Playing Around with Animoto

What Makes Communication Hard

Honest to-goodness two way Communication is hard.

Very hard.

It’s hard because each side holding up their end of the conversation has to have a common frame of reference before anything meaningful can be conveyed and understood.

Speaking the same language. Having a common world view. Wanting similar outcomes. On the same topic.

Most conflicts, micro and macro, have at their heart a deficiency in this common frame of reference.

The significantly difficult parts of my job aren’t all the technical details involved in my day to day development tasks – it’s in managing the frames of reference that I move between when speaking with customers and colleagues.

And it’s getting more difficult as technology advances even faster.

Some clients won’t answer the phone or voice mail, and are offended if you call unannounced.

Some associates don’t read their email, or if they do, never respond to it.

Others only write me in the wee dark hours of the night.

I’m not talking about  cold-calling prospects.

These are people with whom I transact business. Regularly.

As time goes on, I have to make a more concerted effort to reach whatever comfortable frame of reference the person I’m trying to influence happens to dwell within. Not that I don’t want to; only that the effort eats up more and more of my time than I care to admit to.

This morning I read a news story about VMWare and Microsoft being in a heated battle for the hearts and minds of Corporate Virtualization. To many, I’m sure the story was only of passing value. Having been around the industry long enough to remember when Paul Maritz was a big part of Microsoft and Windows gave me context that perhaps my younger peers don’t have.

I say this as not a good thing or a bad thing – only to point out that in order to be an effective communicator, it’s never enough to know the bare facts of any conversation; in order to be an effective communicator, you have to master the contexts and frames of reference that your target market or customer base carries around with them.

Debugging for the New Blackberry 9800

Hopefully, a helpful hint:

Use the Blackberry SDK version of the 9800 simulator, and not the one that you can download separately from the Blackberry website.

The SDK simulator seems to work fairly well; the separate download version tends to lock up when trying to access embedded web controls.

This may be a very temporary thing. But for now, I can say at least anecdotally this has been my experience.