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.
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Image credit: killythirsk via 2headedsnake
Guns and Talk: Is It Possible for the U.S. to Become Self-Aware?
Our Home-Grown Version of the Mohammed Cartoon
Not so many years ago a Danish newspaper took on a critique of Islam and self-censorship. It accomplished this with a set of 12 editorial cartoons, which enraged many—so much so that riots erupted across the globe. Cartoon depictions of Mohammed are considered blasphemous by many.
In the US, we tend to applaud most any exercise of free speech. It is a right we cherish. Except when it comes to guns. When The Journal News recently published data locating pistol permit holders in two counties in New York, the sound of lock and load replaced the applause.
So the publisher of The Journal News hired armed guards. Janet Hasson told the New York Times, “The safety of my staff is my top priority.”
To any who laughed off the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy saying it could not happen here, think again.
When will talk become unsafe in this country? When will the second amendment take aim at the first?
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Image credit: The Journal News
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.
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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.
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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?
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Image credit: marcedith via 2headedsnake
Vanishing Letters and Muscle Memory
My life without “L” and “M”
Literally: L and M are gone. K is nearly gone. I have no period.
A few days ago I pointed Conversation is an Engine toward Coracle Journeys for a wonderful poem celebrating frailty. Today I realize my keyboard letters are going away.
I’m OK as long as I don’t look. But if I look down—right now—at y keyboard to ocate y issing etters—I can’t because they are not there. I must depend on muscle memory.
Is this what aging looks like?
Though I am a constant note taker (I like writing stuff down), there’s little need of these reminders as much of life is a been-there/done-that proposition. Writing, talking, eating—lots of our daily activities we’ve done hundreds of times. Driving to the gas station or school or to the grocer: did that x1000. We depend on muscle memory for a lot of daily living.
Muscle memory came up again and again in my family over the holidays. My brother-in-law and I talked about how practicing the piano and guitar had a lot to do with training fingers in certain reaches and movements from chord to chord. And my sister-in-law told how she intended to drive a friend and instead ended up at her home. Why? Muscle memory. These things get burned into our muscles through repetition.
Much of life works this way, which is blessing and curse. Maybe that’s why the NRA responds to murder with a call for more guns—muscle memory. Maybe that’s why Republicans want to shield the rich from reasonable taxation and why Fox News invents a war on Christmas every year—muscle memory. Maybe that’s why anything bad that happens results in focused media frenzy, a search for the guilty (or anyone with a photo), and a call for more laws. Muscle memory.
I can buy a new keyboard, but I’m not likely to try to look at it more often. My fingers already know that route. And while I want to grow muscle memory for the chords and notes on my guitar fretboard, I also want to pay more attention in 2013. Because muscle memory is not the answer to every question in life. Some things deserve a fresh look from a different perspective.
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Image credit: Elisabet Sienstra via 2headedsnake
(Worth Reading) Through Thickets of Darkness: Solstice Thoughts
Judith Hougen, over at Coracle Journeys, did a good job of celebrating human frailty.
Her post is worth reading.
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Peace for the Promiscuous Reader
Coming to grips with one’s naughty habits
By my favorite, well-lit chair are stacks of books. Actually five stacks. Why stacks of books? It’s a quirk of borrowing—one library allows me three weeks (six when I renew, which I usually do). Another library allows me three months or so (an amazing primary joy of teaching at a college, for which I am daily thankful).
In the past I’ve felt guilty for all these books lying around partially read. But yesterday I realized, “No, this might be what my reading life looks like. Maybe reform is not possible.” (Maybe reform is not needed?)
I currently adhere to the discipline of reading one book (at a time) straight through, from cover to cover. Right now I’m reading “The Dignity of Difference” by Jonathan Sacks which is an amazing, readable argument for why anyone should care about the outsider. I am completely intrigued by how Sacks pits Moses against Plato in a knock-down, drag out fight on purity vs. practicality. OK, yes, I’m also reading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow on the fiction side of the equation.
“Adhere to the discipline” because it is easy to fool myself into thinking I’m reading them all from cover to cover. I’m not. Many are there for research on this notion of the Other (Levinas) and various philosophical/theological tangents arising from an easily distracted mind. Some are there because of something I want to learn about or to try to backfill one of the many holes in my education. But with the cover-to-cover book, I also try to finish at least a chapter at each sitting.
So I read one fiction/non-fiction book from cover to cover as I sample from many. And then I pick the next cover-to-cover book from those I am sampling.
And I’m OK with that.
I’m OK with that because of a tweet from John Wilson (@jwilson1812) about his reading habits. As editor of Books & Culture, I imagine his office and home (Garage? Car? Boat? Scooter?) awash in tidal waves of book stacks. And that makes me feel not so bad.
But, well, judge me if you must.
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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.
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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.
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conversation is an engine 