Ramblemuse Touch Points

The starting point for this article is about a miscommunication, one that festered and cost me a friend, a prospective instructor, and turned a person that I’d collaborated with before into a person that I’ll likely never be able to work with again. It was a high cost for a situation in which, initially, there was little difference in goals but a substantial difference in perceptions of where we were. That this occurred in a virtual reality does not seem to me to limit the application of the lessons learned to anyplace in which humans communicate.

I absolutely hate it when communication fails, and will ponder the situation until I understand, at least from what I can perceive, the underlying reasons. This one took me some months before I realized that the argument was entirely about starting perceptions rather than real differences in goals. The final key came when I was at an event with a trivia machine. A question came out that I actually knew the answer to, but before I’d typed a single letter, someone else had typed the entire answer. I may think deeply, but I also think slowly. The final key was about tempo.

Let’s suppose we have a software system that displays pictures of interesting places and gives a text note and location out when “touched”. The location of a place has changed as well as it’s appearance. My assistant has a suitable place-holder picture that could be used until we get a new picture. So, I contacted the owner for a landmark (geo-coordinates) for the new location.

She asks why and when I tell her, the reply is a rapid fire response. One of the lines is “I want to do it myself”. My first mistake is assuming we are at the same place and the second is in thinking that I can respond at this tempo. Thinking that she means updating the system itself, my reply is “You can’t”. It is several lines down when she says, “I want to take the pictures”. I finish the reply I’m on, say “okay” and give the specifications for the pictures. But, by this time, the other person feels like I’m not listening to her. She had started out thinking that she was being denied the right to change her listing picture and I had assumed that she knew she could submit a new picture at any time. We were essentially arguing about a difference that didn’t exist.

It took a while, but I did finally come up with several things I might have done different. The first is not to leap into an argument that is coming at me faster than the tempo I’m at, but to tell the other person that they are faster than I can respond and to ask them to please slow down. The second item is to clarify exactly what the other person is after before I make any response. The third is to make sure that what the other person is assuming and what I am assuming are in sync.

Hindsight is wonderful, but doesn’t undo the damage done. This one I write-off as an unfortunate experience and loss; an experience to gain the wisdom to hopefully not make the same mistakes in the future (a creative person should always seek to make new mistakes). If writing of this experience helps others to also avoid repeating it, so much the better.

Thanks for reading.

“An open ear is the only believable sign of an open heart.” – David Augsburger