Giving Directions

A funny thing happened to me on the way to work the other day: a stranger stopped and asked me for directions. Why is this "funny?" The answer is because I am an American living and working in South Korea and the person asking me for directions was a Korean. While I do not think for a moment that just because a person born in a country should know where everything in that country is located, I was amused that, in this case, a person born in Korean would turn to a person like me who by all appearances was not born here. Not surprisingly, yet to my regret, I was not able to give this person any meaningful assistance.

Still, this points to a larger communication challenge: effectively providing guidance to a person unfamiliar with where they are on how to go from one location to another. "Drive for about a half mile, turn left at the third light and you're there." What is more straight-forward than that? Often times, however, the direction is not that easy. If a person is truly lost, then advising them on how best to reach their destination in a way that is fairly simple, understandable and above all accurate is not all that easy. It is akin to trying to communicate in a language with which you are unfamiliar. This is because you are trying to share information in a way that is clear to the listener. What you are saying is not about you.

More often than not, when asked for directions, I first try to assess what the person doing the asking knows or does not know about the area. If we both share at least a bit knowledge about the area, then that gives us a starting point from which to communicate. Lacking that makes our communication exchange more difficult but not necessarily destined to fail. Either way, assuming I can, in fact, help the person who is lost, I try to do two things: give them the needed information in bite sizes based on specific landmarks; and give them a sense of how close they will be to their destination at each landmark. People, I figure, need that assurance. I know I sure do.