I’ve spent a lot of my career around communications specialists, even considered myself to be there too. Although I know a lot about communications, the more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know half as much as I think.

People are complex, really complex and that is the real issue for me. We can easily get sucked into patterns of communication based on assumptions. How often have you spent ages working on that email, to inform your team of important changes and felt that great sense of relief when you hit send?

Just how important was that information?

Communication is a minefield, effective communication is the never ending story…

Instant messaging, email, texts, presentations, calls, face to face, the list goes on and with remote working, the challengers are getting harder. You can be having a conversation with a colleague and never be sure that they are really paying attention. Are you getting eye contact? Do they even have their cameras on?

People are also so diverse that we often make assumptions that we have been clear in our direction only discover later that we were not understood, a word was taken in a different manner changing context resulting in that work nit getting completed.

I guess that the starting point to improvement is the acknowledgement that you don’t know it all and show some bloody humility, learn to relate better and try to empathise with whoever your audience is.

I am starting to understand that communication, like a lot of things, is like a sandy beach, you can make a path that people can follow easily enough but sometimes the sea or the wind can obscure it easily, the path can get lost in other foot prints, your path can also be obscured by others on the beach on purpose…

Constantly question yourself, learn a bit more each time and will will improve but you will never get it right every time.