Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Providing background material in advance of discussions

One place I see for improvement is an actual underuse of email. In meetings when lots of data is provided on some issue, that normally would be better handled by an email in advance (or could be some reporting system or whatever - but an email to look at urls of certain data...) to let people review the data.

Also preceding an urgent face-to-face, cell phone... with background info is often more helpful than trying to talk about stuff that is best digested by someone sitting and thinking. When on the phone or in the presence of others we often have a tendency to need to feel the space with noise/talking and deep thought is not likely, unless you already have deep thoughts on the topic and are just thinking of how to tweak those based on comments.

I see a systemic failure to provide background material in advance of discussions in many organizations.

Posted in response to How can you bring standard work to communication?

Related: Process Thinking: Process Email Addresses - Better Meetings - Effective Communication is Explicit

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