“The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.”

If Shaw is right, what can we do about it? We spend over half of our working life, and a considerable portion of all our waking hours, engaged in some form or another of communication, yet for all our practice most of us seem to be very poor at it. The problem, I think, is that it’s hard to learn from your mistakes when you don’t know you’re making them.

I’ve often watched and listened to someone try valiantly to make some critical point about which they are both passionate and informed, and then when I talk with their audience immediately afterwards I’ve discovered that almost no one got it. I’ve been equally astonished at some of the comments and e-mails my weblog articles have provoked that indicate the reader has not understood in the least the point I was trying to make.

But I’m less stressed and self-critical about that than I used to be, because I’ve learned that the miscommunication often wasn’t my (or anyone’s) fault. I’ve come to appreciate that there are five major hurdles to effective communication, and you have to vault them all or your communication will fail. Here they are:

1. Your point must be explainable using language. This might seem obvious, but most of our important life learnings are not taught through language. We learn for the most part by doing (and by making mistakes), not by listening to someone tell us something. Try to explain to someone (or write a manual to explain) how to ride a bicycle. Try to describe the difference in taste (or smell!) between a Merlot and a Shiraz. Much of our knowledge is instinctive, and much of what we learn is subconscious or unconscious. The comprehension ‘bandwidth’ of oral and written language is surprisingly narrow, and language is much better at conveying some things than others. Language itself is an artificial construct, a feeble model to try to depict reality abstractly. What’s worse, we may have a shared vocabulary of no more than a few hundred words with our audience, and their subjective connotationof many of these shared words may be completely different from ours. I once listened to two people on a train argue vociferously for an hour over what strategy their organization should pursue, only to discover that they had a completely different idea of what the word ‘strategy’ meant.  Why should we be so surprised at language’s limitations? There are a variety of devices that can be used to push the idea you want to communicate across the line from incomprehensible to comprehensible — most notably metaphors, analogies, stories and conversations (iterative communications) — but we would be best to realize that there are many explanations and teachings that language is just not equipped to do. When we love to teach, it is hard to acknowledge how much cannot be taught with language. Maslow said “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” (That’s a metaphor: did it help you understand this hurdle?)If your point is not explainable using language, take your audience out of the lecture hall and into the laboratory and show them instead.
2. You must be able to articulate your point clearly and persuasively. If you’ve vaulted the first hurdle, this next one is just as tough. There are two parts to it — clarity (rational appreciation) and persuasiveness (emotional appreciation). Although debates are supposedly models of persuasiveness, their focus is really on clarity. Clarity is tough enough to do, which is why the aforementioned techniques like stories and conversations and metaphors are so vital. Persuasiveness is a much subtler achievement, one that requires both personal conviction and an understanding of and empathy for the audience. I don’t know whether this is a lost art, or if we have just given up trying. I see a lot of sermonizing (in churches, on talk radio and in the editorial pages) but no real persuasion — sermonizers preach only to the choir, and change no one’s mind. They only reassure. True persuasion takes an appreciation of why the audience doesn’t agree with you now. It involves tact, diplomacy, consensus-seeking, compromise, and creative thinking. Such skills tax our patience and attention span. It is usually easier to use power and deceit than persuasion to get what you want. So it’s not surprising that those who want to change people’s minds are more preoccupied with getting power and perpetrating myths than with appreciating other perspectives and thinking through how to win people over in a non-coercive and non-manipulative way. The only way over these hurdles is through a ton of research (face to face as well as online), openness, attention skills, empathy and an enormous amount of practice.
3. Your audience must be ready to listen. If your audience is ignorant of the lessons of history, or complacent about the state of the world, trying to teach them about the importance of separation of church and state, or the steps they need to take to reduce their contribution to global warming, is like trying to teach calculus to pre-schoolers. Your audience needs an appropriate intellectual and conceptual foundation, and an informed sense of what is urgent and what is important, before they will be ready to listen. Daniel Dennett says “On any important topic, we tend to have a rough idea of what we believe to be true, and when someone provides the words we want to hear, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments”. If your audience doesn’t think they need what you’re selling, they probably won’t buy. Until your audience is ready for what you have to tell them, you’re wasting your time, and theirs. There’s only one thing you can do to overcome this hurdle — pick (and invite) your audience carefully.
4. Your audience must be listening. They’re probably not. They’re thinking about the cutie they met last night or sitting next to them, or what they have to do next, or what they’d rather be doing now than listening to you. They may be multi-tasking. they’re almost certainly daydreaming. So you need to get their attention. To do that you need to distract them from all their other distractions. The best way to do that is not by impressing them with the importance or urgency or cleverness of what you have to say. It’s to entertain them. The work ‘entertain’ means literally to hold attention. That means start, and pepper what you’re saying, with interesting stories, amusing anecdotes or jokes, and facts. That means talking in an animated manner. That means relating to the audience in a personal way that keeps them engaged — first names, eye contact, relating something about them. That means giving them something. That means paying attention to the audience, understanding why they’re not listening (perhaps because their sidebar conversation is more interesting, urgent or important to them), and drawing them gently but powerfully back in. That doesn’t mean criticizing them for not paying attention — that’s blaming them for your inability to keep their interest. How many of us are good at doing all this? I don’t see many hands. We need to go back to school on this, and learn how to be better presenters (even if we’re only ‘presenting’ to one person) — not just more prepared and articulate, more entertaining as well.
5. Your audience must be able to understand your point from their frame of reference. This is not the same as point 3. Even if they’re ready to listen, they’re coming to whatever you’re talking about from a very different place, and their brains, like yours, is wired by history of personal experience. Lakoff says: “Frames trump facts. All of our concepts are organized into conceptual structures called frames (which may include images and metaphors) and all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames.” That means even if they’re ready for your message, even if they need to hear what you have to say, you still need to say it in a way they can understand. How do you do that? Spend lots of time talking with people whose frames are very different from yours, and practice understanding their frames and explaining things in their context. And rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

All of this isn’t as hard as it might sound. We have an enormous number of opportunities to practice vaulting each of these hurdles every day. Mostly, we just need to pay better attention, be more conscious of what we’re doing wrong, and work on all those bad communication habits we’ve picked up. And these five hurdles apply as much to written communications as oral ones. As I worked through this list, I cringed at how much work I have to do at improving my own communications. So I’m guessing it must be a pretty good list.

What Makes a Group Collaborative?: We need a few hundred more responses to this survey before we can derive some meaningful results. If you have a few moments, please participate. Thanks!

Young People Changing the World: A group of young women have organized a youth conference on Global Warming in BC at the start of next month. If you’re young and passionate, read up and consider going — some sponsorships available.

Great Nature Photography: Fellow Canadian blogger and knowledge-worker Stephen Downes is also a terrific nature photographer. Take a look at his work.

Understanding the US Social Security Proposals: Here’s a wonderful 12-minute video from Arnold Lee that uses powerful graphics to explain this concept subject, and why “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Finally: an Honest Movie About Oil & Corporatism: The new low-budget (but star-packed) film The Deal is a fictional story about oil (and the end of it), politics and how the economic system is broken, that even a conservative could love. Let’s go see it and prove to Hollywood that honest, intelligent, courageous drama has an audience.

Share Your Footage: A new site NowPublic connects bloggers to photographers — find the story that goes with your photos or vice versa. Intriguing idea.

The Art of Edward Tufte: Here’s a fascinating site that shows how important good design is to understanding, and the elements and sources of such design. The graphic above is from his site, and shows a rock from a road project he was working on on the left, and an example of early cubist art by a Spanish artist on the right.

In his books and on Edge, he invites serious thinkers to bring others into the discussion. The tagline for the massive and generous website is “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” Most of the participants are scientists rather than philosophers or intellectuals from the arts and literary fields, and Brockman is unapologetic for this: He clearly believes that this is where the most important, integrative and expansive thinking is going on.

Last year I quoted extensively from the responses to one of his annual exercises called The World Question Center, when he challenged these “complex and sophisticated minds” to answer the question “What Is Your Law?” I still refer to these ‘laws’ frequently — they have altered my ways of thinking on many subjects.

So here’s the situation as I see it:

1. Very few people are doing much serious thinking.
2. Those people who are, tend to be cliquish, partly because so few are interested in what they are thinking about, partly because it’s so difficult for the rest of us, uninformed and unpracticed, to keep up. As a result, their ideas and their implications are largely closeted.
3. The media, which could help bridge the chasm between these people and those who could learn from these ideas and put them to effective use, are disinterested in doing so, partly because they don’t think their audience is interested, partly because they don’t think their audience is capable of understanding, and partly because their background is substantially in non-scientific disciplines and they are a little miffed at the idea that scientists are doing most of the important thinking.
4. The rich and powerful, who could actually employ the results of this important thinking, are convinced that preserving their wealth and influence has little to do with imagination and innovation, and so are disinclined to pay much attention to it, and many of them are also anti-intellectual by nature (just look at what they read in their ‘spare’ time) and hence incurious and skeptical of what little seriously novel thought they are exposed to.
5. The political elite is threatened by new ideas and also shares the anti-intellectualism of the rich and powerful, so unless the message can be captured in a sound bite they are likewise uninterested in exposing themselves or their citizenry to new ideas.
6. Modern conservatives are overwhelmingly populist, and hence like things simple and unchanging. They don’t do any serious thinking themselves and certainly don’t want anyone in their families exposed to such dangerous stuff.
7. Many modern progressives distrust technology (for perfectly understandable reasons) and by association distrust science, which they see as technology’s handmaiden. They don’t see the need for or practical value of serious intellectual discussion, don’t see it as actionable, and hence don’t see it as important. “The people have the answers, if only we would listen”.

The consequence of all this is that serious thinking is considered a pastime, an exercise of dubious value primarily for students in university. Beyond that, serious intellectual effort is only respected when it is tactical, applied in the context of a specific short-term task, towards achieving a known, practical goal. In a world of immense scarcity, in which time is the scarcest commodity of all, this vicious cycle of anti-intellectualism is perfectly understandable. It explains why Michael Jackson’s trial hogs all the news headlines, and the lion’s share of social discourse, while global warming and Darfur are substantially ignored. And when we are inclined to think about things we don’t want or like to think about, we find we are seriously out of practice (present company accepted, of course).

There was a time when people were motivated to invest in serious thinking and thoughtful social discourse. That was a time when people made more time for serious thinking and discussion, when people did most things for themselves, and when great ideas were respected and talked about. But today we are entrained with learned helplessness, convinced that understanding and sharing and coming up with great ideas and thinking seriously about them is a largely useless activity. And why would we want to invest a lot of precious time to study and understand something merely interesting?

The legacy media seem determined to abrogate their responsibility to inform and engage the public on matters that are important,especially when they are complicated and make the public uncomfortable. So it falls on our shoulders, as the alternative media, to be the advocates for the truth, and to assume that responsibility. I believe it is essential that we bloggers tone down the jargon and the ‘in’ conversations, and the rhetoric and partisanship, and ratchet up the information and thought leadership and conversation and debate in our online journals, to reach a much wider and under-served audience, and hence to fill that void.