Email Communication
I was having lunch with Adrian recently and we were talking about how people work with email. One thing he said made me stop and think about the different ways people treat email and the potential problems that can occur if they aren't aware of the differences.
What he said was, "e-mail is a conversation, not a considered media".
Now some people treat e-mail as a "considered media", I must admit I'm one of them. When I put together either a response to an e-mail or create a new email, I spend time crafting it and reviewing it before I send it. In a few cases, the people I send them too are "email conversationalists" and so I regularly get short responses that don't always address my entire e-mail.
This reminded me of the Myers-Briggs "E" versus "I" categorisation and the confusion that can occur when they interact unknowingly.
'E' types tend to think by talking, whereas 'I' people tend to think then speak. As such, when an 'E' is talking to an 'I', the 'E' is looking for the type of feedback they would give that they understand. As the 'I' internalises this feedback, it is possible for the 'E' to continue way past the point the 'I' understood, causing frustration on both behalfs.
Understanding this makes for significantly more useful conversations between the two types.
So what happens when a person who treats email as a considered media gets a quick response from someone who doesn't. Well it's possible they read more into the response than was intended and hence draw the wrong conclusions. Alternatively, they get frustrated that not all of their questions were answered.
Equally, the other party can get frustrated with the "long" email and so skims, possibly missing important information or questions.
Next time you receive an email, consider the approach the person sending it may have taken and engage in the conversation appropriately.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:59 am
I’m one who considers it a “considered media”. To me, an email is a letter to someone. Messenger or ICQ is a conversation, email is letter writing.
I do encounter issues with people who don’t treat it this way, but they are solvable. Like all media, it is a matter of effective communication, which means tailoring to your audience, while still expressing the right information.
I think the trick is brevity. The large number of words in the English language gives it flexibility and power.
Another technique is the “executive summary”. If you need to give a lot of details (eg in order to be thorough in a professional situation), give the recipient a short and a long version. This technique comes from reports and speeches, but it works just as well in email. Give the short version first, in case they tune out. You can treat a long email like a newspaper article - most important facts first, drill into detail later on.
Notice the number of media I’ve just compared email to. This illustrates the flexibility of the medium, which is its greatest strength and weakness. It inherits the expressive strengths of many media, but the flexibility leads to many interpretations of its usage, and conflicting expectations of participants.
In terms of expectations, it has similar weaknesses to verbal conversation. You get very talkative people, and very quiet people. If these two types are communicating, one can perceive that its “like getting blood out of a stone”, whereas the other can feel overwhelmed by the guy that won’t shut up. However, there are the times where the two extremes balance out, the talky person lubricates the conversation, the quiet person subdues the over-excitable one.
The key is balance.