Or why we suck at it right now
Episode 39 of the Make Saints podcast: “The Second Biggest Challenge to Communication”
the episode script
“I don’t know what’s going on!”
That phrase is both heartbreaking and infuriating. And it’s incredibly common.
Sometimes we say it because of all the things: the world is confusing. And it can be all too much. And we really don’t know what’s going on.
Sometimes we say it because we feel like we’ve missed something. Something we should have known.
“I don’t know what’s going on!” is a kind of call for help. And how we receive that call is to assume that there is a communication problem somewhere.
There is. It’s just not at all like we think.
The Second Biggest Challenge to Communication
I started this conversation about communication last week. You should check that one out, too.
The biggest challenge we have with communicating with one another right now isn’t the pandemic or technology specifically. It’s that we misunderstand the nature of communication, apply the wrong kinds of communication to a situation, and develop unrealistic expectations for one another.
These conditions didn’t start in March 2020, nor do they stem from Facebook. They start with the written word and universal literacy.
The biggest challenge of communication today is that we have both synchronous and asynchronous communication and act like they are the same.
So people treat texts, Slack, and social media like they are active tools for communication rather than passive. As if both parties are there at the same time.
That’s the biggest challenge. Now here’s the second biggest challenge.
Communication is like the tango. It takes two.
I think we all get this at the highest level. It’s just, by the time it gets down to us, where we live, in our situation, we’ve lost the understanding entirely. Because we act like it is something people do to us.
Communication isn’t anything if there isn’t at least a speaker and a hearer. That’s the minimum.
And make note that there are at least those two jobs: someone speaking and someone hearing. That’s going to be important later.
There are also two general types of communication.
- Macro
- Micro
Another way to think about these two types is
- Broadcast
- Dialogue
Macro-communication is most often mass communication. Because we are trying to speak to as many people as possible. So, without a huge buildout in infrastructure, this means we broadcast our message. Think: advertising. Billboards, commercials, targeted mailings, newsletters, podcasts.
These are situations in which a person has something to say and hopes to reach as many people as they can.
And how do we react to mass communication?
If it is something we want, like a favorite show, we sit down and watch it. But most often, we treat everything else like a commercial.
And what does that mean?
We ignore it.
Have you ever heard the old saying that you have to say something seven times before people start to remember it? You may have also heard that the number is now up to twenty.
They aren’t saying that listeners are stupid. They’re saying we have filters. When we hear mass communication, broadcasting, we hear it all like its advertisers trying to sell us something. It all goes into the proverbial Spam Folder.
In essence, we’ve all developed special techniques to not listen to people.
Now, keep that in mind when we venture into the other kind of communication: micro.
Unlike communication on the macro-level, communication on the micro-level is fundamentally different.
Micro-communication is peer-to-peer.
It’s dialogue. It isn’t one person broadcasting to the world which has developed incredible filters to avoid listening to 99% of what comes in. It is one-on-one, two-way communication.
This can also happen in small groups in which communication is always back and forth.
Now, in a classroom, a lecture is like a broadcast. It is all one-way communication. But when the lecturer opens things up for questions or dialogue, it becomes a whole other beast. A fundamentally different thing.
Or think of church. The standard sermon is a broadcast. Until the preacher invites dialogue. Or the preacher talks to people one-on-one afterward about what they’ve said. Then, the macro becomes the micro.
Miscommunication
See how we use this one word: communication: to mean one person blathering on and also people talking? At the most basic level, these are total opposite concepts which are often utterly incompatible. And yet we call them both: communication.
Now remember when I said earlier that there are essentially two jobs in communication: speaking and hearing? Here’s where this is important.
If we mistake communication for broadcasting, then one person’s job is only to speak and another’s is to hear.
Or, to put it another way, if we think of any kind of communication as macro-communication, then there is only ever a speaker and a bunch of hearers.
The father talks and the rest of the house listens. That’s it.
It means that the rest of the family has no voice. And more importantly, no place. So we can only be in the know when another speaks. But we also have no way of making them speak. We are, then, only passive receivers of another’s communication to us.
And yet that is almost never true about the organizations we are in. Or what we want the organization to look like.
This is our biggest mistake!
We act like our organizations have designated speakers and we are the designated hearers. And because we use the macro-communication framework, we utilize our sophisticated means of filtering to avoid listening to them anyway.
In organizations like churches, Girl Scouts, or your family, a person you care about shouldn’t have to say something to you twenty times before you stop filtering them out.
Imagine telling a story to your spouse nineteen times and then the twentieth time, they finally listen? Does any of that feel good? Do we feel like we’re in a loving relationship with someone when, between the time you both get home from work, they have to remind you to pick up the groceries every 20 minutes before going to bed before you say “I’ll put that in my phone for tomorrow”?
I’m calling this the second biggest challenge to communication, but I think it is just as significant. Because when we treat all communication like a broadcast, it means none of us is ever responsible for actually listening to the person next to us.
And nine times out of ten, when people say there’s a problem with communication, it is when a person has designated themselves as a hearer and then didn’t hear about a thing. And, of course, they never tried to ask about it or engage with it earlier.
This is a podcast.
One-way-communication. I’m not really inviting dialogue. I’m offering insight out into the ether and hoping someone hears me. This is totally a broadcast example.
So take that with a grain of salt.
And I am also not throwing people under the bus for not being good listeners. That is not at all what I’m saying. I’m trying to say the opposite.
I’m saying people treat themselves like listeners when they are supposed to be dialogue partners. And not knowing what is going on is often the result of that.
As a podcaster, I’m trying to be heard by a bunch of people. But when we get to know each other: on Twitter or in real life: we can communicate more effectively with each other.
At the micro-level, communication is never just broadcasting. It is the land of dialogue and back-and-forth. This is essential!
Think of the impact on your family or on the church: all members are already in! I’m not selling you on being a part of this or Jesus! Communication with insiders isn’t marketing. So we should more naturally assume a posture of dialogue and peer-to-peer communication.
Because communication doesn’t just require two people. It requires us all to utilize both speaking and listening skills. And we have a habit of pretending we don’t need to use them both.