6

Communicating

One thing that distinguishes humans from the other species on Earth is our ability to communicate in a variety of ways. Most animals communicate with other members of their species—and sometimes with potential predators or prey. They have mechanisms to attract mates, warn potential enemies, or signal danger. They may communicate through sounds, movements, or even chemical trails.

But humans have a complex language that allows us to add new words at will to name objects, actions, and concepts as our information environment changes. We are skilled at metaphor and analogy, permitting us to extend the meanings of words to cover new situations. We have developed a variety of technologies for communicating with one another even when we aren’t in the same place at the same time. Indeed, this book allows me to share my knowledge with you across time and space.

Language is central to human nature. We learn our native language just by being born into a particular culture. If it’s an environment in which multiple languages are spoken, we learn them all and use them in different contexts. Despite the importance of language to everything we do, we recognize that not everyone is a good communicator. Some people are more skilled at conveying information clearly or using language to motivate others.

To succeed in the workplace, you must master the art of sharing information across a variety of modalities, including email, text, writing, and speech. In this chapter, I explore some key aspects of communication and look at ways to recognize your weaknesses and to improve as a communicator.

What Is Communication?

People’s ability to communicate with one another evolved in an environment in which small numbers of native speakers of the same language spoke face-to-face in real time. As the psycholinguist Herb Clark points out, the further we get from this ideal, the harder it is to communicate effectively.

Advances in technology allow you to communicate with people from around the globe who grew up speaking different languages. You can be far away and unable to see your conversation partners. You can communicate across time through writing—in which case your conversation partners cannot hear you or respond immediately to what you’ve said. Each deviation from the ideal creates opportunities for miscommunication.

The ideal form of communication works so well because it facilitates a coordinated effort between speaker and hearer. You may think that the way conversation works is that a speaker has an idea and translates it into sentences. The hearer deconstructs those sentences into the ideas the speaker presumably intended and then formulates a message to be sent back to the speaker.

At an abstract level, this sounds reasonable. Certainly, when you read dialogue in a novel, conversations play out that way. But real dialogues are much more complicated. For one thing, the hearer plays an active part in the conversation. To see the truth of that, notice what you’re doing next time you’re in a conversation and someone else is talking. By looking at the speaker, you communicate that you’re paying attention to what is being said. Nodding indicates that you understand and generally agree with it. If you suddenly have something to say, you may change your posture to signal that you’d like a turn in the conversation.

Speakers are usually sensitive to what hearers are doing. If you’re talking and your conversation partner suddenly looks quizzical or angry, you stop to figure out what’s wrong. You try to repair misunderstandings as quickly as possible to ensure that the conversation doesn’t get derailed.

The way you talk also takes into account a lot of the knowledge that you believe you share with your conversation partner. In general, your speech obeys the given-new convention. That is, you refer to something you assume the hearer will understand and then provide a new piece of information that adds to their knowledge. If you say, “Raul is now manager of the marketing team,” you assume that your conversation partner knows who Raul is but not that he has been promoted. If you misestimate the knowledge of your conversation partners, you’re likely to confuse them by referring to things they don’t know or bore them by providing information they already have.

Another aspect of language to consider is that we don’t say everything we want to say directly. We regularly use many conventions that we expect other people to understand. For example, the most direct way to get someone to do something for you is to issue a command, such as “Make these copies for me.” But that can sound harsh to native speakers of English in the United States, so we often phrase a request as a question: “Would you make these copies for me?” The intent is still a directive; you don’t expect the person to say no. But you’re acknowledging their ability to act as they choose by stating your request indirectly.

These are just a few of the many things that can cause your conversations to fail. In this chapter, I explore a few common communication problems and talk about how to avoid them.

Communicating Effectively in Different Modes

Perhaps the most important point of this brief overview of communication is that its ideal form is one that we engage in less and less often in the workplace. For a number of reasons, much of our face-to-face communication has been replaced by emails, texts, and instant messages punctuated with the occasional phone call or video conference. Some small conversations and group meetings still occur, but they’re no longer the most frequent way of passing on information.

To be a good communicator, you must know the limitations of the modes you’re using so that you can minimize potential problems. Thinking through these limitations may lead you to shift your strategy away from some modes and toward others—at least in some circumstances. I’ll start with a discussion of text-based communication and then turn to phone and video conferencing (such as Skype). In the next section, I’ll focus on meetings.

Text Communication

In many organizations, you have several options for text-based communications. You probably get a lot of emails each day. Some are addressed directly to you, some are group discussions, and some are memos and newsletters circulated to a very large number of people (spam). You may have a text messaging system on your phone or an instant messaging system on a device that you’re expected to monitor and use. You may be part of a social network or message-board site or app where articles and discussions are posted for comment.

Three communication problems can arise when you communicate too often with text. First, asking for clarification by email can be difficult, leading to miscommunication. Second, whatever back-and-forth is necessary to clarify something may actually take more time via text than in person. Third, establishing the right tone can be challenging, making it hard to maintain relationships. Email and instant messages can also be a source of distraction—I’ll return to that issue in chapter 7.

Another problem with text is that you may misestimate the knowledge you share with someone else. You might use an unfamiliar word or jargon term. You might refer to things the other person doesn’t know about in ways that cause confusion. Rajesh told me about an email in which a colleague asked him to look at “the report” and fix any errors. Unfortunately, the report that Rajesh thought his colleague was referring to was a different one. As a result, he spent a morning working on something his colleague wasn’t interested in.

You might think that Rajesh could have asked for clarification up front. But he was relatively sure he knew which report was meant. And even if he had some reservations, sending an email could have delayed the process significantly, because Rajesh was in India, while his colleague was in New York. Rather than take the time to clarify, he forged ahead.

In face-to-face communication, we often negotiate meanings. Consider this unremarkable snippet of dialogue:

A: Have you heard from Sydney?

B: Sydney from marketing?

A: No, our office in Australia.

B: Ah, not yet. I’m expecting an email from them tonight.

In the span of just moments, an ambiguous word (Sydney) was clarified, and the question was answered. This dialogue would occupy about ten seconds of someone’s time during the day unless it happened via email—in which case, a few hours might elapse between messages. And messages can take longer to process if you have to read back through the thread to remember what was going on in the conversation.

In many offices, people have developed the habit of communicating with most of their colleagues using text. It appears easier, because you don’t have to interrupt what they’re doing—they can check their emails or texts when it’s convenient. But that can actually waste a lot of time, particularly when a seemingly simple request requires a number of turns to resolve.

For greater efficiency, try dealing with simple requests either in person or on the phone. We’ve fallen out of the habit of poking our head in on colleagues or setting up a quick chat. But it’s amazing how much time you can save by talking to people in person for small things. And as your colleagues learn that when you say you need a minute of their time, you mean that literally, they become more willing to engage in a quick chat or phone call.

Having more conversations and fewer text interactions can also assist in establishing the right tone. Stacy told me that she had recently started a new job working remotely. Her supervisor said that people in the office had complaints about requests she had made to move projects forward. Stacy had never had friction with colleagues before; she realized that a big part of the problem was that most of her interactions with the rest of the office were by email.

That’s not surprising. If you ask someone to make copies for you in person, you can convey how much you appreciate their efforts by the way you phrase the question, your tone of voice, and the look on your face. Text allows you to choose your phrasing, but your tone and facial expression are missing (even when you add emojis to what you write). As a result, a simple “Please make these copies for me” can sound like a command in an email. Over time, you may get a reputation for being demanding or difficult.

In general, spending some time with colleagues is valuable, even if the bulk of your interactions are by text. Face time helps people get to know you better, which makes their evaluations of what you say more charitable. Your social brain reacts better to people you know than to people you don’t, so developing relationships with colleagues will smooth your ability to communicate with them by text. When they know you, they can hear your voice behind the text.

Communication at a Distance

Technology also supports real-time communication at a distance. Obviously, the phone lets you talk with people who aren’t in the room with you. Video conferencing software like Skype, Google Hangouts, and Zoom supports simultaneous video and audio.

These modes of communication provide a lot more information than text alone does. You can hear someone’s tone of voice. You can get information that signals people’s interest or excitement. Consider the difference between these two exchanges:

A: Would you join the hiring committee?

B: Sure.

A: Would you join the hiring committee?

B: [Long pause] Sure.

Even if the tone of voice is the same, the pause communicates uncertainty.

With video conferencing tools, you can see the people you’re speaking to. Facial expressions can communicate interest, irony, sarcasm, or boredom. Video also permits a shared environment. When people share a computer screen or a slide deck, they are anchoring the discussion in something that everyone in the conversation can see. The cursor lets them point to items in the environment—“this one” or “here.”

Where these forms of communication create the most difficulty is in small-group settings such as conference calls. Conversation in a shared environment is a coordinated dance. When one person is speaking, everyone else looks at them. When someone else in the group wants to contribute, they will often call attention to themselves to indicate that. The speaker then looks directly at them and cedes the floor. And when people are in a shared environment, it’s easy to see when someone isn’t participating and give them an opportunity to do so.

Phone and video conferencing make this process harder. People can’t gracefully indicate that they’d like to speak, and handing over the floor is challenging for the speaker. As a result, awkward pauses often occur when someone finishes speaking, or several people jump in at the same time. People who don’t tend to participate in group conversations can easily fade into the background—particularly on conference calls, where they have no visual cues.

When you’re leading a conference call or a video conference, try to help move the conversation along. Keep track of times when several people start to speak and make sure they all have a chance to contribute before the conversation progresses too far. Keep a list of everyone in attendance and elicit comments from people who haven’t said much. Running a conference call or video conference is not like having a group conversation in a common space. You have to more deliberately keep track of who has spoken and be more mindful of the dynamics of the meeting. Things that come naturally when you’re working with others in the same space may require more effort.

Meetings

No element of work life is more common or more maligned than meetings. We get together in groups for many reasons, among them to develop new ideas, share plans, solve problems, coordinate projects, and reach consensus. Meetings can be a productive way to get work done, but many times they are not. One problem is that often a few people tend to dominate what’s said. A second is that key things may go unsaid. A third is that meetings are frequently not organized around clear goals that can be accomplished by getting a group together.

The Dominator

The Pareto principle states that 80 percent of any outcome typically comes from only 20 percent of the potential causes. This rule may be particularly apt with regard to meetings. It always seems that 80 percent of the comments are made by 20 percent of the attendees.

That happens for several reasons. Not everyone in the meeting has the expertise—the cognitive brain—needed to participate fully on every topic. So some people must necessarily listen to the proceedings rather than contribute.

Two personality characteristics—the motivational brain—drive people to engage in meetings. First, extraversion (another member of the big five) reflects how much people like to be the center of attention in social situations. Extraverts in a meeting enjoy the social give-and-take and are more likely than introverts to speak. Second, narcissism makes some people believe that they’re superior to those around them, who ought to pay attention to what they say. Narcissists will speak early and often at meetings but usually don’t listen to what others—particularly those who disagree with them—have to say.

Your social brain can help you learn good meeting behavior. If you pay attention to what other people do in meetings, you’ll get a sense of how to contribute. Watching the reactions of others as you speak is helpful. If they look attentive, you’re probably contributing something of value without going on too long. If they look away or whisper to one another, you’re probably saying too much. It’s important to speak up when you have something to say (I’ll take that up again in the next section), but you want to be sure not to speak more often than everyone else. If you think you might be dominating, try recording a meeting you attend (with permission from the other participants, of course) and listen to your contributions later. Was what you were saying on topic? Did you move the conversation forward? Did you remain concise?

It’s hard to speak in sound bites, but that’s a valuable skill to learn, because people are likely to remember sound bites and use them throughout the rest of the conversation. A sound bite need not oversimplify the topic, but it should briefly state your main point. Spend some time looking over the meeting agenda in advance and think about some of the key topics. Write down your thoughts ahead of time and see if you can find some clear phrases to use in discussing them.

A key reason people drone on in meetings is that they have something to say but haven’t quite figured out how to articulate it. So they take the floor and speak until they figure out a way to phrase their intended point. You frequently have to respond spontaneously in a meeting, choosing the words to express a thought in real time. The more you practice crafting pithy ways to phrase what you’re thinking, the better able you’ll be to do that in the moment.

Pay attention to how much time you take when you speak in a meeting. If you spend more than a minute on a given turn, you’re probably going on too long. If you speak for several minutes, you’re probably making several points—so if you want people to respond to the things you’re saying, focus on one or perhaps two issues at a time. Otherwise, most of what you say will get lost. Furthermore, if you get a reputation for droning on in meetings, people may tune you out entirely, severely diminishing your impact.

Finally, a cardinal sin in meetings is “me-too-ing,” whereby one person makes an important point, and then several other people take the floor to say essentially the same thing (perhaps in other words). Before you raise your hand in a meeting, ask yourself whether you have something new to contribute. If someone offers what appears to be an unpopular opinion with which you agree, you ought to speak in support, but that can be done quickly. Avoid the temptation to take a full turn just to tread the same ground walked on by previous speakers. And be particularly mindful of repeating a point made by someone else without acknowledging who said it first in the meeting. A common observation is that more powerful people will repeat a point made by a less powerful person in the room and ultimately get credit for someone else’s idea.

To be an effective communicator in meetings, avoid dominating the proceedings. When you’re leading a meeting, keep it flowing, even if you have one or more dominators in the room. At the end of this discussion of meetings, I’ll talk about strategies for leading effective ones and explore some ways to tame people who might otherwise take over.

The Things That Go Unsaid

Several years ago, when I was consulting for a large company, I sat in on a two-hour meeting in which an organizational leader facilitated a discussion about a new initiative under development. Many people took turns, and a few friendly amendments were added to the proposal. As we were walking out, I stood behind two midlevel managers. One leaned over to the other and offered several reasons why the plan was misguided. A few of the points he made deserved consideration and discussion. Unfortunately, none of them had been made during the meeting, when they might have influenced consideration of the proposal.

When organizations develop new initiatives, their plans are only as good as the collective knowledge of the individuals who work for them. Meetings are one of the ways we attempt to tap that knowledge. But people encounter barriers to speaking up and sharing their expertise.

Some organizations simply don’t want dissenting opinions (no matter how much they may say they do). Lena worked for a nonprofit that focuses on public school students. The organization has a strong donor base and a powerful mission. Like any other organization, it had some programs that worked well and some that needed improvement. The leadership was quick to tout the great things it did, and claimed to encourage staff members to suggest programming improvements. Unfortunately, no action was ever taken on any of Lena’s suggestions. She stopped giving feedback and eventually left to work for an organization that was more receptive to her ideas.

You must judge by the actions of the people in management whether they are truly interested in suggestions for making the organization better. When you find yourself in a position of some authority, it’s important to listen to people’s recommendations and to follow up later to let them know what if any action has been taken.

If you want truly constructive criticism of new ideas, though, it’s also important to give people time to think about their concerns prior to a meeting. You can circulate proposals in advance and encourage people to send in comments. You might even offer to create an anonymized list of comments in case some people are concerned that they might get a reputation for being contrary.

Develop strategies for providing your own constructive feedback on proposals. Early on in your tenure at an organization, you may not feel comfortable voicing your views in group meetings. If so, reach out to a trusted colleague or your supervisor to discuss your thoughts. Ask for advice about the most appropriate way within the culture of the organization to provide your comments so that you can become more comfortable making them in a group setting as well as in one-on-one meetings.

Designing Your Meetings Backward

The success of a meeting is crucially determined by its structure. Early in your career, you may not have many opportunities to run meetings of your own. That’s a great time to put your social brain to work and watch how the people you admire set up their meetings. In this section, I present a few suggestions for maximizing the value of meetings you run.

The most important thing you can do when setting up a meeting is engage in what educators call backward design. Whenever you create an experience for other people—whether it’s a course, a lecture, or a meeting—start by thinking about the end goal. What do you want to accomplish? How do you want the participants to be different at the end of the experience from the way they were before it began? Then focus all your efforts on achieving that goal.

The work starts with deciding who should attend the meeting. You need people with expertise that will be relevant to solving any problems that must be addressed. You need stakeholders who may have to approve the results of the meeting. Identify individuals who should stay in the loop on developments related to what will be discussed.

Also, think about who doesn’t need to be there. The dynamics of a meeting change a lot as it gets larger. When three people are working together, everyone participates. As the number grows, it becomes easier for some people to disappear. By the time ten people are in the room, there’s a good chance that several of them will say nothing during the meeting. If twenty or more are there, the meeting is likely to become a series of presentations rather than a dynamic discussion.

Next, construct a clear agenda. Concentrate on discussions and activities that will help achieve the goal. Put together a timeline to ensure that you stay on track and complete the items on the agenda. It’s common to spend a lot of time on the first few items and rush through the rest.

I’ve served on a large university-wide committee whose meetings are regularly attended by many of the top-level administrators. With that much expertise in the room, it would be great to work on important problems facing the institution—and invariably some of those are on the agenda. However, the meeting is often structured to start with a number of summaries of written reports. We frequently don’t get to the important discussion topics until just a few minutes before the meeting adjourns. This gathering would be much more effective if we began with the discussion topics and saved the reports for the second half, because attendees could read them over later if there wasn’t enough time for oral summaries. Indeed, this committee has recently started circulating reports and skipping the in-person recitation of the information unless there is time after having discussions that take advantage of the talent in the room.

Before the meeting starts, circulate copies of any documents you want people to look at. Remind them a couple of times to review the materials so that the discussion can be productive. Nothing stalls a meeting as much as having to summarize documents for one or two people who came poorly prepared.

When you run meetings, be careful not to dominate. You can give a brief opening statement, but get on to the important agenda items quickly, and let everyone participate. If you know there’s a dominator in the meeting, consider ways to ensure that everyone gets a turn. You might go around the room and give everyone a chance to speak, or ask a few people in advance to prepare some things to say.

Finally, when the meeting is over, send everyone a summary of what happened and highlight the key action items. This summary will be particularly helpful if others remember the meeting differently. Invite people to comment on your summary, because they may point out things you missed. You want to help meeting participants engage their motivational brains, so if a particular person needs to follow up on something, send them a reminder soon after the meeting with specific instructions and a date for completion.

If you get a reputation for running good and productive meetings, you’ll be noticed and will be given more opportunities to do interesting projects.

Hard Conversations

Even if you’re a perfectly clear communicator, there are conversations you don’t want to have. For example, in chapter 5, I pointed out that you have to admit what you don’t know before you can learn new things. But letting someone else know the limitations of your knowledge and skills can be hard—particularly if you suffer from imposter syndrome.

In general, difficult conversations take place in one of three situations. The first is when you have to reveal something about yourself that you would rather other people not know. The second is when you have to deliver bad news. The third is when you have to resolve a conflict of interest with another person. Handling these conversations well requires practice.

The first of the three is the most straightforward. There is a simple rule here: any work-related piece of information about yourself that other people don’t know and that you believe would reflect badly on you if they knew is something you should try to tell people as quickly as possible.

For example, if you make a mistake at work, you should own up to it immediately and then try to fix it. Successful work relationships are built on trust. You might think that you undermine that trust by admitting a mistake. But as I noted in chapter 5, managers are likely to trust you more if you own your mistakes right away than if you hide them. The sooner you admit a mistake and work to fix it, the less damage that mistake will cause. If you hide an error, you may compound its influence, because then nobody is working to repair it.

That doesn’t mean it will be comfortable to admit mistakes. It will not. You may be embarrassed. In the moment, you may elicit a bad reaction from the person you tell. You may even get in trouble at work (though as I discuss in chapter 8, healthy organizations don’t punish errors). However, in the long run, you’re likely to learn more and to get more responsibility faster if you admit your mistakes and improve yourself than if you do not.

The second type of difficult conversation—delivering bad news—involves telling someone something they don’t want to hear. As a result, despite your best efforts, they may not like you very much. Another one of the big five personality characteristics is agreeableness, which reflects your motivation to be liked by other people. The more agreeable you are, the harder it is to deliver bad news, and even if you aren’t high in agreeableness, you probably don’t relish doing so. You will dread even having the conversation. And when you finally get around to speaking, you may have trouble stating the news directly.

When you have to deliver bad news, do so in as constructive a way as possible. Sal is a supervisor with several direct reports. An employee who had worked for him for a year had not met expectations in her job. He had to tell her that he was putting her on probation. He started out by saying that he had to give some bad news. Then he went through the job criteria on which his employee had been unsatisfactory and said that he needed to put her on probation, describing exactly what that meant. Next he worked to frame this bad news as an opportunity. He reiterated that his company doesn’t hire anyone it doesn’t want to see succeed. He let her know what resources were available to help her improve her performance and told her that he was available to answer questions.

Sal clearly stated the bad news and what led to the negative evaluation. Critically, though, he made the conversation as productive as possible by highlighting the way forward rather than dwelling on the past.

The importance of being clear, empathetic, and productive is echoed in a story I was told by John Wright from the company Eagle’s Flight. He said one of the most difficult lessons he had to learn as a leader was to provide clear and honest feedback to employees whose performance needed to improve. By being frank about both what was wrong and how to improve, he increased the number of opportunities he had to celebrate people’s later accomplishments. The pain of difficult conversations was ultimately rewarded with the joy of sharing his people’s success.

A related kind of bad news occurs when you have to deny a request. Marc Musick, a senior associate dean at the University of Texas, was addressing a group of emerging leaders. He talked about how he deals with situations in which he has to reject a request from a department. He said that he always treats these rejections as part of a problem-solving process: He lets the people making the request know that he cannot do exactly what they ask but presents alternatives that may help them achieve their goals. Then he offers to work with them to pursue those options.

Sometimes the bad news you have to deliver involves someone’s having done something that violates a policy or requires correction. Lucienne had an employee who was causing disruption in her work group by getting angry and yelling whenever something went wrong. The first step she took toward having a productive discussion with him was to focus on his verifiable actions and talk about how people reacted to his outbursts.

It’s tempting when discussing the actions of other people to slip into talk about their motives. That can make them defensive, because they may disagree with your characterization of the reasons behind their behavior. If you focus instead on what happened and how others reacted, you help avoid defensiveness. You can ask people to talk about why they acted as they did and then move to a discussion about how they might treat similar circumstances differently in the future.

Lucienne was able to get her employee to talk about his frustration with certain situations, and they worked out a plan for him to take a brief walk when he found himself unable to interact well with colleagues. During that walk, he would think about what he wanted to communicate about the situation and how to re-engage with his colleagues when he returned to their shared space.

The most difficult conversations occur when there’s a conflict of interest between parties. That requires some negotiation or other method for resolving a dispute, because both parties cannot get what they want.

Conflicts of interest require the same skills we explored in chapter 4 when talking about negotiating job offers. When the conflict is serious, you must start by making sure you understand as much as possible about what the other person wants and why. Then, instead of fighting over whose request is more deserving of fulfillment, treat the conversation as a problem-solving exercise. Are there hidden resources that might allow one or both of you to get what you want in a different way? Is it possible to trade off in some way, such that one gets what they want right now and the other gets what they want the next time a conflict comes up?

This approach works particularly well when resolving conflicts with colleagues. There will inevitably be times when you and your colleagues want different things. Finding ways to work together for the good of the organization is crucial. In the long run, the most successful people are those who are most adept at creating novel solutions when resources are limited.

If your conflict with a colleague appears to be intractable, consider getting a neutral third party to mediate. Even when you adopt a problem-solving mindset for negotiations, the other party may have a hard time trusting you. In that case, it can be helpful for someone else to step in and work with the two of you to reach a resolution. Some companies even have an ombudsperson who mediates conflicts.

What It Means When You Think Communication Is Bad at Work

Employee engagement surveys have become a common way to assess the health of an organization. These surveys explore many aspects of the work environment, including salary, satisfaction with job duties, happiness with the management team, and effectiveness of organizational communications.

Often, one of the first big signs that an organization is having trouble is that employees give it low marks on communication. In response, organizations naturally try to improve how they communicate with employees. A common solution is to develop a newsletter or add mass emails to alert people about new initiatives. Although these changes are made with the best of intentions, they often fail to address the underlying problem, because the frequency or clarity of communications was not really what led to low marks on the survey.

Usually, what people really mean when they complain about communication is that in some instances they didn’t have information they needed or wanted at a particular time. That may happen because the organization doesn’t communicate frequently enough or clearly enough, but often it reflects other issues. The organization’s decision-making process may not involve as many people as employees would like. People within the organization may disagree about the roles particular employees play, so one person doesn’t know what information another person needs.

Several years ago, I worked with an academic group in which many employees complained that communication from management was poor. After extensive discussions, one of them pointed out that her job description was vague, so she was rarely certain which tasks she was supposed to take on and which to delegate to others. She expected her supervisor to be clearer about what jobs she was supposed to do. Her supervisor, meanwhile, believed that this employee understood which responsibilities were hers. So the fundamental problem was less about communication than about organizational structure and the clarity of people’s roles.

Practically speaking, then, complaints about communication signal that people feel they aren’t being informed of things they should know. Determining why they aren’t getting that information requires additional work. It’s important to start with specific cases in which someone failed to get needed information and then explore how information is normally transmitted in order to evaluate what actually needs to be done to fix the problem.