Category: Communication

One critical aspect of brainstorming and other idea-gathering processes is that one must not judge the ideas as they are presented. After that gathering phase, though, the ideas are useless if no patterns or relationships can be discovered. One good solution for that is the Affinity Diagram. The process was identified in the 1960s by […]

If you’re worried about interviewing for a SQL Server job, here’s some advice from the former head of an IT department on what matters (along with examples from the three critical areas where you need to have answers ready). As an instructor for Learning Tree’s Querying SQL Server 2014 and 2016 courses, I’ve worked with […]

In my previous post on improv, I said about improv, “It requires thinking on one’s feet. More importantly, it requires working with the other actors in the scene — each player must be able to respond to and lead the others with lines and actions that enhance the scene and make it entertaining for the […]

Lifehacker recently featured a post titled “How To Use Improv to Change your Life”; the post made me think how improv (improvisational theatre) had changed my life. Way back in high school I took a summer theatre class from a teacher who’d worked on Broadway. We did lots of fun activities that summer, but my […]

The headings in your email or larger documents are probably more important to your readers than what you’re actually writing about. Fortunately, it’s easy to figure out both how to write genuinely useful headings and to know where to put them in your emails or documents. How you’ll use your time getting this right, though, depends […]