I'm good. I understood you." Well, that's a very different thing than I understood it enough to apply it, to use it, to remember it. To call it back to consciousness the next time I might need it, that kind of thing.

Karen: [00:04:38] So we're talking about things where we have information that we want the team to be able to access, to work with, to do something with. You know, there are things you might say that "They either pick them up or they don't. We don't care. It was there if they wanted it." That's a different category.

Karen: [00:04:54] But for things that we want to be able to work with, I'm going to assume that if I ask if they understand me, they will tell me 'yes'. Because that's what they have been socialized to do. And we need to recognize that there's nothing wrong with them. And there's nothing sneaky or dishonest about them. It is actually the way our society is, so we have to figure out ways to check our communication.

Paul: [00:05:19] I have often said that the only useful answer to the question 'Do you understand?' is 'No'. Because if you say that you understand, you might think that you do. But that doesn't mean you necessarily have the same understanding as I do. And so 'no' is the useful answer! Because it means "I know that I don't know what you just said." 

Paul: [00:05:40] And we very rarely get a no. And so it's why I just kind of dropped that out of my vocabulary. Because I don't even think it's a useful question.

Paul: [00:05:48] But yeah, to your point of with all of those things. And the fact that the power dynamics and the social hierarchy and things like that all come into play. And that's where I think that in a hierarchical situation, people who have positional authority can use that usefully to check for understanding. To actually insist that "I want to hear from you what you got from me."

Paul: [00:06:10] And you can do that in a humane way. You can say like, "I know that this is complicated and I don't always explain things as clearly as I think I do. Could you help me out by explaining back to me what you heard?" Or, "Could I watch you do this?" Because that's even better, is if we're talking about things that we want people to be able to apply. Like, what I really want is the way I know that you know how to apply it is that I see you apply it successfully.

Paul: [00:06:35] And so this shows up like in, and this is one of the things that shows up a lot in, in a lot of Agile ways of working where it's, "Hey, we think we understand what the customer wants, but until we actually build the thing and give it to the customer, we don't actually know." Like, and so if we have built the thing and given it back, they can check our understanding of what they wanted. And so if we can do that very frequently and in small bits, it means it closes that loop a lot faster.

Paul: [00:07:03] So there is that piece of recognizing that if we just keep saying it, if we keep repeating ourselves, it's unlikely to really close the gap between 'what we want people to understand' and 'what they actually need to understand'. I do think that it is valuable to repeat those things in different forums, in different media.

Paul: [00:07:25] One of the guidelines that I sometimes have tried to follow is "seven times, seven ways". So it's like you do need to say it multiple times, but that's not the only thing that you need to do. You need to check for understanding. You need to see how people can actually apply this and do corrective stuff in there. For me, that's how communication of these things really happens.

Karen: [00:07:46] Absolutely. And if we want it to land in memory, it helps if we ask them to use some higher order thinking skills. To use some old education speak from my education days. But if we can get- you talked about analysis or application, that's one piece. If we can get to the evaluation level, which in that theory is even higher, it's again more likely to land.

Karen: [00:08:10] And I also want to think about we've been talking about it as a frame of like a one on one conversation. I'm not going to propose that if you've just said a thing to a room of ten people, that you go around and have each of them tell you, you know, 'say the same thing over again', that that will get old in a hurry. But you can use a different kind of engagement.

Karen: [00:08:29] So if I've spoken to a group about a thing, I might, for example, ask each of them to get out a pencil and paper. And I will say I'm a fan of pen and paper, or pencil and paper, as opposed to things that you can type on. We know that the brain works differently with moving a pencil.

Karen: [00:08:45] But I often will say, you know, so "We've just talked about a thing. Write down one thing that surprises you. One thing that you like or that excites you." You can adjust the language on this. "One thing that concerns you, or that you don't like. And one question that it brings up for you."

Karen: [00:09:03] So that kind of frame. And that could be adapted in any number of ways, but write down each of those things. And then maybe go around the group and each person shares one of them. So that you're getting some feedback from everybody and then collectively. And so some of that's helping them process it so that they will take it in. And some of it's giving me some feedback about 'Did it land like I thought it would?'

Paul: [00:09:30] One of the things that I often coach folks on is that people will misunderstand you. In part by filling in their own fears, and what they think this thing implies, particularly if it's not great. But it's like- we talked about communicating bad news, like that always happens.

Paul: [00:09:48] But there's another question that I'll sometimes add to your processing of it, which is asking, "What do you think this implies?" Like, what assumptions about this are you making that I didn't explicitly say but might be true, that you want to check with me?

Paul: [00:10:03] Because sometimes they need to correct those misconceptions. Like the things that people filled in that I didn't actually mean. And so that's another way of getting people to engage with it. To getting to think about, to put it into the larger frame of what they're working with.

Paul: [00:10:17] And I think that's actually the other really important piece about. I mean, one of the things we know about how human brains work is that we latch on to information that is relevant to us. That where we can see 'How does this apply to me?' 'How am I going to use this?' 'How am I going to need to use this?'. 

Paul: [00:10:35] And one of the problems that we have with, when people feel like they have to keep repeating stuff, it's because you're giving it to people at times when it doesn't apply to them. When it's not going to stick, it's not immediately relevant or actionable or things like that.

Paul: [00:10:48] And so it's not surprising that it doesn't stay with them. With what you're talking about in terms of getting people to engage with it. And engage with higher order thinking processes, getting into the evaluative piece about it, that will help. But still, that will help in the short term.

Paul: [00:11:05] But if they're not immediately going to need to use it, it's probably going to go away. Which is why we should only be, which is why the best bang for our buck is when we're communicating these things at the right time. When it is relevant to people because they're going to need to apply it, they're going to need to use it. Because then that makes it most likely that it's actually going to stick.

Karen: [00:11:25] Yeah. And you briefly mentioned another piece that's part of the right time, too, which is the emotional load. When we are very emotional, our ability to take in cognitive information drops way off. And that can be very positive, happy emotions. It can be very sad, angry emotions. Doesn't matter. 

Karen: [00:11:44] If the emotions are highly engaged. That's not the moment to transfer cognitive data. And so there's also a piece of this of "I'm delivering a thing that's going to get a big reaction. Let's react together. Feel that. Work through the emotion together", whatever that is first. And then get into more of the cognitive and what the rest of the data around it is.

Karen: [00:12:06] And that's trick. because when people are highly emotional, they often say they want more data, they feel like they need it. So there is this balance that gets hit. But I would say even if the way that you're processing the emotion is to give people the data that they're asking for, I would assume that they didn't actually take it in very well. They latched on to whatever the one thing was that linked to their emotional state. But I'm going to, for sure expect, that I'm going to have to engage with it another way if I want people to be able to use it. 

Karen: [00:12:36] And frankly, if I want them to think about it accurately or speak about it accurately. I mean, a lot of that emotional stuff turns into gossip. And, you know, the old telephone game, where it just gets very different than what was actually said. That's super likely to happen if you're transferring cognitive information in emotional spaces. So just be thinking about that.

Paul: [00:12:58] Yeah. And for me, what a lot of this comes down to, in terms of 'How many times do I have to say this?' That is often said in a very exasperated, frustrated tone. Because it is "I'm tired of saying this thing! Why haven't people gotten it?"

Paul: [00:13:12] And I think what we're kind of saying here today is be aware of how humans actually interact with information like this. And to the extent that you can let go of that frustration. That this, this is the way these things work. Even though we wish that it weren't. And even though we sometimes believe that it's not how it works, you know.

Paul: [00:13:36] So it's not that people aren't getting it because they're stupid, or they're obstinate, or they're resistant. Or they're lazy or they're- it's because of the way that human brains work. The way that communication works, the way that we metabolize these sorts of things.

Paul: [00:13:55] And the degree to which you become frustrated is probably the degree to which you become less skilled at communicating it. So if you can get to that spot of being able to say "Okay. I have not yet communicated this well. What's my next move? What can I do next in order to do this?" If you can come to that in that calm place, even though the clock is ticking, right? You've got, yeah, things are not going the way that you want! 

Paul: [00:14:21] The more that you can do that, the more likely it is that you're actually able to move the needle on people's understanding, develop more of a shared understanding of it.

Paul: [00:14:30] There is a tech executive who once said- I was a CEO, right. And he said, "By the time you're tired of repeating it, people are probably starting to hear it." And so it's just recognising that you have so much of the context and so much of the understanding of it. And you have a much different relationship with this knowledge about whatever it is, than the people you're trying to communicate it to, particularly in a large group, in a large organization.

Paul: [00:14:57] It's just normal. That it takes, that you need to overcommunicate. It's normal that people won't get it the first, fifth, sixth, eighth time around. Particularly if all you're doing is broadcasting. And so if you can step out of that place of frustration, and just see what is. And go, "Okay, this is where we are! Now what?"

Karen: [00:15:17] Yeah. So just track where we've been. "How many times do I have to say this?" And looking at this, that's the thing that really needs to be communicated. People need to have the information and be able to use it. For decision making, for the work that they're doing, for whatever it is, that we expect that it will need to be more times than we thought. In more ways than we thought. 

Karen: [00:15:43] And with more response and engagement from the recipients of the information than we normally would expect. We expect that if we ask people if they understand, they'll say, "Yeah, I do." Because they don't want to seem stupid or obstinate or whatever those other things are. And so they will very agreeably say they understand.

Karen: [00:16:04] And in fact, the likelihood is that they don't. And so what we're suggesting is be ready to cheerfully and peacefully repeat yourself. Ideally do that using different modalities, different approaches, different words, different contexts. Different storytelling, possibly even different voices.

Karen: [00:16:21] If there's somebody else who knows the same information, get somebody else to say it. And then look for ways for your audience or your team to engage with it. To respond to it, to feed it back. "Let me know what you think you heard about that" is the simplest, maybe.

Karen: [00:16:40] But also look for ways that they can be involved in analysis, application, evaluation of it. What surprised them? What did they like? What did they not like? What do they think is a good next step? What does this imply? What does this suggest in terms of where we might go forward? So that they're really getting it landed in their brains using what we know about how brains work, and how memory works, and how information transfer works.

Karen: [00:17:04] And if we can do all of that, we still don't expect that the communication will be perfect. But A, it will be good enough, likely. And B, you'll know what actually has been communicated and where to go next so you can make better decisions.

Paul: [00:17:19] Well, that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:17:23] And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.