The notion that openly discussing complex subjects helps to clarify thought processes seems an obvious one, but it’s something we should be doing a lot more when making IT purchasing decisions, says A.Hack
If you’re struggling to find a mobile phone, memory stick or set of car keys, naming the lost gadget out loud helps you find them. We are indebted to the University of Wisconsin for this revelation, which proved something many people suspected and published the results of its empirical study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Naming something out loud seems to clarify one’s thought processes and makes missing objects suddenly become visible. Or, as the researchers put it, improves “ongoing cognitive (and even perceptual) processing in non-trivial ways.”
Imagery becomes more vivid and colourful and we can recognise things that previously faded into the background. That’s how I would put it.
This principle applies to many disciplines. It would be particularly useful when trying to make sense of complex concepts such as cloud computing, virtualisation and customer experience management, where there seem to be as many versions of events as there are vendors.
Any financial director could be forgiven for confessing that they can’t see the wood for the trees – or should that be the solution for the cloud. You would have to be a brave man or woman to admit this, so understandably many people might be tempted to steer a course through the mists and hope some sort of pattern emerges.
As trusted advisors in this field, Insight has a duty to its clients to help them to understand how things like the cloud fit their particular needs. However, we are not mind readers, so it is an important part of the job to talk things over with our clients until we can understand what the customer really needs and not what they think they might be expected to need.
Getting people to put a name to their object of desire is a lot simpler. It seems so obvious, now I think about it. Perhaps we should all try it.
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