What questions or struggles have you faced when it comes to communication skills?

Could you please elaborate? could you share an example?

Thanks for sharing your insights John Duncan. I liked it very much.


How do we recognize if someone wants only summary information , visuals or numbers.

is that that we should ask them on what they want to receive from us?

Once again thanks for your attention.

Would you say that the challenge is what and how to tell the story?

It seems a lot of times, through no fault of anyone in particular - just the way things are - people may forget important details. I am thinking specifically when it comes to requirements gathering, but it applies to almost everywhere. Small bits of information get left out, over time it can build up.
A lot of people overcompensate for this by having more collaboration sessions. That may get some of it out of the way and in the open, but at the cost of spending more times in meetings. The trick is to try and balance it out and accept the fact that sometimes you will get hit with a missing piece of information.

Examples:
I was gathering requirements for an automation application. I essentially job shadowed people as they worked, asked them questions. There was a point where during their job they create these spending accounts in the system. There were multiple types of spending accounts. Now, it never occurred to me to ask, "Can they have more than 1 of the same type of spending account?" and it never occurred to them to bring it up. They do the job every day, they roll with the flow at what they see in their source of truth documents.
It turns out that it can happen, and it was rare. So I never witnessed it.
The first version of the application only considered the possibility of 1 per type of spending account being created. I can certainly argue that I should have asked the question, but I look back on it and I think, "Why would I ask it?" Every run through of this never included more than 1 per type of spending account. Examples I saw never included more than 1 spending account per type. Never crossed my mind as a possibility.
So I could have had more meetings with them, taking more time to create the application as I looked for something missing that I had no idea what I was looking for. I can't really blame them for not bringing it up, this whole process was hundreds of values and options they have to do it while I watch and ask questions. For all I know, it never crossed their mind because they were thinking about the case they were working on, or they didn't think I was interested, or they figured someone else already covered it.
At some point, you have to declare you have enough information, move forward, and just deal with the missing pieces when they come up. The more complex the work, the more likely it is to happen.

No. Delivering your story is the easy part. The hard part is finding the right story for your audience

Gonzalo,

Complex question, first all individuals are different and communication are better adjusted to the audience.

First, we need to distinguish information distribution (one way) and other communication exchange (two ways). And there is some in between.

Some individual responds better to image/ graph, text or face to face.

Already a nice set of inputs

Agree with John & Kiron