In her interview in The Knowledge Project Ep. #84, Jennifer Garvey Berger shared the idea that there are 3 types of listening: Listening to fix Listening to win Listening to learn Win: I think of this as the most surface-level listening. Dismissive. You listen in order to collect just enough data that you can use…
Category: Communication
Welcome to the fifth part of Practical Phrases and Scripts for Non-Native English Speakers Working in Tech. This time I will share with you a framework and checklist you can use to write effective business emails. Grab attention, get the action or information you need, and do it swiftly — saving your and other people’s…
Perfect communication is HARD. We can only make it less bad. We can communicate better by fixing one bad practice at a time. In the first part of this series, we dissected the belly of modern communication and got to know the Pieces. Then in the second part, I looked at how they relate with…
Perfect communication is HARD. We can only make it less bad. We can communicate better by fixing one bad practice at a time. In the first part of this series, we dissected the belly of modern communication and got to know the Pieces. Then in the second part, I looked at how they relate with…
In the first part of this series, I tried to dissect the belly of modern communication and shared the Whats. Then in the second part, I looked at how they relate with each other and what Rules we can derive from them. Now let’s see what steps we can take to ensure we are communicating…
The last time we looked at building blocks of a communication: the Whats. Or you can think of them as the nodes, the Data Structures. This time let’s look at the mechanics, how they relate with each other, and see what Rules we can extract from them. To refresh our minds, here are the different…
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. — Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer I’d like to modify that into…. God, grant me the serenity to mute Slack notifications, courage to reject meetings I didn’t schedule, and wisdom…
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash Yesterday things got heated on one Jira ticket between an Account Manager (AM) and a Presales Engineer (PE). First a bit of a context. I lead and manage the Solutions Architecture team for a data acquisition and data engineering services firm. On a day to day basis, people…
Why messages don’t stick? The main problem is the “Curse of Knowledge”. The person sharing the idea has insider information that others don’t, so they have already framed the problem and understand its relevance. Six principles of stickiness: Simple. What’s your point? Say it. And shut up. Unexpected. Violate people’s expectations. Engage people’s curiosity over…
How can we apply the SUCCESS Framework presented in Made to Stick and STEPPS presented in Contagious (summarised here) to the global crisis started by COVID-19? Global event filled with abstract ideas, invisible threats, and uncertainties. We are in deep shit partly because it’s difficult for us to properly grasp the scale and magnitude of…