Acknowledge!

I grew up on old war movies, especially movies with fighter pilots, such as the Battle of Britain In fact up until the age of 13 I thought I was going to be a fighter pilot.  I badly wanted to to be wearing a leather helmet and goggles, and saying things like “Roger Wilco, Over and Out”.  Being told I needed glasses destroyed that dream.

Fast forward 10 years and I learned that it’s just plain silly to say “Roger Wilco, Over and Out”.  There is no need to say “Over” if the conversation is finished and you are saying “Out”.

But more importantly, you never say “Roger” and “Wilco” together, and there is a lesson in this that I was reminded of last week. You see Roger means “Your Message has been received” and Wilco mean “Your Message has been received and I will comply with your request/order”.  Thus, saying Roger Wilco is doubling up i.e.  “Your Message had been Received, Your Message has been received and I will comply with your request/order”.

Willco is a kind of obvious concatenation of “Will Comply” but Roger is a bit more abstract.  In the early days of the British Armed Forces, they would say “Received” to acknowledge receipt of a message.  This was soon reduced down to “R” when using morse code, and became the standard acknowledgement.  When the British Airforce started developing the phonetic alphabet (used for spelling words out over difficult radio conditions, the word Robert, then Roger was used to represent the letter R.

Last weeks lesson though was that in today’s digital world, people generally forget or don’t know that that different types of human to human communication (phone, SMS, email, IM etc) have different attributes.  Such as quality, price, speed.  A quality issue around SMS messages is that when you send a standard SMS message, you don’t get a confirmation that the message has been received, let alone looked at.

This is kind of why the British Airforce developed the concept of saying “Roger”.  It was a work around invented to solve a problem with radio communications.  In laymans terms  – you don’t know whether somebody heard you, until they tell you they did.

So why does this matter?  Last week I was supposed to have lunch with my brother.  At 1pm he still had turned up.  But just before I called him to abuse him (I was hungry), I thought I would call my message bank first to see if there was any messages.  Lo and behold he had cancelled the night before, but I never received an SMS saying there was a message waiting for me.

The lesson (taken from the military) is that if you want to improve your quality and be good at making things happen, then make sure your messages are received, not just sent.  Out.

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