You probably think of yourself as a decent human being who doesn’t go around pissing off your friends. But because we are all human beings it is inevitable that you will make some assumption that is not true, or not shared by the other person, or just not think something through from the other’s perspective and thus come across as insensitive or worse.
Here are a few things to consider before, and after, you put your foot in your mouth in an online situation:
Amazing Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie (who lost her hearing in her early teens) gave a TED Talk about “Listening To Music With Your Whole Body” – it’s 32 minutes well worth your time.
If someone asks me: “Oh well, how do you hear that?” Then I simply say: “I really don’t know, but I just basically hear that through my body, through opening myself up. How do you hear that?” “Oh well, I hear it through the ears…” …you know…” Well, what do you mean, ‘through the ears’, what are you actually hearing?” So, when you try to bounce the question back to a socalled hearing person, then, they simply do not know how to answer these questions…
There’s also a longer documentary about this, Touch the Sound.
Things that fell out of my mouth today during a meeting:
Inter- means “between groups.” Intra- means “within one group.” (e.g., “interscholastic competition” means a contest between different schools;”intra-team communications” means talking amongst your teammates)
Get to “yes” first, from all parties involved, to avoid later “no”s.
Escalate responsibly…
Random thought after explaining to a non-IT person how they broke a piece of the internet (though not totally their fault – combining a 1980s app with arcane Exchange 2010 features frequently does not end well):
A key communications skill when explaining tech to nontech users seems to be anthropomorphizing the effect of their actions on the application.