“When in doubt knock ’em out”
The title above comes from the plaque over the old NYC Hells Angels HQ in East Village before they moved to the Bronx last year. It was the motto of their “famous” or “notorious”, depending on your perspective, ex-leader, Vincent (Big Vinny) Girolamo (1948–1979).
This is an example of effective communication, in that Big Vinny’s audience would clearly understand where they were with him at all times.
I find this is not so with many engineers, who have an aversion to verbal communication with customers. Engineers will happily send an email but picking up the phone and talking to the customer, remains outside their comfort zone.
The well-known joke brings the issue into sharp focus…
Have you heard about the lost balloonist?
A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”
The man below says: “Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude.”
“You must be an engineer” says the balloonist.
“I am” replies the man. “How did you know?”
“Well” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but your information is useless, and the fact is I am still lost.”
The man below says “You must be in marketing.”
“I am” replies the balloonist, “but how did you know?”
“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is all my fault.”
I think the negative “customer” relationship between engineering and marketing above can be explained in social psychology terms by the fundamental attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, which is the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else’s behaviour in a given situation rather than considering the situation’s external factors.
It does not explain interpretations of one’s own behaviour, where situational factors are more easily recognized and can thus be taken into consideration.
Conversely, from the other perspective, this error is known as the actor-observer bias, in which people tend to overemphasize the role of a situation in their behaviours and underemphasize the role of their own personalities.
So what does this mean for my communications challenges, as engineers can tend to unresponsive to a social psychology intervention, and find the “Big Vinny” solution of knocking out their customer using their technical knowledge as a weapon, quite effective?
I ask my team members to see things from the customer’s perspective — to pretend they are the customer and “listen” to what they are saying from the customers’ perspective.
Does it work?
Sometimes — but it is usually more effective than trying to “knock ’em out”
