Interesting problem cropped up today. While working, it became evident that part of the people I should get concrete results from by the end of the day, got confused. We exchanged several emails, with no real progress. I tried to be very specific, wrote emails with appropriate summaries, process and action oriented – no result.
We then decided to switch to voice and organised a conference call. At the beginning, there was again some confusion. Of course, we come from different organisations, from different backgrounds – we needed to establish the basic understanding, or at least, establish basic translations between words and known concepts.
After this initial phase, things went like a charm. We finally understood each other, finally decided on the initial phase, set goals and actions.

What I took from this experience:

• Be positive. It is never easy to switch contexts, gears and vocabularies.
• Repeat after people in your own words. This enables everyone to get to grip with different vocabularies.
• Never assume people aren’t smart, just because they don’t understand your jargon. It is you, that is living in your bubble and it is you, being incompetent and not able to express concepts in layman terms.