Let’s count to three… emmm… difficult

In my work I regularly deal with documentation produced by other people. That always enriches me with new ideas, with some fresh examples and sometimes (quite often) some funny things can be encountered.

We all can count to three I believe. That is really simple: 1, 2, 3!

Just now I’ve seen the following in one document:

1. Program status. At this stage of development we will use only three type of statuses:

· Green – everything is all right

· Red – some errors, probably related to the books or if the program schedule overlaps with another program. At this stage should be only verification on overlaps.

So, you see, some people count to three like 1,2 and enough

There are other forms of this phenomenon that can be often seen. For example you ask few questions to a person in an email in form: Question1:…, Question2:…., QuestionN. When you get a reply you expect to see Answer1…, …, AnswerN. You open the reply and there is something like @#%Q!%@^W )))

I think we need to fight with such things fiercely.

Wonders of communication or how to lose money day by day

Part of my daily @work activities is a communication with different people.
It can be with people whos primary native language is English, Dutch, Ukrainian or Russian.
So I can choose way:

a) Always try to switch to the person’s native language. It can result in long term that your own command of that language will improve. This approach is nice in 1-to-1 communication. But it really sucks when you need to share information between people who are not in the same country.

b) Optimum.
In group of N person try to find the language that is accepted for the maximal number of people from that group. This never sucks I believe, this always win.

So if I ask you a question: which approach you would chose at your work, a) or b), the answer seems evident.
But nothing perfect in this world.
My current project shows me that people are acting sometimes irrationaly. I have a communication chain that can be reduced to simple schema: Netherlands -> Ukraine. Neither 99% of dutch understand Ukrainian language nor 99% of Ukrainians understand Dutch. But a reasonable amount of both do understand English.
It seems logical to agree (and perceive intuitively) that sharing info using English language will benefit and reduce response time and costs of information processing. Alas, I need to translate again and again. And that is not bad for me, it even makes me understand some NL words, phrases, etc. But that is bas for the customers and their business.

Life is wonderfull, smile