Communication Logistics (Communication Series #5)

To recap, what do we communicate? Vision, culture, and information. These produce purpose, team, and movement.

How effective are you at communicating? Measure that by the clarity and accuracy of what people hear, according to what they do about it.

Communication Logistics, 7 rules that we just made up.

Creative. Am I clear and motivating? Learn how to speak and write so that people ‘hear’ you. We remember pictures, metaphors.
Concise. Be short and to the point. Highlight important info, date, time place, Who is responsible…
Comprehensive. Work from the assumption that people have not understood, don’t leave out details that you think they probably already know.
Close the circuit. Has what I said been acknowledged? Don’t wait, if you’re not sure, follow up.
Complete. If you want people to know something, communicate it three times: announce it, email it, mention it again. Ask yourself, Have I gotten results? Has the communication landed? Does it have to land on the calendar, in the planning meetings, in the accounts?
Inclusive. Does everybody know who needs to know? Don’t leave anybody out. Who else needs to know?
Archive. Write everything down, assume that all verbal communication will be misunderstood and forgotten.

Beware of leadership gurus who have a new solution to the old problem. They are selling books and they want you to feel like your present system is a failure and their new concept is what you have been missing – just take a deep breath…

You need to use what works for you. Don’t get bogged down in designing, or overwhelmed by the challenge – the purpose is to get communicating.

For example, I don’t use a phone, I don’t own one. I make about six phone calls per year, usually to deal with the archaic systems of banks and government. I use a voip app on my iPad to do that, otherwise, everything happens online. I don’t expect this system would work for you, but it might.

Communication systems that work for us:

Information flow and decision making: Slack for internal communication, FB chat for our Thailand board of directors, email for our Canadian board of directors. Weekly staff physical meetings at home base and ministry area meetings. (YOU NEED MEETINGS)
Vision and direction: Monday chapel at home base is live fed on Facebook and archived on alpurvis.com blog and Youtube. This is for the nations we lead and anybody else who wants to stay connected. These sites all have comments enabled so we can receive feedback. Our annual Asian Leadership Sumit is pivotal, we gather the leaders from the nations for relationship, vision, and prophetic direction.
Health and unity of the ministry family and individuals: we do Sunday church together, a midweek worship/prophetic meeting. Coffee shop or workspace meetings, randomly. We use a google form questionnaire to get feedback from individuals.
Researchable information: you need to have a place where people can go for more information. victoryasia.com, Youtube, magazines, and books.