Many of the issues facing businesses today can be described as “translation” issues. Markets are expanding across time zones and geography, and consumer/customer demands for products, services and tools have begun to commoditize. We must find ways to communicate seamlessly with those who don’t speak our language. However, even as our need for a common language increases, so does our individual desire for the richness and cultural context implicit to our ‘native tongues’. In the global village, we still value and feel passionate about maintaining our uniqueness and choice.

The analogy to the messaging issues we have studied is astounding, though by one measure the communications environment is more alarming. The language challenge we now face has taken eons to develop; the communications tower of Babel has developed in the last 20 years.

The problem begins with the pace of technological advancement and the rate at which new communication tools are introduced into the existing desktop mix. It is exacerbated by a lack of worldwide standards for key systems. And it is fueled by expansion into markets in which the technology infrastructure is unknown and/or unevenly distributed, and in which communications practice differs culturally from our own.

We have reached the stage where we as individuals are mediating (or translating) the communications environment when connections fail. Indeed, people have become the intelligent switches to translate between communications methods or geographies. And keeping up with communications demand is both structuring our days and dictating how we feel about our work and our productivity.

Why has this happened and what can we do about it? Can we find a common language that will serve in all of our business interactions?

It is my belief that our access to technology has outstripped the development of the social systems that we must have to manage the new communications culture. The pace of new methods entering the workspace has been so intense that we just can’t catch up. We don’t plan for the integration of new methods with the old in any formal way. We learn to use only 15-20% (or less) of any product’s features, and know little about the relative cost or value of any particular method versus another. What is more, we match methods to jobs or applications by habit rather than using a thoughtful process that includes our recipients’ preferences, efficiency and cost.

Though technologists and equipment suppliers have encouraged us to believe that the new methods are more effective and efficient than the old, and that our communications practice will evolve naturally with new tools, this is not the case. On a global basis, our cultures connected with technology use and communications practice differ greatly from person to person, company to company, and even country to country. The e-mail message or fax contract that is perfectly acceptable - even desirable - to us may be considered too informal, rude, or “non-binding” in a legal sense elsewhere.

When you add to this the great disparities that exist regarding the availability of the installed technology infrastructure between East and West, between developed and undeveloped nations, it’s easy to see why arriving at a common-denominator technology or practice is hard. These cultural and infrastructure issues are so pervasive that I believe we will continue to have to accommodate the differences - to translate between systems and practice - for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, even as markets develop and practice becomes more common, our experience in North America and Western Europe seems to tell us that things still may not change. No matter how compelling the thought of standardization and substitution for better new methods, technologies never seem to “go away”.

For example, though we have cell phones, voice mail and e-mail, we still use and value our traditional wired telephone. Physical mail is still growing today even in the face of unbelievable volume growth in fax and e-mail messages. We send every message in two or even three different ways to the same recipient and resend with increasing frequency if we don’t receive a response.

The end result is 190 messages sent and received per person per day, a 24-hour “work” day, a significant reduction in the time frame allotted to any project phase, a marked increase in responsibility and job scope for a majority of employees, an increasing sense of never being able to “catch up” and expanded markets, innovative products and services, higher revenues, ever-increasing business productivity and growing profits.

So what’s the solution? What is the silver bullet that will let us retain the benefits while bringing order to this chaos? Just as effective translation requires an in-depth knowledge of culture, practice, dialects, word choice and linguistic forms, so must our messaging.

Before we can construct products or services to help us mediate the messaging environment, we must understand our partners’ lexicon. We have to remember that our new “markets” are made up of people and that our business partners are individuals who respond best to things that have a familiar ring. By understanding our partners’ business practice and culture, we develop the effective common language of communications that we seek. The payoff is immediate and counted in time saved, anxiety lowered and communications costs reduced...in other words, in better business.

Meredith Fischer
Pitney Bowes, Inc.
1 Elmcrest
Stamford, CT 06926
USA
Tel: +1 203-351-6884
Fax: +1 203-351-6836
E-mail: fischme@pb.com