The time cost of poor communication
What I learned about communication from commuting into London every day …
Two things I hate: Train delays and boring Powerpoint presentations. They both waste time, and not in an unrelated way, as I want to show.
The metaphor of time as a scarce resource is a well integrated part of the Western worldview – we don’t just talk about how we waste time, but how we save time, spend time, how time runs out, how some time can be set aside, how to invest time profitably and so on. In business, of course, buying and selling time is literally what happens whenever you employ someone. Your employees’ time becomes another scarce resource you use to realise the vision of the business.
By way of analogy, next time you’re on a busy platform waiting for a delayed train, notice how many other people there are. If there’s, say, sixty people on the platform and the train has a ten minute delay then that’s a total of ten hours worth of time that’s been wasted. If the same train calls at another ten stations to pick up a similar number of commuters, then you have three full weeks’ worth of working time taken out of the economy.
Here’s my point: What quantity is the driver of the train thinking of – the ten minutes or the three weeks? Next time you’re creating your Powerpoint deck, ask yourself the same question. What is the cost to the business of people not understanding what you’re saying? Of not seeing your strategy? Of not knowing how the business actually works? Of not having the same vocabulary? Clarifying exactly what you mean and figuring out how to express it in layman’s terms is obviously a good use of time. But somehow it often doesn’t feel like it when you’re already in a rush.
So next time you’re tempted just to cut and paste together bits and pieces from other presentations and wing it on the day, try to think not just in terms of the immediate time you’re saving as an individual, but the compound time of all the audience members you’ll be wasting.
