From goods to information, the concept of delivery is underestimated – Annamaria Testa

The concept of delivery is largely underestimated. As far as I can, I would like to try to remedy it.

In fact, a large part of the usefulness, effectiveness and success of any idea, offer, product, technology, project, message, etc. is played on a well-executed delivery.

Let’s start by clarifying the concept well: “to deliver” means to give or entrust any entity, material such as an object or immaterial such as information, to a recipient who wants or must then do something with it: receive, keep, transfer, use (you I deliver my thoughts, the house keys, a box of tomatoes, a letter …). It also means conferring (I give you a prize, but also: I give you to your destiny). And it means to pass on (I consign to fame, to memory).

But we can also cultivate the excellent idea of ​​”handing over to children and grandchildren a better and fairer country”.

In short: we are talking about something important that is transferred by someone, to be delivered (delivered) to someone else.

Receives and beni materials
Speaking of important deliveries: English uses deliver e delivery for all the cases in which we speak of “deliveries” and “deliver”, and also, with a little Anglo-Saxon rudeness, in the sense of giving birth to a baby, and in that of making the public reach a loud and clear speech.

To begin with, let’s talk about material goods.

We can easily realize how crucial delivery is in this area if we only think that one of the elements at the basis of Amazon’s “unstoppable global success” (as the BBC defines it) is, together with low prices and vastness of the offer, precisely the impressive ability to deliver anything, anywhere, quickly and reliably. But we can also consider how, more generally, the expansion of e-commerce is inextricably linked to the issue of delivery.

And we can consider how the pandemic has definitively made the ability to deliver central. Or how, on the contrary, the temporary blockade of the Suez Canal, preventing deliveries, has thrown ship owners and towns into panic. Among other things, renewing (it is a great classic) the atavistic fear of a worldwide shortage of toilet paper.

Finally, we can recall how vaccines that were originally poorly delivered to national governments were then, amidst the disorganization, cunning and opacity of many territorial organizations, badly given to their legitimate recipients. With the consequences we all know.

The art and science of delivering material goods have a beautiful name: “logistics”. It is a word that comes from the Greek λογικός, and which means “endowed with a logical sense”. Logistics has very remote military origins: without certain supplies, the great Greek and Roman armies could not have waged their wars of conquest.

“Today, logistics can decide whether a business is going to succeed or fail,” writes the Harvard Business Review.

Logistics has evolved since the second half of the twentieth century, also thanks to two important inventions. The first is the barcode which guarantees the traceability, and therefore the management and control, of goods in transit, including the suitcases that we deliver to the airport.

The second is the invention of the container (and then of the container ships – and here we are again at the Suez Canal), which allows you to move large quantities of goods without having to stow them several times in the passage, for example, from rail to ship, to transport on rubber. And it is the real key to globalization.

Things get complicated
In essence, and in pure terms of delivering goods, things seem to be working great today, even if there are large areas for improvement, and not just at the environmental level.

But let’s get back to the point.

Things get complicated (and doubly complicated) when we talk about delivering stuff that is at least as important as goods, but as immaterial as information is. I’m talking about the huge and intricate amount of news, instructions, notions, recommendations, knowledge, proposals, ideas, rules that we exchange continuously every day.

A first problem is this: the classical mass media and the new media today make available a quantity of news so gigantic that it overwhelms us. The result is the cognitive overload that we have to deal with every day.

And here, precisely in terms of delivery, there is an interesting difference. While the more traditional sources of information offer us news of general interest, which touches us, so to speak, go and collect (this means, offline or online, take the trouble to access dedicated newspapers, and perhaps to compare different sources), social media deliver news to us, so to speak, at home: on our personal bulletin board, on our mobile phone.

They are convenient news, profiled and packaged especially for us. This is why they are irresistible, even when we have some doubts about their reliability. And for this reason 50 per cent (2020 figure) of adult Italians use social networks to “inform themselves”, despite the pervasive presence of fake news.

And here’s the second problem: while not everyone produces, packs and delivers goods, we all produce, to some extent, information that we exchange with a thousand different referents. If it were packages, and even if we are not logistics experts, we would take care that they arrive at the right destination in the best possible conditions.

But, since it is immaterial stuff, we don’t pay attention to it. And we tend to neglect the final, and crucial, part of the process: the one that concerns, precisely, the packaging and delivery. We say or write what we want to communicate, as it comes to us, and we think this is enough and advances. It is not so.

Unforgivable negligence
I would like to underline this a thousand times: of any type of information (recommendations, updates, instructions for use, proposals, rules, teachings, ideas, proposals, projects), producing is not enough. It has to be packaged and delivered. When information does not arrive, it is as if it never existed.

Just to clarify the concept, I will give some examples.

The public administrator who produces illegible or untraceable rules, and then accuses citizens of not following them, neglects the packaging and delivery. Or the politician who delivers ambiguous or contradictory messages, and then complains of being misunderstood. Or of not having obtained the consensus he expected.

He neglects packaging and hands over the teacher who is very competent in his subject, but who does not worry about preventing the students from getting bored or distracted (and, indeed, scolds them for being distracted and bored). Or the technician who writes an instruction manual that is incomprehensible to anyone other than a technician like him. Or the candidate who sends a résumé full of mistakes to a generic mailing list, in which he also boasts a degree in communications (yes, I’ve seen some).

He neglects the packaging and delivery of the manager who does not know how to convey clear and courteous instructions to his employees, and then mistreats them because they do something wrong. Or that he is unable to handle bad news, and then resents because the reactions are bad (Harvard Business Review advises: be direct and unambivalent, and watch out for body language).

The landlady neglects packaging and delivery (and is decidedly unpleasant) who assumes that her domestic worker has telepathic abilities and reads their minds, only to whine that “the maids are no longer what they used to be”. And the same happens with the teenager who treats the older one like a moron because he doesn’t share his jargon (and vice versa, of course).

She neglects packaging and handing over the parent who complains that small children are unmanageable, and doesn’t question how she conveys instructions.

Here are five great and effective tips: look for eye contact; indicates a positive thing to do (say “put the toys away” instead of “don’t leave the toys in disorder); be clear and concrete; be assertive (affirm instead of asking); give instructions for a single action, rather than for multiple actions.

I am sure that a thousand other examples will come to mind.

I would just like to softly add that anyone who has the ambition to formulate a project for the country, or for any of its areas, at the same time undertakes to deliver it to the interested parties in the best way, and to apply, if not excellent logistics, at least one some explicit logic. Otherwise, as has already happened, the project will be “not received”.