Spring Water Clear Messages

When I was doing volunteer work in Brazil, I met a wonderful indian family living in the city of Manaus.

Manaus is a huge city of four million people, but when you start coming to edges of it, the rain forest still creeps its way into the city. This family was living in a little ravine on the edge of a neighborhood near the north end of the city, where the foliage around their house was pretty thick.

The person who I was working with at the time was a huge nature fanatic. He dreamed of becoming a fly fishing guide and had owned snakes and other reptiles as a teenager.

He was trying to learn the names of all the different animals in Portuguese. We'd bought a couple of animal books and he'd been studying them. When we were talking with this indian family, he realized they were pretty familiar with the animals of the area. He started talking to them about different animal names, especially lizards.

When they got talking about one particular kind of giant lizard (I have no idea what kind--he was the nature fanatic, not me), they told him they'd seen one of those around their house lately.

He was ecstatic. He wanted it. Having raised so many reptiles as a teen, he was excited at the chance to have such an exotic pet.

"If you see it, you've got to get it for me," he told them.

They smiled and told him they could get it. No problem.

The next time we stopped in, he was hopeful that he was about to walk away with a new pet.

Sure enough, they smiled when they saw him. "Hey, we got it for you," they told him. "We already started in on it, but you can have the rest."

Yeah, you probably guessed it. They brought out the charred, half-eaten lizard they'd shot with a bow and arrow, and cooked up for him.

He didn't try it (But I did, just so I could say I had).

It was Dr. Benjamin Martinez of Panamerican Associates that first introduced me to the idea of "Spring Water Clear" messages. He defined that this way: Messages so clear that not only can they be understood, but they cannot possibly be misunderstood.

Making sure instructions are spring water clear is one of the biggest challenges of management. Communication is a tough thing--you're trying to get an idea out of your mind, and into the mind of another. Generally, any number of obstacles can keep that mind-to-mind transition from going smoothly.

Often, businesses have certain cultural "lingo" that aren't always clear to new employees. Even worse, sometimes it can vary from state to state. A term that the west coast divisions use to mean one thing may mean something entirely different to the east coast divisions.

Also, one phrase is often used to describe entire processes. Although the manager and the employee might be clear about the job to be done, the details of the process might vary.

There are two lessons to take away from this: It requires caution before, and understanding after.

When delivering a message, we must be cautious that we make all instructions as spring water clear as possible, and that as many of the relevant details are outlined as we can. Taking time at the start will lead to time saved later, both because there are fewer mistakes to fix, as well as because even though confused "lingo" costs time, confirmed "lingo" saves it.

After the message is delivered, when problems arise, understanding is necessary. We need to remember that it is often inadequate communication that leads to mistakes, not incompetent employees. If you're repeatedly finding employees performing tasks incorrectly or differently than you would like, it is more likely that you're inadequately communicating your expectations than they have begun to suffer from communal, contagious ineptitude.