July 27, 2007

“Can you all hear me?  The line is very quiet.”

Your initial reaction to this quote probably isn’t much.  Let’s put the quote in context to give it just some meaning, some humor, and hopefully, to learn a lesson about methods of communication.

Meetings can be delivered in many flavors.  The meeting on this day several years ago was coming to us via web-cast, which was at the time, still a very new way of communicating.  The meeting moderator introduced the executive who would be addressing a large group distributed around the world.  We listened intently as that was all this particular web-cast was designed for:  one-way communication.

About ten minutes into the presentation, the executive became a bit frustrated and somehow lost track of the medium she was using to communicate.  She stopped her presentation and asked, “Can you all hear me?  The line is very quiet.”   Of course, because of the nature of this web-cast, none of us were able to be heard even if we did make an attempt to answer her question.  Getting more irritated, she began asking, “Hello?  Hello?  Is anyone out there?”  Many of us sat listening in amazement that this executive either didn’t know or didn’t understand the nature of this particular web-cast.  We didn’t know whether to laugh at the situation or cry at the lack of awareness.  After about the fifty-first “hello”, we couldn’t hold back the laughter.

It took what seemed like hours before the moderator was able to notify the frustrated executive that there were more than 200 people on the line and that none of them was connected in anything other than “listen only” mode at the moment.  Now completely unnerved, the executive’s ability to communicate was so diminished that the web-cast became a legendary disaster in our company.

Virtually every company communication requires an effective medium.  It is well worth our time to make sure that when we need to be face-to-face, we are; and that when a web-cast will suffice, everyone understands the limitations.  To be sure, few things cause greater frustrations than communication constraints.