Invisible Information

I didn’t want to buy my Thanksgiving plates last week. It’s September for goodness sake! Thanksgiving is a lifetime away. But if I wait until November to buy Thanksgiving plates, and I want the napkins to match? Forget it. It’s too late. The stores have started stocking Valentine’s Day.

So now, I’ve learned that if I start seeing Thanksgiving things I know I’m going to need, I’ve got about three weeks to buy them. I am not a fan of this arrangement. But I’ve learned how it works. Retailers have trained me.

How often does this happen, in much smaller ways, in business?

Our clients learn how to work with us. They learn whether we tend to answer an email immediately or sometime in the next day or two. They learn whether we’ll return a phone call the same day. They learn whether “one more little thing” usually gets folded into a project or becomes a separate conversation. Most of the time, I don’t think we’re deliberately teaching or “training” any of this. We’re just doing our work.

But patterns are information.

If I do something the same way often enough, the people I work with quite reasonably begin to expect that I’ll probably do it that way next time, too. And that isn’t necessarily a problem. Maybe I want my clients to know that I’ll usually respond quickly. Maybe I want them to know that if something small comes up, I’ll try to help. Maybe I want them to know that I need their information well ahead of a deadline because that’s what allows me to do good work.

The question, I think, is whether I’ve taught them, or created the patterns, that I intended to. Because I think that’s what bugs me about my Thanksgiving plates.

It isn’t only that I have to buy them earlier than I think I should. It’s that the timing isn’t what I naturally expect. I show up at what seems like a perfectly reasonable time to buy something for Thanksgiving and discover that I should apparently have been thinking about turkey while everyone else was shopping for school supplies. I had to figure out the pattern myself.

Maybe that’s the part we can make easier for the people we work with. If something usually takes a week, we can say that. If we need information earlier than someone might expect, we can explain why. If the way we work has changed, we can talk about it instead of waiting for someone else to discover the change.

And sometimes the useful question may simply be: What have my clients learned to expect from me? The answer might be exactly what we hoped it would be. And if it isn’t, we don’t necessarily need a new policy or a complicated set of rules. Maybe we just need to make the invisible information a little more visible.