I’m going to pre-apologize for being super nerdy, bear with me, it’s my training. Information theory basically says that when message complexity increases or the channel narrows, errors will increase as well. And to fend that off, you deploy error correction strategies. In layman’s terms this means that when the information you want to get across is a lot or complicated. Or when you have limited ways of communicating; you are bound to have more problems getting your message across. And you need to account for that.
What seems obvious to electrical and software engineers seems not so obvious IRL. This nerdy stuff is true. As you grow older, the burden of communication increases. When you’re a kid, you start by communicating what you want and what you need. And then graduate to explaining your wants/needs to your parents and negotiating with them. Soon you have to evolve negotiating play with other kids. Add your teacher and mentors. Soon you’re including employers in the mix; girlfriends, wives, extended family and your own kids. And the weird thing is that the level of difficulty keeps increasing because at every point the stakes are higher than the last time you had breath. All of this constant communication brings the possibility of being misunderstood. And the price of being misunderstood gets expensive because the stakes are higher now and getting higher every day.
I was chatting with my CEO the other day. Hours after I was agonizing about whether something I mentioned was too racial for what I intended. Just intention is no longer enough, in my role you have to have the presence of mind to deliver communication like a surgeon or a ballet dancer – with precise control and to achieve the right impression. The margin for error is so small sometimes (cumulatively, you do get to slip up now and then).
But it’s not just career stuff. Your personal life is even more pressing. My own communication style verges on the blunt and direct. I’m sure people who don’t know me well could describe me as curt and impatient. In my head I charitably refer to it as curmudgeonly. I can be charming but for me that’s a choice and not an ‘always on’ situation. The point being that those close to you are even more worthy of care and attention about your style and content of communication. Especially since they constantly stay in proximity to your bullshit and vacuum up an inordinate amount of your vocal and expressive emissions. And here’s the rub – nonverbal communication also becomes crazy important to the health of your relationships. And who can keep that s&@! together all the time amiright?
However, this blog post isn’t to burden you with one more of the many terrors of the grown up life. Instead it offers a reprieve. One thing I’ve crystalized as a good communication strategy to help me cope with communication complexity is Telegraphing:
a. To make known (a feeling or an attitude, for example) by nonverbal means: telegraphed her derision with a smirk.
b. To make known (an intended action, for example) in advance or unintentionally: By massing troops on the border, the enemy telegraphed its intended invasion to the target country.
In electronics, once error is introduced into systems, they can stop working. Imagine your fancy large screen TV winking out occasionally in the middle of a high definition broadcast; the digital equivalent of a signal storm. Remember that show is usually transmitted from half a world away on satellites, fiber and finally cable. For YouTube, its coming over the same network where your kids are streaming Call of Duty on the Xbox 360. To deal with this, information systems use error correction strategies. They have ways for the sender and the receiver to check to make sure the signal that is received is the one that was sent. Either they do it through talking to each other (called a handshake) or including a part of the signal that will change if there are errors and by changing lets you know that the rest may be inaccurate (called a checksum). In reality information systems usually contain both strategies at multiple layers in order to make sure Tom Brady beats Eli Manning in glorious high definition on your Tee vee.
Telegraphing is a bit like error correction. The kind of telegraphing I advocate is the verbal kind. The conversion of non-verbal cues into explicit verbal statements. This sort of follows the principle of ‘no surprises’. With Telegraphing I try to explicitly remove any of the various vacuums that can be left in the detritus of daily communication – your attitude, your intentions, your frame of mind, the meaning of your elevated voice range, etc. Usually in personal life it looks like the following: “My voice may be a bit angry because I’m feeling a bit attacked right now but …” or “This is coming out more confidently than I intend….”. At work I even try to telegraph things that would take months to learn about me that are core to my style but I can’t afford to be discovered organically: “I have a resting bitch face when I’m trying to solve a problem, I get pensive. It’s nothing personal, I still like you when I get like that…” or “My style is direct and questioning. I’m not attacking you, just really getting into the problem, ok?”. Even in intimate situations, Telegraphing can be a good way to have a good relationship and make sure you get an affirmative ‘yes’; “Here’s what I am going to do to you…”. For kids here’s an example of what works – “…my voice is raised right now because I’m really angry but I still love you.”
Half the problem in communication is vacuums – people using past history or their own orientation to draw conclusions about intentions, tone and style. Things that can be pretty involuntary to most people except maybe actors and psychopaths. I find that Telegraphing gives me a fighting chance to head off some of these vacuums. Obviously good communication is not just up to us, it takes at least two. But explicitly acknowledging that its hard and deploying human forward error correction will help you cope.
I hope. What do I know?!, this stuff is hard.
