| name | value |
| date | 2025-01-23 |
| location | Playa del Carmen, MX |
| author | Anton |
I’m staying in Mexico in Playa del Carmen. There is a nice local food truck that sells tacos and tortas(Mexican sandwiches).
Every day I go there and order two tortas: one for myself and one for my girlfriend.
My order usually goes like this:
“One sandwich with meat with cheese and no onions and another one with meat and onions and no cheese”( una torta con arrachera y queso sin cebolla y otra torta con arrachera y cebolla sin queso) - try saying that aloud when you reading this.
At this moment cashier that accepts my order freezes - because I order two sandwiches that kind of opposite of each other. Then in 3 seconds he realizes what I order and repeats the order back to me. I pause too to process what he said, but then I approve the order and he passes it to the cook.
Everything so good so far.
But then every 3rd time when I received my order I’ve got two sandwiches with onions.
I repeated this procedure maybe 15 times at this point. And everyday there is a pause and everyday there is an anxiety not knowing if both sandwiches will have onions.
So what is the issue here? The issue is that information needs to travel from me to cashier and from cashier to the cook. So there is more chances that information can be lost or misunderstood. The person who takes the order and understands it is not the same person who executes it.
Here is small visualization for you:
Why am I telling this story? Because it’s a trivial example about trivial topic - sandwich. But you can see it’s happening in our daily life all the time - in relationship or at work.
Telephone game is a real world thing that happens all the time.
Think about work. Maybe you come up with some idea for a project. You describe it to 3 different people in one sentence and they will imagine 3 different things - and now you need to spend time bringing everyone on the same page - to reconcile what you have in your head with the things people have in theirs.
Or maybe you are an engineer and your manager asked you to work on a thing that he got from the support and support got it from the customer. How many levels did this information pass before it reach it? How accurate it is?
Reflections:
- communication is hard.
- alignment is hard.
- in order to make communication more efficient remove intermediate steps if possible.
- if you can, try to implement checks if information received is correct at every stage. try to catch mistakes as early as possible.
- direct contact - try to make sure that people who collect information at the source are the ones who are working on things(if possible).