Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
This series focuses on the approaches and tools to communicate more effectively with senior decision-makers and peer professionals. We’ll cover Framing the problem, Illustrations, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics – plus some pointers on how to be a more effective facilitator.
Effective communication is the one thing that makes your life better, more fulfilling, and more rewarding. That is equally true in personal relationships and in business.
Keep it simple. If you can convey the same information in fewer words, do it. If you can use fewer sentences, use fewer. If you can avoid tangents and parenthetical comments, avoid them. Only about 20 percent of what you normally communicate provides 80 percent of the influence on others.
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The one thing is right under your nose. The one thing is the game changer for your career because it enables others to understand the complex and uncertain world where you work. The one thing requires understanding the outcomes you seek before optimizing the separate components.
A system is a collection of interrelated or interacting parts, each of which can affect the behavior or outcomes of the whole. One defining property of a system is that it provides a function that none of the parts can accomplish by themselves. The corollary is that a system is not the sum of the parts but the product of their interactions.
Simple examples include the mechanical advantage gained from a system of pulleys or a gearbox. Sports teams or work units are examples of human systems. Systems are essential aspects of our everyday lives.
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