PD6Week3 - 10 9 12 Print able View PD 6 On l i n e Fal l 2 0 12 i m p o rt u rl/c o n t e n t/e n fo rc e d/4 3 0 4 2 PD6_k o a_c e l

10/9/12 Printable View 1/7 © University of Waterloo There are many cultural differences in how people express themselves. Different cultures have different ways of being courteous, offering praise, showing acceptance, initiating dialogue, and receiving criticism. Don’t neglect the opportunity to learn things from the variety of people you work with. Respectful curiosity is never offensive. PD 6 Online - Fall 2012 - @import url("/content/enforced/43042- PD6_koa_cel_1129/CSS/table_of_contents.css"); Week 03 - Problems with Processes I: Communication - @import url("/content/enforced/43042- PD6_koa_cel_1129/CSS/table_of_contents.css"); Content and Activities - a. Introduction Introduction Problems with Communication You’ve just started a new co-op job and you’re confused. Messages are flying back and forth all around you. You scramble to keep up with the voice mail on your cell phone and your work phone, emails to two different addresses, telephone calls, and text messages. You find yourself missing meetings and deadlines, disappointing your team mates and bosses, and losing sleep over your performance. To make matters worse, you’re not sure you understand what people want from you. The workplace is like a mini-UN: people from all over the world work there, and the products are marketed internationally. Almost no one has English as a first language, but it’s the language of communication in the workplace. As a consequence, the people who work there have developed a kind of “esperanto” to talk to each other, drawing in and adapting vocabulary from dozens of different languages, and strapping it all together with abbreviated forms of English grammar and connecting words. Guess what: you’ve got communication problems, and sorting them out is a top priority for you and for the organization you work for. In this course we deal with three different kinds of problems: problems with things, problems with processes, and problems with relationships. A communication problem is a problem with processes. A process is an ordered series of events intended to lead to a specific outcome. What you experience as a problem with communication can usually be analyzed in terms of the series of events that is intended to lead to a specific outcome. For instance, a phone message may be intended to confirm your commitment to a meeting the week after. If you aren’t able to collect the message (for instance, if you don’t have a password to the voice mail system, or you don’t have remote access and are working out of the office) or if you aren’t aware of how the process is designed and what its outcomes are supposed to be (for instance, if you expect email messages to confirm meeting times), then you will have a problem. Communication problems can be solved through the process of analysis and innovation that we’ve described in the model outlined in Week 1: Describe the problem Propose solutions Implement solutions Problems with processes are usually more complex than problems with things, and they often