Archive for the ‘Communication is about relationship’ Category
Don’t Bother Me, I’m Busy Talking to Myself
Just because you have a budget doesn’t mean you know what you’re talking about
I just finished with a client who refused to take direction.
What’s that? You think a consultant should not give direction to a client? You could not be more wrong. That’s exactly what a good consultant does. It’s just that a consultant’s direction doesn’t look like orders or demands. A consultant’s direction looks like alternatives to the usual and invisible way of doing things.
Sometimes we need help seeing what is right before us. We are soaked in teams that are steeped in detail that is loaded with the talk that just circulates between people in the know. This adds up to a set of increasingly narrow word choices that are interesting only to the team. Those words sound like gibberish to anyone on the outside.
My client continued to talk in the insider terms only they understood. And they would not be dissuaded. In the end, they approved copy that ensured no one outside their little circle would understand.
Which feels like failure to me.
This doesn’t happen often, but it’s a bummer when it does. And it makes me think again about how complicated communication is, and why it is so important to start talking earlier rather than later. And why it is critically important that we pull our head out of the huddle from time to time.
###
Image credit: killythirsk via 2headedsnake
Our Words are Fatally Flawed—By Design (Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #13)
4 ways our words succeed even as they fail again and again
Words seem like the perfect carrier for an idea. Say something and you’ve just told your thought. And now someone else understands that thought of yours.
Not so fast: assuming others understand is a bit of a leap.
The best you can say is that someone heard the words you said aloud. Whether they understood those words, whether they gave those words the weight you think they deserve, whether they have any clue about what you really mean—all these are in limbo. It’s very difficult to say if understanding happens in someone else. And I’ve taught enough college classes to know that a direct gaze back has little if any indication about what is going on deep in the whirring cogs of understanding.
Yet the very failure of words to communicate your thought exactly is actually the genius of our species. Because when we see our communication has not worked precisely—or perhaps it has failed to work at all—then we take action. We grab other symbols, we grab a pencil to make a sketch, we grab someone else’s words, we stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon or point to the stars or maybe we grab somebody by the lapels. One way or another we keep working at making ourselves understood. And as we do that work four things happen:
- We grow in relationship. Time spent communicating is time spent paying attention to each other. And time spent growing relationships, relating to each other—maybe even honoring each other by listening—is prime meaning-making time. Gathered together, these moments become the most memorable in our lives.
- We grow. We grow in communication. We grow in use of different tools, some of which we may find we have particular skill. We grow in understanding of our thought and of what this other person needs. Perhaps we grow in caring.
- Something new emerges. It turns out our original thought was not all that complete. The very act of communicating that thought changed it. For the better.
- We realize we need each other to move forward. Whether in our project teams at work, or in discussions about some ancient text, or in philosophy class, or discussing a web page design, or our daily exercise regimen—name any endeavor, and it benefits from being talked about. Even a silent retreat feels complete after we form words to tell our spouse or friend what we learned.
I hope 2013 is a year of growth for you in using words, especially as you work around their fatal flaw to communicate your passion.
###
Speak Up: I Can’t See You.
We’re Walking Catalysts
There’s a point at the end of The Sixth Sense where everything suddenly shifted. One piece of information—one realization—and all the characters and their relationships went topsy-turvy. Then the story begged to be retold in this new light and the second time through I was on high alert, noting all the clues I missed the first time.
Our best interactions with our audiences can have this quality: holding attention until the reveal makes perfect sense, so much so that our audience says, “Duh. Of course. How did I miss that?” This is a great way to teach, but also very difficult to achieve. This kind of clever communication front-loads with just the right context and then delivers the missing key ingredient.
Our favorite products fit our lives in this way: how did we ever survive without the iPod or cell phone? Or the car? They make perfect sense in daily use. Well, now they make perfect sense. They didn’t always, that’s because a context grew up around the product that reinforced its use. We saw other people using it. And we found our ways changing in anticipation.
Products and ideas that demand something different of us don’t just happen. In fact, we resist them. Some kind of context must arise to reinforce the use of the product or adoption of the idea. That context is different for everyone, but usually starts with reason and proof points, but it doesn’t end there. Even the physician who claims to only be swayed by medical journals still has a soft spot for using the product her peers consider cutting edge. Emotion and relationship are big parts of why we use products and adopt ideas.
All this is to say that we constantly influence each other. Our words and our actions serve as catalysts—that missing ingredient that changes everything—often in ways that we never know. Most people don’t come back and say, “When you chose the salad instead of the chicken-fried steak, you changed my eating habits and my life.”
We don’t even realize how little observations add to big change.
###
Image credit: Jim Kramer via 2headedsnake
How To Solve Things With Words
Business, guns, diversity could all benefit from simple talk
I had a boss who would stand amazed at what could be accomplished through simple communication. After a team meeting with a difficult client, she would say, “All we did was talk and that problem just went away.”
She went on to become Le Grand Fromage at Medtronic, which seems fitting and a happy circumstance of a good person rewarded for aggressively doing good (an atypical reward, in my experience).
Could simple communication help us hash out reasonable restrictions for assault weapons? Just people talking together about the rights we cherish, but also weighing them together in the multi-dimensional needs of a diverse culture—aloud. It is OK to become heated, but adults know also how tone it down. Our leaders have led us to bitter partisanship, which our media has been happy to reinforce, so maybe it is up to the regular people, the ruled (as it were) to point the way back to ordinary conversation. In fact, I would argue that it is the ordinary conversations that carry the most extraordinary power for permanent change.
Let’s bring our passions to discussion, and let’s also listen to understand that good point our opponent, but fellow human, wants to make. Covey’s advice to “First Understand” makes sense for today. What if we began to appreciate the very things that made us different?
###
Image credit: marcedith via 2headedsnake
Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow Predicted Storytelling in the Twitterverse
Good story always depends on silent remembered chunks
Athey was a storyteller too, as it took me some while to find out, for he never told all of any story at the same time. He told them in odd little bits and pieces, usually in unacknowledged reference to a larger story that he did not tell because (apparently) he assumed you already knew it, and he told the fragment just to remind you of the rest. Sometimes you couldn’t even assume that he assumed you were listening: he might have been telling it to himself. With Athey you were always somewhere in the middle of the story. He would just start talking wherever he started remembering.
(Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry. Beginning of Chapter 21)
That’s why Hemingway wrote and then returned to remove as much text as possible to make the story as spare as possible:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
(Hemingway’s self-proclaimed best work)
Our minds need to leap and grasp their way through a narrative to fully engage.
###
Lead By Explaining Something to Yourself Out Loud
Our Words Always Boomerang
Early in Dr. Luke’s account of the nascent church, a central character was named Peter. Peter was a guy who processed things aloud: he had a mind-mouth connection that sometimes got him into trouble. But in Dr. Luke’s account, Peter’s verbal processing framed what was an entirely new situation. Peter grabbed pieces of the Law and Prophets and combined them with what he observed to sort out what they were all experiencing. In doing so, he freed many to participate in the ongoing conversation. The resulting conversation was nothing less than explosive.
Walk with me: what happens when we release our perception into a conversation? It’s not the case that anything we say comes true. (Despite what Minnesota Senator Al Franken said as Stuart Smalley) But there is something in the mechanism of “saying aloud” that allows an audience to hear and respond. That audience may be other people. That audience may be the one speaking the words. Our audience can agree, disagree or whatever. But the words are out there, itching for response. Hearing our own explanations often has a much more profound effect on the speaker than anyone we are talking to. That’s why the teachers and professors I know all say they learn so much every time they teach a class.
My favorite leaders often use that mind-mouth connection to process out loud what the team is experiencing. It’s a kind of shop talk that results in meaning-making right in the work place. I can think of several of those out-loud-processings from people I respected that changed my perception of an organization or situation forever.
###
When You Know Too Much
You should shut up
Sometimes you are in a meeting and you know more than most people in the room. I’m not writing about an ego trip here or an exalted view of self. I’m writing about a function of age and experience. You personally have wrestled with the three topics circling the meeting’s agenda. And most of that wrestling was two decades ago. You know the people and stories and ethos the leader is referring to from deep study of your own—and you reached your own conclusions about five years ago. You’ve been there. And you’ve done that. I’m sounding like an old guy.
That’s the time to take action: Shut up.
Not entirely, but show some restraint. Why? It’s tempting to say you should shut up to hide what a cranky old codger you are. It’s also tempting to say “Shut up” to give the neophytes an opportunity to make their own mess of things. But neither of those tell the whole story.
In a meeting yesterday a group of us talked about a set of communication (and theological) issues revolving around reaching out to a growing population of immigrants to the Twin Cities. I said too much—I realized this on the slick, snowy drive home. But then I realized: no, honest discussion is exactly the give and take, the push and pull, the misunderstanding followed by dawning group understanding. That is the way of human communication. It’s mostly messy.
Here’s the point: every communication event is fresh. Even cranky old geezers who know too much can learn, because the players are different and the times are different and frankly, new stuff is happening. All. The. Time.
So: bring your experience to the table, by all means. And steel yourself: results will vary.
###
Image credit: Denis Dubois via 2headedsnake
If I Had a Parking Lot (The Parking Lot Movie)
That’s Fecund Ground for a Philosopher
If I told you there was a documentary about a parking lot and that you would not be able to stop watching it, you might disbelieve me. And yet. There is. And you can’t. It’s called, The Parking Lot Movie.
You can’t stop watching because of the cast of characters who each take their turn tending the unheated little hut that serves as the outpost for payment. They charge people 40 cents, or a dollar, or eight bucks and the world of the parking lot revolves around this simple transaction. The attendants are students, and recent grads and grad students. They are philosophers and professors and musicians and slackers and bikers and skateboarders. What they share in common is lots of reflection about the transactions they have with the public. These guys have lots of time to think.
This overeducated bunch connects the dots of culture from the seeming-lowest point on the food chain of work. They think about how people park and about how the car make and model and even the license plate reflect on the driver. They think about the irony of having to pay to park that lumbering, expensive SUV. They think about what it means to be a parking lot attendant, mostly. And the camera catches these comments, along with the transactions and events that drive them to the comments.
The only way to get this parking lot attendant job at the Corner Parking Lot across from the University of Virginia is to know somebody. And that fact is one key to the whole interesting film: it’s the little community of irrepressible attendants trying to sort out life together that turns a mundane job into a joyous window on life. But more than that, the guy who owns the Corner Parking Lot—Chris Farina—has a way of working with people, mentoring actually, that helps each attendant grow into the person they are meant to be. He’s boss, but he’s a parking lot visionary who has figured out how to help each attendant have ownership over the parking lot. And maybe their life.
This is a great film on its own. But I can imagine using it in a class when talking about collaboration or community—it’s a perfect illustration of both. And with the shop talk caught on camera and in context, it is a delightful and an all-too-quick 74 minutes.
###
On This 1st Day, Consider the 7th
How can freshly-sliced time call to you?
It’s Monday and that is bummer enough. But take a minute and think with me about how time works—it may make a difference for next weekend. We’ll do this by looking at The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Heschel’s The Sabbath feels like an old book though the first printing was only in 1951. (Some of you will say, “Yeah: old.”) But the thoughts, the pacing and even the language mark it as something way older and way more out of sync with our current urgencies. In this case, the medium mirrors well the topic, which is a day set apart—a day out of time. [One note: My understanding is that the Jewish observance of Shabbat extends from Friday sundown to Saturday evening. The Christian observance of Sabbath is a Sunday. It’s not the exact time I want to look at, but the concept.]
There is no end to the mystery Rabbi Heschel presented as he talked about the observance of the seventh day as a day of rest. Many of us innately understand the point of Sabbath though few of us practice it. We get that a day away from work is a good thing. We can be convinced that not working for a time makes us sharper for when we are working. For us—especially in the U.S. around Christmas—the Sabbath is a useful day for practicing our American religion of acquisition. But maybe there was some wisdom in those old out-of-sync rules that forced merchants to close for a day.
The heart of Heschel’s book is a quote from the Torah, where God rested from all his work on the seventh day and called that day “holy.” Many of us associate that word with church and religion and boring sentimental stuff. But Heschel’s first interesting point is that it was a day that was holy. Not a place. Not a thing. Not a people. But a day. And that day recurred. Every week or so. (Well, every week).
That a slice of time would be separate and somehow different is a wildly different way of looking at life. Especially as we push toward always-on-24/7/365 connection. It raises the expectation that something different can/should/will happen in that time slice devoted to rest. Heschel does a heartening job of building out the possibilities—indeed, that is his point: time devoted to, well, transcendence. But with a God-shaped denouement.
The second interesting thing Heschel said is that rather than seeing the day of rest as a reward for a week of hard work, this freshly-sliced time becomes an anticipated climax to the week. All of our thinking, our relating and collaborating, all the working pieces of life somehow move toward this festive laying down of the keyboard/pen/steering wheel/hand truck in rest. So…not a reward for a week’s work but the week’s work serving to outline the great difference of a day set apart to contemplate and celebrate relationships.
There’s lots more to this, of course. And generations of smart people have written volumes on the topic. But just laying a different story arc on this week’s work may make this Monday different.
###
Image credit: laurabfernandez via 2headedsnake
Talking Philosophy with a 10-Year Old
Why not talk about something more interesting like dragons or flying?
I like reading Emmanuel Levinas. He’s mostly opaque, but every once in a while his writing opens on a breathtaking view and is just what I needed. If I had the opportunity to explain why Levinas matters to an interested ten-year old, I would say that we have a problem with other people. And the problem is that we mostly don’t want to hear from them. I could use an example from their life: you don’t want your mom to interrupt your fun: when she calls you in for dinner, you go in only reluctantly. One problem with the will of the other is that we don’t welcome distraction from our preoccupations. But it is not just that, it is that we really don’t want to even interact with some other who might have authority over us.
10-Year-Old: “Oh. You just don’t want to do what other people say. Does Levinas tell you how to avoid doing what others tell you to do?”
Kirkistan: “Not exactly.”
10-Year-Old: “Does he tell you don’t have to do what they say?”
Kirkistan: “No. It’s more like you suddenly want to do what the other person wanted because you really, really loved them.”
10-Year-Old: “Like maybe if my grandparents were in town and asked me for something and I wanted to do it for them because they are so nice?”
Kirkistan: “Yeah. Maybe like that. And maybe you found yourself really interested in the experiences they had, partly because they are such good storytellers and they make everything sound so exciting. You like their stories and can almost imagine being there.”
10-Year-Old: “So my grandparents are cool and I want to get to know them because they are nice and tell interesting stories. So what you are really talking about is why it is important to hear from other people and why we should care.”
Kirkistan: “That’s right.”
10-Year-Old: “So why did you start be talking about stopping what I thought was fun to do something I had to do?”
Kirkistan: “Well, I might have been a bit confused. But also because sometimes I close my ears to people who are trying to give me a gift. Something I really need. Say you are at the grocery store with your parents. It’s Saturday. And there are sample ladies on every aisle. There is lady offering free ice cream in the frozen aisle. And another man making pizzas in that aisle. And another with little chicken nuggets and another handing out crackers and cheese.
Kirkistan: “But say you really didn’t want to go to the grocer. You really wanted to watch cartoons. So you went to the grocer reluctantly, but you took your iPod and listened to music the whole time. You walked behind you parents, music turned up. So you didn’t hear the sample ladies calling out to you. You kept your eyes on the floor so you didn’t see them either.”
10-Year-Old: “That would be bad. I like ice cream and chicken nuggets and pizza. It’s like I had missed all the really good stuff while everybody else got something. I’d have gotten my way but I’d have missed out on the very best stuff.”
Kirkistan: “That’s why Levinas is important. He helps us start to see and understand why it is we should care about the people around us: what they know. What they bring to our conversations. What they have to say about this and that. Even people who don’t seem to have anything to say—even those people can surprise us with lots of interesting things.”
10-Year-Old: “OK. Well, why don’t you just listen to people? I listen to people and learn things all the time. That isn’t hard to do. It is super easy to listen to people. It’s not like you have to do anything. You just listen.”
Kirkistan: “Well, that is great advice and I want to follow it. My answer to you would be that as you get older, you start to think you know a few things. We get to thinking we know the patterns of how things work and we figure we know pretty much how anyone will respond in any given situation. Anyway, all I’m saying is that it gets pretty easy to think you know what most people will do or say in any given situation. The surprise—if you can call it that—is that quite often people live up to our expectations. They do what we think they’ll do. Not always. But often. Then the question becomes, “Did that guy say that because I expected him to say it?” “Did I have a hand in turning this conversation this way?”
10-Year-Old: “You’re pretty boring aren’t you?”
Kirkistan: “You might be right.”
10-Year-Old: “Why don’t you write about something interesting like dragons or warships? Why don’t you write a book about how to fly?”
Kirkistan: “Great suggestions. I really want to write a book about how to fly. I think that this is the book I am writing.”
###
Image Credit: Mid-Century via thisisnthappiness
conversation is an engine 