Solving Bottlenecks using Better Communication

I had an interesting conversation today with a member of one of my teams who was describing the challenge of having to translate a tricky business use case to another team member who then had to explain how to solve the problem to our legal counsel.

It was a non standard use of vendor that was using Iguana for one off data migrations. The challenge was to come up with licensing model that could allow us to share the value and then to express that in legal language.

How does one solve this communication bottleneck?

To solve this problem requires drawing down and combining concepts from:

• Technical (what is actually being done)

• Business (what the value is and negotiating how we share in it)

• Legal (how do express this in legal language)

• Logistical/operational (how to have a practical process of measuring and collecting license revenue)

So how does one solve this bottleneck? The challenge is carrying the message forward in a way which made sense to find the legal solution of phrasing this business case in the contract.

For me this is why kindly encouraging breadth in our perspectives has huge value. It’s comes back to thinking about perspectives and asking the question - why does it seem difficult to explain this concept to a member of my team?

To me the problem most likely can solved by understanding why it takes longer to explain some concepts is that they are not starting with a same set of concepts you already have. By showing kindness and patience and investing in a co-worker to help build them up conceptually it takes a little bit more time at the start, but over time communication becomes faster and faster and more effective.

By showing that kindness, compassion, patience and investing in each other every day and in every conversation over time it becomes possible to eliminate these bottlenecks naturally without requiring rigid top down solutions. The value of educating each other to become broader in our perspectives has much more profound and deep long lasting value.

Why is that?

It’s the old “teach a person to fish and you feed them for life” proverb. By investing in one another and growing each other to learn new concepts - those concepts can then be applied much more broadly than just solving one particular problem. Each person in the team becomes more perceptive, more capable - able to see value, communicate and in the context of sales can translate into business and revenue that we wouldn’t have got without this kind investment in one another.

By consistently following that philosophy with the development team I have seen the team grow rapidly, become faster and faster and more capable.

This is why from my perspective I see tremendous value as a leader to always be guiding people back to understanding principles of communication and helping us communicate better.