THE LOST ART OF LISTENING?

Dell and Kodak*:  Worlds apart in product and positioning, in the past few years, both companies named executives to the post of Chief Listening Officer, otherwise abbreviated as CLO (though the earth doesn’t need another c-suite acronym).

According to news interviews, much of the CLO’s listening centers on customer feedback, and, appropriately enough, conversation mining –whether on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and/or other media – to track information that drives product and strategic direction. 

 Fair enough. 

 The art of listening, though, is frequently missing within other business functions, and within our individual communities. Personally?  We hesitate to say how long it’s been since we sat down, shut our mouths, and just listened to our partners and friends.   Even for 15 minutes.   It might be due to our distracted-ness or to a psychological need to express ourselves or to, quite simply, take over a conversation. 

 Professionally?  Though we do listen, it’s fair to say we’re often thinking about three things at a time, as inveterate multi-taskers.  Within our roles as communicators and marketers and designers, working inside a company or as consultants, listening isn’t always embedded in our everyday activities.  After all, we gotta get things done.  And listening takes time.

Here’s the other dirty secret:  Listening is hard.  It requires submerging the ego and paying 150 percent attention to another human being(s) for an undetermined amount of time.  It also demands that we clear our minds, delete lingering perceptions, and become open to the listening content. 

To be honest, listening is not taught in schools.  Nor do many businesses reward us for being quiet and thoughtful, for taking stock of the various dialogues we participate in. It would be a true accomplishment if more companies featured “listening” as one of their values, let alone appointed CLOs.  Imagine:  With true listeners onboard, would there be reason to document performance?  To worry about employee engagement?   To fret that clients don’t understand us?  To plan for constant customer turnover? 

Mom knew best:  It’s all about two ears and one mouth.   

*In 2012, Kodak’s CLO joined a social media agency.

SYMBOLOGY 101

Confession:  Visual design professionals are not the only ones who love symbols and icons.

 To them (and to us), it’s not just filler or decoration.  Nor is it a way of illustrating words to emphasize points.

 Instead, symbols and their iconographic relatives (also known as infographics) connect meaning and the mind.  They break up the pattern of words, singularly, so we notice and absorb quickly – in many cases, much more speedily than reading a page.  They also act as translators for those unfamiliar with a particular jargon or culture.

 What started us thinking about the power of symbols were the subtle and blatant changes in Bloomberg Businessweek and stalwart Time magazine articles.  To depict the changes in the new healthcare law, for instance, Time’s designers segmented the impacts by group – single, newly married, family, senior et al. – and then bulleted those changes in words, with illustrations.  BBW grabbed us with the headline “how not to embarrass yourself in Germany,” featuring boxes, with almost universal symbols (taxi meter, water, utensils), and one or two sentences about what to/not to do in different situations, like taking cabs, drinking, and eating.  Now every print pub’s doing it, from heavy-on-the-pictures Martha Stewart Living to heavy-on-the-text New York magazine.

 What magazines have learned is that Internet-raised readers prefer bits and bytes and symbols as shorthand for communications.  Other industries and professions embrace icons:  CPG marketers use them consistently.  So do architects and planners, among many others.  [And don’t forget graffiti artists.]

 Icons make it easier for us to flag specific topics – and, visually, identify the level of attention needed.  In other words, guiding us about work behaviors and activities.  Instead of all-caps directions in the subject line, images are inserted within copy.  Inside manuals, we turn to pages we need immediately through colorizing and picturing. 

 Some of our favorite worktime actions lend themselves to visuals: 

•       For your information
•       Deadline nearing
•       Mark your calendar
•       Be IT secure
•       @home

 Why not add yours?  Or other icons you’ve adopted?  Words, we know, will never be replaced.  It is time, though, to deliver a greater, more immediate impact when words combine with symbols.  

POPULAR PHASES WE'D LIKE TO CHANGE #2

Technology is our life.

It invades – er, pervades – so much of our selves that being stranded on the proverbial desert isle sans our Blackberries and iPhones would force us to rethink who we are.  IT allows us to check trends, respond instantly via texting or IM’ing, rsvp to clients and customers, strategize through communities of interest, and just plain do our work.

Yet when we hear or read news about the next “killer app,” we cringe. 

Originally, the phrase referred to any computer program that instantly proved its value (in terms of sales, usually).  PageMaker and Adobe, for two, earned that moniker.  So did Pokemon and the Halo video game franchise.

Other personal “apps” emerge.  In many colleagues’ lives, the iPhone’s touch screen rules.  For me?  thesaurus.com and AdAge’s online edition.

When we really think about it, all these examples are, pure and simple, tools that help us succeed.  Maybe at one time, before copycat-ism shortened the life of innovations to one nano-second, killer apps existed.  Now, Groupon has been circumvented by LivingSocial, opentable.com, and any number of local e-businesses.  The iPad is spawning imitators (and good ones, at that) by the day. One site, one product, one service might have served us well in the past.  No way today.

We’re also objecting to the phrase for deeper reasons. 

One, killer apps over-emphasize the influence of technology.  After all, we find killer apps in other industries, like pop-up shops for retailers.  Or the growing call for good greens, from farmers’ markets to companies’ products. 

Two, the use of killer apps obscures the cry for just plain communications.   Too much attention is being paid to screens and animation.  Too little, to the needs of the folks around us.  When a face-to-face request is usurped in favor of email exchanges and PowerPoints, when we “3-3-7” an important voicemail because there’s another urgent priority, when our eyes peek at business smartphones during a video/audio team meeting, it’s time to give killer apps a rest for a while.

Hmmm.  How about talk-wares?

READING, WRITING … AND ANALYTICS

Consider this the ultimate oxymoron.

 More and more MBA students are going back to school – in writing.  According to news reports, corporate employers complain that recent grads can’t present ideas, engage audiences, or summarize research implications succinctly. 

The culprit?  Many people and trends could be blamed, from today’s heavy reliance on e-communications to light (or no) high school writing instruction.  Test administrators even point to the increasing number of international exam applicants, for whom English might not be a first language.

One instant remedy, it seems, is being shouldered by the b-schools.  Some offer writing coaches, who help individual students and/or partner with professors to double-grade papers.  Others have launched mandatory writing courses. 

Other cures come from business.  Consulting firms carefully supervise proposals penned by new hires.  Quite a few financial institutions rigorously monitor client emails, ensuring that no comma is out of place. 

 Unfortunately, these are short-term solutions.  Just because PowerPoint data have been reduced to essentials in one presentation doesn’t mean the next set of slides will be pithy and informative.  Toggling between friendly texting and straightforward emailing might trip up a junior employee.  And proposal writing, with its tendency to lean to the obfuscatory (!), definitely requires some serious educational time.

 Where else to turn?  Clearly, the U.S. educational system is under construction.  So don’t expect immediate help there.  Many undergrad and graduate deans are re-working the curricula, with help of faculty, to help students succeed.  That, too, won’t happen yesterday. 

 Here are our two cents, especially relevant for we who transform the stunningly complex into the compellingly simple: 

 Many of us are regular volunteers, often as tutors or as mentors for different non-profits.  All good.  All worthwhile.  So why not offer to train and coach business communications … at work?  Sure, it adds to our responsibilities.  It’s not necessarily part of our job description.  Yet teaching colleagues how to use language and design to reach business goals can fulfill our desires to pay back while enhancing our employers’ bottom lines.

 It’s the ultimate, no-arguments-accepted, reading and writing analytic.