All the right notes… not necessarily in the right order?!

I’m sure many of you are familiar with this classic Morecombe and Wise sketch, and if you aren’t you really ought to watch it, it is comedy gold!  However I had a real life situation the other day that made me think of Eric’s words “Listen… I’m playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order!”   I was involved in a bit of communication that went awry.  We exchanged a number of messages and I wasn’t at all convinced that it was being resolved but I stuck with it.  Today I heard that it was all satisfactorily resolved but I suspect that the issue wasn’t so much the substance as the timing of the communication.

I’m sure we have all been in situations when someone asked us something at the wrong time and we failed to engage with them properly, and maybe afterwards said something like “Why didn’t you just ask me..!” only to discover that they had.  If your perfectly constructed message arrives at the wrong time for your recipient you maybe doomed to a difficult time.  We can’t always know what is going on for our recipients especially when we fire off an email or text, but if it is important, and I’m phoning, I try to ask the person “Is this a good time for you?”  If it isn’t then I’m not only wasting both our of time but potentially my one shot to get the message over.

In communication, like so much in life, timing is everything

Tags: Communication, miscommunication, morecombe & wise, timing, video

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 5th, 2011 at 16:34 and is filed under Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.