Matthew Lang

We've all been there. We've made a mistake in our career that has had serious repurcusions. We might have hit the wrong key, flicked the wrong switch, cut the wrong cable, sent the wrong document or even just looked the wrong way. Despite all the damage control there's still going to be a degree of fallout from the mistake and it's a mistake can be far reaching for lots of people to see.

I remember two such mistakes in my career. The first was when I was doing work experience at a local brewery and distillery for a large drinks manufacturer. On this particular day I was working in the IT department helping to organise some cables. I mistakenly pulled the wrong plug from the wall that was providing the power for over 10 workstations. As a result a lot of people were unhappy that morning. I put my hand to the mistake. There was no getting anyone work back who hadn't saved it.

The second involved deleting data from a production database. While I was working on an application with my own local copy of the database, I was asked to connect to the production database to run a report. Forgetting that I hasn't disconnected from the production database I ran a delete command on a table thinking it was my own development environment. It wasn't. Before I released the key to execute the command, I realised my mistake. I called my team manager over right away and they arranged a back up of the production database to be made while I was still holding the key down. Once I let the keyboard go the data was deleted but promptly brough back using the backup we had taken minutes before.

These are two examples of the biggest mistakes that I have made during my career, thankfully on the scale of things it doesn't get much bigger than that. Some mistakes though end up becoming local or even national news. I've been on the end of a few wrong electricity cables being cut by builders and such but thankfully nothing more serious than that.

Having recently seen a similar mistake being made, it's easy for me to see now how people can let these mistakes worry them. However, it's not the scale of the mistake in terms of visibility that should be the main concern. It's the risk from the mistake. Will this mistake endanger anyone? Am I putting anyone's life at risk? Unless you're working in an already high risk environment then chances are your mistake won't put anyone at risk. When you make a mistake you should remember this.

We all make minor mistakes on a frequent basis. We chide ourselves for them and then move on. It's when the mistakes become grander in scale that we start to worry about their repurcusions. Over my career I've slowly learned that I'll never make a mistake that puts anyone's life at risk. At most, I'll have lost some data which is why I now have back up strategies for my own data and all the applications that I work on.

In each of these cases I unecessarily worried for a few days about the making the mistake and the effort required to get back to normal by people affected by the mistake, but after a few days the worry was gone. Worry is a wasted energy when mistakes happen. Mistakes do happen and for the majority of us, the best thing to do is to take ownership and rectify the mistake as best you can.

Effective communication isn't about how your message gets to your audience, it's about the message itself.

I rely on an business to keep me up to date with events and updates happening within that business. I pay this business for services that I use on a monthly basis. I'd rather not name and shame them as that doesn't benefit anyone, so if you don't mind I'll leave them as anonymous. They have a website that supports both an email newsletter and a RSS feed. They also have accounts with both Twitter and Facebook. You would think that with all these outlets there would be a steady stream of information being sent out. Well, there isn't. I don't have the exact reason why this business isn't using these more frequently, but what I do know is that they're ignoring a chance to communicate effectively with their customers and potential customers.

Effective communication means communicating clearly and frequently. It's such a simple rule to follow but is ignored in a lot of cases.

Be Clear

Effective communication means communicating clearly. It's not hard to do. Don't use 50 words when 25 will do, avoid technical jargon and business speak and outline summaries using lists. These are just some of the things you can do for long form communication. For shorter forms of communication it can be more difficult. Twitter only allows 140 characters in each tweet, so even if it something quick you want to say, you need to be sure that what you want to say can be conveyed using this limit. It just takes time, but keeping it simple is the first step, and if you follow this then you're already winning.

Be Frequent

When communicating, being frequent with your messages is the best way to keep your audience up to date and informed. It's not rocket science. Agile software methodologies promote frequent communication between customers and programmers. The reason this is encouraged is because when we programmers keep our customers in the loop, we are keeping them involved and they can see what's happening from day to day. This limits the chances of the programmers going in the wrong direction building an application that the customer doesn't want or need.

The same goes for communicating. When we communicate frequently we keep our recipients informed and up to date. If we maintain this we foster interest from our audience and then we can expect a decent return of interest and participation from this audience when events or meetings are announced.

The Mistake

A common mistake for many businesses today is that they have more than one outlet for their outgoing messages and therefore think they already are communicating effectively. Unless you frequently use these different outlets though, you're not going to reach anyone. Having a website with an email based newsletter that is sent out regularly can be just as effective as a website that has multiple social network accounts. In order to be effective we just need to ensure that we are communicating clearly and frequently.

All the social networks under the sun aren't going to get your message across to your audience unless you're clear about your message and those messages get sent out on a regular basis.

This business in question might not be aware of it, but they're already lagging behind other competing businesses in the area who are doing a much better job of keeping their customers involved and up to date. As a paying customer my loyalty is waning. I just want to be kept up informed. Is that too much to ask?

In what must be my longest period of habitual change, I'm still in the process of rebooting. It is changing me for the better though. Here's a few changes that have come out of this period of rebooting.

1. I've cemented a habit of reading a chapter from a non-fiction book every weekday. By reading from a variety of books I keep things from getting stale.
2. I'm capturing everything in Todoist, and I mean everything. I'm using it to keep a track of errands, notes and even urls to check out.
3. I've made the jump to a new text editor and I'm learning new shortcuts about it everyday. It's taken me a few tries to make a successful transition but this I worked through the days of frustration and now I'm working quite well versed with the comamnds that I need to use daily.

I've got a few changes coming over the next few weeks that are more career orientated, but I'll report on these when the reboot process for these is complete. There's still room for improvement which is why the reboot process is still ongoing. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.