I'm going to tell a story I really liked telling when I taught Public Speaking or Business Writing, though I probably snuck it eventually in any time I taught.

It's about knowing your audience and identifying when you're an expert speaking to others largely because they're not. It's about what my business writing textbook's author called "You-Attitude". Someone who taught from that book at Radford said the following are a few "you-attitude principles":

  • Look at situations from the readerโ€™s perspective
  • Emphasize what the reader wants to know
  • Respect the readerโ€™s intelligence
  • Protect the readerโ€™s ego

You can learn to do this, but it comes much more naturally to some than it does to others.

Anyhow, it's story time.

One day, for lunch, I walked into a Hardee's, a hamburger joint, and had the mis/fortune to overhear this conversation going on in the line in front of me.

  • Hardee's employee: What would you like?
  • Customer: A cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, ketchup, and mayo.
  • Employee, after looking down at the register: But what don't you want on it?
  • Customer: I don't know. Everything that's not lettuce, tomato, ketchup, and mayo?
  • Employee: I understand what you want. But what don't you want?

Ad infinitum. (It really went on like this for a while.)

:facepalm:

I mean, obviously the employee's register must have had some way to take toppings away from an order, but not a way to express the opposite: Exclusive toppings to put on.

Look, ultimately, this is a common thing at restaurants, and if you've been a few times & paid attention, you might, as a customer, be able to handle just such a conversation. Maybe you've ordered at Jersey Mike's, which has some toppings preselected for your sandwich so you can get it "Mike's Way".

If you're ordering in person, you might say, "I want it Mike's Way, minus onions, vinegar, & oil, plus mayo."

But if you have no idea what Mike's Way is, are you stuck? No! Even though it's usually posted on the ordering board in front of you, most sandwich makers (are they called "artists" now? Oops, that's Subway) can still figure out how to do "lettuce, tomato, oregano, salt, and mayo" if that's what you order.

And that's the problem we had here. The Hardee's employee couldn't translate the customer's order to what the register needed to accept the order. No matter how long we stood there asking, "Right, but what dontcha want?" the customer would never know what compromised the default "Hardee's Way". And it appeared the employee either didn't know or couldn't articulate that either.

That's the epitome of "Me-Attitude": The inability to frame a situation from a point of view other than your own. You need to be able to reframe the discussion around how it affects your audience -- the "you". When in doubt, assume they don't know what you know until they tell you otherwise. And when they've removed all doubt that they don't know something you assumed they did, back up and catch them up.

I run into this inability to describe something from another's point of view at the office with some frequency. Once, we had someone put up code to review in an area where I'd never worked before, changing code I'd never seen, fixing a bug I'd never read.

  • Me: Okay, catch me up. Describe what you're doing. What problem were you solving? What other ideas did you consider and not use? How did you fix it and why?
  • Them: It's all in the bug report [plot twist: it was not]. We couldn't use jQuery because we're catching bubble events at the document level.
  • Me: Great, but why are we listening to mousedown events at the document level? What problem did that solve?
  • Them: That fixes the bug.
  • Me: Cool, cool.
    • Also me: This is probably going to take me a while to review.

Look, I kind of get it. "Them" was saying, "If you had my context, you'd understand what's happening." But I didn't have the context.

Them's answers were wholly unsatisfying in the "guess the Hardee's Way" way. I'm ultimately asking, "Can you give me the context so that I can intelligently review this without doing a forensic study of the code first?" The answer in this case was, unfortunately, no.

I didn't have any more luck convincing "Them" to explain what came on the burger by default than the person in front of me did.

What the audience needed to know wasn't emphasized. These are all "Me-Attitude" conversations, not "You-Attitude" ones. And that makes for clunky communication and inefficient work.

Moral of the story: Be able to tell your audience what's on your burger.

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