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I received the following from a friend, looking for anecdote of technical
communication at its worst. Can anyone help? respond either to me or you
can email my friend directly. Thanks!
Among the interesting events of the spring: I've been asked to give a
1/2 day seminar on "communicating with non-technical people" at the
Usenix/LargeSystems Administrators' conference this September. I expect
that this will belots of fun to put together AND to deliver... and even
more fun if I have really juicy examples of good and bad communication.
I'm collecting examples. Do you have any old e-mail or paper memos
about? How about stories about presentations gone awry? Hallway
conversations with catastrophic results? Especially look for those
where the marketeer or manager missed the technical point entirely, or
the technician/engineer didn't get the management directive, or where
the support specialist completely muffed the presentation through
stepping all over the customer's concerns...
If you have examples of "cross-cultural" communication that worked, I'd
like to see those, too.
Naturally, I will use this material only as you allow: changing
headers, names,dates, and the like to disguise the source. But I know
that the *very* technical audience would prefer me to use real-world
examples.
And I didn't keep the memos from my previous employment. THEY were
certainly examples of mis-communication!
Please feel free to pass on this request to your colleagues. I'll
accept e-mail or paper until roughly August 1, or if you want to phone,
I'll take good notes.
Thanks in advance for any juicy ones.
- Maurita
e-mail: 75456 -dot- 1625 -at- compuserve -dot- com (CIS 76460,1625)
US mail: Expert Innovations
258 Sugar Road
Bolton, MA 01740
