Saturday, April 16, 2011

How to communicate: state fact before opinion

One serious communication error I see people making quite often is stating their opinion in response to a request for facts, without first providing the requested facts.

To take a recent example, I was mildly interested in the recent possibility of the US government shutting down, basically because I wanted to see what would happen if it did shut down, but on the day of reckoning I unexpectedly had to work so I wasn't following the news. A couple of days later, I realized while I was out and away from the internet that I hadn't checked to see what happened. So I asked the people at the table with me if the US government ever did end up shutting down. (Turns out it didn't, in case you weren't following the story but are now curious.)

"Why would the US government shut down?" asked one person who hadn't been following the story.

"Because the Democrats couldn't get their act together," said another person, who apparently had very strong opinions on the matter.

Now before we even start thinking about the accuracy of this answer, the problem is that it wasn't in any way useful to the questioner. The real question being asked is "Under what circumstances could the US government shut down? That sounds like a big serious thing to happen, and I don't think we have anything equivalent here." (And since we were all Canadians having this conversation in Canada, it should have been obvious to all involved that it was a question of how their government differs from our in this respect.)

So the opinionator not only failed to answer the questioner's question (by providing no information on how the US government might shut down), but also failed in sharing their opinion and convincing the questioner of the validity of their opinion, because the questioner still doesn't have any information about the process as a whole or the what exactly the Democrats did or failed to do.

A more effective and useful communication approach would have been to first describe how, in the US, the government cannot operate if the budget is not approved in time, then give a brief overview of the current situation and the positions of the two parties. Only then is it useful to get into the effectiveness of a particular party's approach.

This would also have the advantage of making the opinionator look knowledgeable and informed, rather than making them look like a comment thread loudmouth as jumping straight to opinion is inclined to do.

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