Communicating against the odds

Humans can get through to each other in the most unlikely situations. In crises or random encounters, it sometimes doesn’t matter if we don’t share a culture, or even a language.

So how is it that communication at work can get so scrambled, even with a common culture and language?

And what instinct drives us in those other, special times, that we can use in daily work?

You’re probably a person who notices gaps in communication. You wouldn’t be reading this otherwise.

When do you notice these gaps? It could be after a meeting, comparing impressions with colleagues, where you picked up something they missed.

Or when you realize that something you said or wrote has been misunderstood. Sometimes people even hear the opposite of what you meant! It happens because they bring their own experience and context to every message. As do we all. That’s normal communication! But it’s frustrating.

And you might wonder if all work has to be like this. How is it that you can share a work culture and a language, that you can even work in the same company or team as someone, and still have such gaps in getting through to each other?

For one thing, even when we speak the same official language, we don’t always mean the same thing by our words. Take the word “strategy”, as in this still-slightly-painful case from some years ago:

As product leader, I’d been asked to come up with a new direction that could take the product out of its comfortable box and into bigger opportunities, solving bigger challenges. With a bit of lateral thinking, and lots of help from colleagues, I had a direction. It remained to run it by the VP in charge of corporate strategy.

But that word — strategy — was perhaps the first barrier. For me it meant a creative response to specific circumstances, a strategic design in the Richard Rumelt sense*. For the VP, “strategy” meant the methodical application of case studies and financial modeling to derive a reassuring plan. Though she and I were both university-educated, Southern Brits, in the same company, we were separated by a common language.

This linguistic barrier went beyond dictionary definitions, to the pictures that words evoked in our minds. When I talked about “opportunity”, I was pointing in the direction of problems that a software solution could solve, if the vendor and implementor and customer had the right kind of vision for how to do it. “Opportunity”, to the VP, meant revenue predictions over the next three years. Of course, there should be a connection: the first kind of opportunity should lead to the second. But I didn’t join the dots enough for the VP; nor was she interested enough to learn how this kind of solution could lead to revenue.

So despite us being native speakers of English, in the same company, our use of language reflected our different sub-cultures: mine of solution design; hers of financial modeling.

For these reasons, communication didn’t happen that time. It wasn’t that the VP even disagreed with me — she simply didn’t engage to the level of seeing the idea. The words I used didn’t compute. And so she didn’t support it.

For what it’s worth, the product direction did work out eventually, though it took some twists and turns to really take root. And I got better at financial modeling.

But the right and wrong isn’t my point here: this is just an example like so many where communication fails to happen.

Should we leave things there? That different roles talk and think in different ways, and that’s how it has to be at work?

Do we go on gliding through the fog, waving incoherently at each other and calling that “communication”?

If you’re still reading this, I guess you won’t settle for that 😊. You, like me, care about doing good work, and at the very least, respecting the humans around us enough to try for better interactions.

Over the last few months, I thought about this a lot. I could see that words got in the way sometimes. But I kept contrasting that with times when people from different backgrounds and even languages would find ways to communicate. With words, or signs, or at least some recognition of a shared situation.

I thought about random encounters with people when traveling, or when someone needed help. Somehow in the moment, an instinct to communicate came in, and did its work.

(Most moments like this aren’t photographed. But here are a few — click the image to understand what’s going on.)

My friend Eric customized two motorbikes for me, despite our language gap at the time

Some fishermen I met in southern Taiwan, the port of Donggang I think.

Taipei jazz cafe. Close listening and improvisation is a bit like verbal language.

Here is a great case, which “Language Game” authors Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater use to show how a drive to communicate builds common language, starting from zero. What factors can you spot that drive communication here?

About two and a half centuries ago,

Captain Cook and his fellow explorers were anchored at the Bay of Good Success, past the southern tip of Argentina, just across the water from Antarctica. It was mid-summer there, January, but the land didn’t look very welcoming. (Indeed, two of Cook’s men froze to death there a couple of days later!)

And then, in the distance they saw a group of about 30 people on a beach, looking back at them. They weren’t wearing many clothes. They looked like a tough bunch. Cook had heard (in correctly) that in these parts, people ate people. Was this group the cannibals?

What would you do? Would you go to meet the locals?

Cook and his men, following their exploring spirit, moved closer into the bay. Seeing the locals retreating, Cook decided to land with just two colleagues, Joseph Banks and Dr Solander. From the residents, two moved forward in return. They held big sticks. Would this encounter be short and bloody?

Then, the two locals held up their sticks in a dramatic gesture, and threw them to the side. Trusting that this was a peaceful sign, Cook and his colleagues went on up the beach towards them. Cook’s interpretation was correct. The locals received them, as Banks wrote, “with many uncouth signs of friendship”.

Gifts were exchanged, and three of the bay people accepted an invitation to visit Cook’s ship, the Endeavour. They communicated with the explorers through signs, and simple words too. Banks picked up a little vocabulary. The locals — later identified as being from the Haush group — ate some meat, and even tried some brandy, though didn’t enjoy it. (It’s not recorded whether they felt the brandy was an “uncouth sign of friendship”.**)

So, what factors let Cook and the Haush communicate, when they didn’t share a language or a culture?

One thing these different groups had in common: attention. There wasn’t any mobile data available in Tierra Del Fuego at the time! We can be confident that Cook and his colleagues were not responding to messages at the same time as advancing towards the Haush. Also, the fear of being eaten or shot respectively helped focus their minds.

Seriously: attention is a must for serious communication. Without it, you don’t have a chance. I’ve labored that point elsewhere so we can skip the lecture here.

But attention on its own is not enough. I’ve been in meetings and calls where user researchers look engaged, where they ask questions that sound open, and where they still come away missing key signs from the interview subjects. Sometimes I’ve been the one missing obvious signs in front of me***.

So, what else could make an encounter between two very different groups a success? Perhaps, sharing some goals.

Cook’s men and the Haush shared a goal of survival, of course. The gradual letting down of defences helped them communicate towards that common goal. But if short-term survival was the only goal, they probably wouldn’t have risked the encounter. Cook would have sailed off, or the Haush would have retreated to the woods.

But they each had something else they wanted from each other. The Haush had some previous experience of interactions with Europeans, who they knew might bring gifts.

Cook’s group was less interested in getting physical goods, and more in knowledge. They wanted to learn about the locals. It was not their main goal, but they definitely felt a responsibility to document the lands and people they found.

These goals drove Cook and the Haush to communicate, despite their lack of a shared language or culture. And, though their encounter was over in a day, so not much language built up between them, we can assume that if they had had a reason to stay communicating with each other, they would certainly have built a sophisticated common language somehow. Mostly likely some mix of English and the Haush language, with fresh additions over time.

Christiansen and Chater use this case to show how language starts, and they cite many examples of languages developing organically in different places at different times. The languages may be spoken or signed. They grow as people work out meanings together naturally, formal grammar and efficient shortcuts emerging naturally, without some kind of central governance committee overseeing things (sorry, grammar pedants!)

An easy experiment you can try yourself: play charades with family or friends, a few days in a row. In the game of charades, the group guesses a word that’s acted out by one player, and that player can’t speak. The player can nod and use other interactions. As the group plays more rounds, and as they play charades on subsequent occasions, they gradually build a shared acting-language.

From The Language Game:

So — language is not a barrier but a way to build more communication, a tool that we constantly reshape to fit our needs.

Which means we can’t blame language (at least not entirely) when we don’t get through to each other at work.

Thinking again about that strategy VP — while language usage and business role/subculture played a part in hurting communication, the real killers were the two factors I’ve just mentioned: attention and goals.

1. Attention. She was busy, her attention split, and there was little chance to interact with her and refine meaning. The strategy document I wrote was a one-shot thing. No chance to re-align and try again. It missed, and so failed.
   

2. Shared goals. Our overt goals were shared (grow the business!) But it turned out later that our timescales were quite different — hers was much shorter, as some later corporate changes made clear. And, as discussed, our understanding of how to meet those goals was very different.

In normal working life, paying attention and sharing goals helps a lot of my communication succeed. Often it is worth mentioning the shared goals at the start of a conversation or message. If those goals aren’t obvious, it’s worth spelling them out.

Perhaps those are the practical takeaways from this post — to clear mental and physical space, to pay attention, and to establish shared goals. Here, let me make them more takeaway-like:

1. Clear space! 🧹

2. Pay attention!! 👂 👁️

3. Spell out goals!!! 🥍 🥅 🥳

(Perhaps I should twist them into an acronym?)

But actually these are not the main point of this post. Because what the Cook & Haush story reminds me, more than these obvious factors, is that communication is always an encounter between humans, with all our complexity and unpredictability. And we can only benefit from an encounter if we are open to it.

As Cook, Banks, Solander, and two of the Haush faced each other, they were alert, a little scared, but also curious. Curiosity being that instinct to find out about the world and each other that helps us survive, thrive, and really communicate.

It’s only with curiosity that we have space to learn something new.

So it’s quite odd that work often seems to dull our curiosity. I don’t know why, but perhaps the mechanical way we work can do that. If day after day we’re exchanging data, pushing buttons for rewards, then we become docile, caged, and less capable of learning and improving.

Some work messages really are just data, of course. A party coming up? List the place, time, any dress expectations, dietary and travel arrangements, and you’re done. Pay half an eye’s attention to that message, and you’re close enough.

But so often, the things we need to communicate are not simple at all, no matter how we try to make them seem so.

For example, as a product leader, I can stick a bullet on a slide about a small feature for others to build. But there could be several ways to build the feature, depending on how it should fit with the rest of the product, current and future. There can be various costs and risks with different approaches. There can be a history of trying it that I might not know. And, my reasons for wanting the feature might change things (perhaps I should really hear about the reasons against, too!)

So I can write my simple bullet, I can repeat it, I can shout it if I want to be that kind of leader … but that doesn’t help get across all that should be communicated. To get that across, I need to be curious.

I need to listen openly to my “audience”. Not whether they can parrot my message five minutes after I’ve delivered it. But to them as people, at least in the current context. Including their fears and expectations, and other situational factors, even politics, that might influence the building of the feature. Actually, the curious listening should have started well before I told someone to build a feature (I remind myself).

But we just seem to lose that sense of curiosity in much of work, exchanging data, not really engaging.

In times of crisis, people do come together more, finding out about each other’s work in order to overcome a common challenge. That’s the equivalent of being stuck in an elevator together — that dropping of barriers when the normal routine breaks down. The people you barely recognize or even dislike, who turn out to be great allies in a tight situation.

And in “normal” work life? What can bring us back to that fellow feeling?

Sometimes it just happens, unexpected. In a conversation, our mental noise drops away and we are more aware than normal of the other person as person, with hopes and needs as real as our own.

To get there can take a little courage, though. If there are other people’s worlds as real as our own, what is to say that ours is most important any more? Or even that our way of perceiving the world is the right one? There are strange lands to explore much closer than Tierra Del Fuego — they are right across the office, or in our Zoom app.

I mean — people are interesting! Isn’t that partly why we become managers?

The more we talk about that openness, the more we think we know it, the less open we become. So I don’t want to write much more. But this one phrase helps me remember the right kind of stance:

That question comes from investor Graham Duncan, who has a thoughtful blog about working relationships. The question describes his stance towards candidates in hiring interviews. The stance came first; the wording later.

Whether I’m communicating in speech or writing, in the same room or remote, this phrase reminds me to pay attention to the other person’s situation, hopes, and goals.

While interviewing, Duncan does use mental frameworks to help him analyse the candidate quickly. But like every great listener, he sees the limitations of such frameworks too.

And that’s all this post is about really. There are ever so many technical reasons why communication might be hard. And some technical countermeasures too, to make it better. But if we care enough real talk and meaningful messages, we should let go from time to time. Just be open and a little curious about the people we encounter at work. Try some words, and if they don’t work, try others.

What’s to lose? A whole lot maybe! A whole lot of junk that blocks the view between us and our fellow humans.

Over to you

Have you experienced direct communication in unusual or unlikely situations? And how do you make the space to really tune in to others at work? I’d love to hear, and I’m sure your experiences would help others too.

More reading

* For Richard Rumelt’s approach to strategy as design, see his “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” for the general idea, and “The Crux” for some guidance on how to do that yourself. (Though to just follow the processes he describes is not enough for real creative ingenuity — that only comes from mindset and experience.)

** For first-hand accounts of Cook’s encounter with the Haush, see links here: https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20110403102250/http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/maps/17690120.html

*** On the subject of “people in product management missing things in front of their faces” — something which, ahem, I would know nothing about — Ximena Vengochea gives a great example in Listen Like You Mean It. A product manager is super excited about a voice-activated shopping feature in the app he is responsible for. In a user research interview, when the subject likes the app, he takes that as confirmation that she likes the voice activation feature.

But Ximena, the UX researcher running the interview, is not so sure. She thinks that the subject would prefer more information about the product than the voice feature would provide. So she asks more questions, skillfully posed to see whether the subject saw the voice feature as convenient, or would ever consider using it.

And indeed, the subject says “oh no”, she would never use it. For the product manager, that was tough to hear, but of course such feedback is invaluable in understanding who would use a feature and how.