Does anyone understand you?

As you watch news reports about Iraq or Afghanistan, think about this: how hard it is for our military to communicate with the locals? Then think about this: when you're trying to communicate, does your audience have as much difficulty as the Afghans and Iraqis?

Dennis M. Murphy, director of the Information in Warfare Group at the Center for Strategic Leadership, US Army War College, has written a rather academic piece about this, but we can bring his insights into our own presentations at work, before the PTA, wherever. He writes:

The difficulty with cultural understanding is that culture is, by its very nature, a local phenomenon. As MacNulty notes:

The society in which we live—in this context not the national culture . . . but the fairly small area in which we grow up . . . results in different culture, values, beliefs, religion, and views about money, work, marriage, gender roles, and so on.

Neighborhoods take on their own personalities, driven by such considerations as socio-economic factors and ethnic and racial identity. Value sets are different among communities that form the integrated society of a large US city.19 Transfer this reality to a foreign country where the US military is conducting operations. It should not be difficult to understand how challenging it is to influence perceptions among audiences with a “one-size-fits all” set of actions and messages.

Imagine yourself giving a presentation at work. You look at your audience. Each one of those people out there brings his or her own culture to the room, and they're hearing you differently. The finance guy isn't going to hear the same thing the IT guy hears.

Businesses segment their customers on the basis of gender, age, geography, previous purchase history, and on and on. Perhaps before we create that first brilliant PowerPoint slide, we should segment our audience.

Murphy notes that studying a language can help officers understand the local culture better, and that's always our tip No. 1: what jargon are you spouting, and do your listeners understand it? What language do they speak?

(Thanks, Rudy)