Can We Talk?

I just returned from a Board meeting at the Boston Society of Architects {BSA} on the subject of communications. We are confident that the BSA can do a more effective job communicating with our diverse membership and the community at large, so we brought in a consulting firm to analyze our current approach and to make suitable recommendations for improvement to our website, print media, etc.

Sounds like a simple problem to solve, right? Well, it’s not so simple when you begin to appreciate that different people from different generations access and process information in very different ways. Take me, for instance. I get an average of two hundred emails, a dozen letters, a stack of print material, and a bunch of phone calls each day. The best I can do is sift through them as quickly as possible each morning, trashing the vast majority within an hour, and following up on the important ones throughout the day, checking my iPhone periodically for updates when I am out of the office. I own one computer and am usually trying to get away from it so I can spend some quality face time with staff, clients, friends, or family. If that sounds like your typical day, I’ll bet we belong to the same generation.

Now let’s compare that with a few other people in my family, like my thirty-something son, Alex, who is a Creative Director for an advertising company. Email is passé….he texts, or tweets, and is LinkedIn to everyone on Earth. He rarely uses the telephone and, in fact, no longer has a land line. He doesn’t buy a newspaper and gets virtually all of his information online. When he is not eating, sleeping, or exercising, he is accessing information through one of his many computers or his PDA. My 91 year old mother, by contrast, doesn’t own a computer, and told me the other day that she wants to cancel her cellphone account altogether. “I never use it”, she said. She’ll use the home telephone, of course, but prefers to write letters and send cards. She subscribes to several newspapers and reads them all thoroughly, but admits that she gets virtually all of her useful information at bridge parties. Finally, consider my godson, Hunter. He is four, and I think that he may already be on Facebook, but he won’t “friend” me so I don’t really know.

Our consultants think they can complete their report within two months. I’ll bet it takes longer.