If ignorance is bliss, do you work at Disneyland?

I'm going to make a very stark admission here. 

I am a lousy communicator.

There are times that I have tried to get a point across and have met with blank stares in return. I am one of those people who can think of 1000 things at a time and forecast the outcome of each one of those things. In short, my mind moves at 1000 miles an hour and sometimes I have a challenging time keeping my audience with me.

Being aware of this fault, I usually make several attempts to communicate the same information in multiple ways, and there are several times that I am still met with a completely blank stare or even worse yet a look that asks “how does this affect me?” I don't very often and they use this information during a business exchange so, if I'm communicating information to somebody, there is generally a very good reason for it.

I will use this example:

I had a discussion with a credit manager, at a company that I'm working with, concerning the impacts of sales tax. I had explained from multiple angles, that structuring leases in multiple jurisdictions can lead to multiple, complex tax issues.

At the end of this conversation, that person looked at me and said “what does that have to do with credit?”

Okay. Let's try this again.

I asked this person what the process was for approving a transaction and was informed that they reviewed the third-party credit as expected, and that the transaction was structured according to collateral type and credit profile. I then asked if geography played in to any part of the credit decisioning. I was told “yes”. I then asked if sales tax and exposure to tax liabilities were part of the process. I was again told “yes”. I then asked if their current process addressed the issue of multijurisdictional tax complications, exemptions usually caused by apportioned registration.

I was then met with a blank stare.

The moral of the story is:

“We don't know what we don't know.”

And

“We can’t learn what we don’t want to learn”

This person did not understand (or have the desire to understand) the complexities of the transactions that he was approving. He thought he did, however his approvals were causing several layers of consternation amongst the accounting team as they scrambled to gather the remaining tax exemption information.

This person is neither stupid nor uneducated, however they were being ignorant. This person was happier focused in on one aspect of his process. He focused in on the third-party credit profile and on the collateral, leaving out the issue of taxable liabilities.

This unintentional ignorance was then causing issues further along in the chain of events that he was unaware of. This person was under the impression that as a credit manager, all they had to worry about was credit and collateral.

• What are we missing in our decisions?
• Do we have all of the pertinent information?
• Do we slow down the process enough to make sound decisions and yet not slow down too much to cause customer service lapses?

I don't know what I don't know. But, I'm always willing to learn.