EXPECT LESS FROM TECHNOLOGY AND MORE FROM PEOPLE1
Ask people what they remember most about the early 1990s and they will likely say the Internet. That was when we first discovered there was something online for everyone. Singles found new ways to meet people. Music lovers found new songs and rediscovered old favorites. It got a lot easier to talk to people on the other side of the world, to find a hotel, to order a book, and to follow the news.
Technological advances ushered in an exhilarating new world, and a steady stream of innovations expanded the boundaries of that world. Our phones got faster, smaller, and smarter, as did our computers. The Internet grew bigger and more sophisticated. Social media sprang up, our contacts swelled out, and the cost of connecting spiraled down. But somewhere along the way, we started drifting away from a people-centered view of communication toward an approach that’s increasingly centered on technology.
Twenty years ago, if I’d asked people to close their eyes and think about “communication,” they would have likely described conversations, telephone calls, speeches, and possibly handwritten letters (remember those?). If I asked the same question today, the dominant images would probably include tablets and smartphones, text messages and social media platforms. The new additions are mostly asynchronous and mediated (that is, sent through a device) modes of communication. They are also ubiquitous. It’s emblematic of the shift toward technology that when a marketing expert recently tried to identify the sounds that impacted humans the most, two of the top three noises were from things and not people: the Intel chime, a laughing baby, and a vibrating phone.2
As devices have become increasingly prominent in our communication and in our lives, we’ve shifted toward a more technology-centered view of communication, even though the basic building block of human communication is still, and will always be, two people talking to each other (interpersonal communication).
The problem with a more tech-centered view of communication is that it encourages us to expect too much from our devices and too little from each other. We incorrectly assume that our devices can handle sophisticated communication encounters that they really can’t, and we don’t give ourselves and other people enough opportunities for the kinds of meaningful human interactions we really want. Until we restore a more people-centered approach to our communication, we will continue to feel unsatisfied and unfulfilled by our interactions, in spite of having the most powerful connection and transmission devices in human history right in the palm of our hands.
A tech-centered view of communication encourages five unrealistic communication expectations.
Unrealistic expectation #1. Our new and powerful devices have made communication easier.
Reality. Communication is as hard as—and maybe even harder than—it ever was.
In the heyday of the digital revolution, we were lulled into believing that communication was becoming easier because technology made it easier to communicate. But imperfection and misunderstanding can’t be engineered out of communication, which involves quirky, emotional, and unpredictable people. And all of our communication can’t be easy and expedient, because a great deal of it is complex and requires deliberation.
We communicate for many reasons besides the simple dissemination of information. We persuade, resolve conflict, commiserate, teach, discipline, and motivate. All these higher-order communication functions deteriorate when we prioritize speed and convenience. I create more conflicts than I solve when I approach a thorny interpersonal issue with expediency in mind. I become a less effective teacher when I cram in more information in less time. I’m less helpful as a supervisor when I give my direct reports performance feedback based on hasty conclusions drawn from distracted observations. And so on.
As our new devices facilitated virtually effortless lower-order communication, we mistakenly believed that higher-order communication was also getting easier. In reality, the digital revolution made sending and receiving messages easier, but understanding those messages is harder than ever. This leads to the second faulty expectation.
Unrealistic expectation #2. Better communication technologies mean better communication.
Reality. Our communication capabilities have raced ahead of our communication abilities. Our communication is getting worse.
We now communicate faster and in a greater volume than people can thoughtfully analyze, understand, and reply. Instead of gaining efficiency, we often fail to rise above the issues and the distractions that our hypercommunication and powerful gadgets bring.3 New smartphones are trumpeted for their ability to let us talk and surf the Internet simultaneously, even though that is a recipe for miscommunication. All too often, we are texting, typing, and talking right past each other.
Tools that were supposed to make our interactions better have actually fragmented our communication and scattered our mental bandwidth across multiple platforms. If I want to talk to Joe, I have to call his cell phone because he often ignores e-mails. Sam won’t reliably answer the phone, but he responds quickly to texts. Cam and Candy are best reached through a Facebook message, and Jim prefers instant messaging.4
Today we face the distinct possibility that communication—the very glue of civilization, and a source of primordial connection and enjoyment—is in danger of becoming a net negative in our lives. In spite of the amazing innovations of the digital revolution, our interactions are throwing off more problems, creating more confusion, and generating more trouble than ever before.
Unrealistic expectation #3. What I want to say is the most important part of communication.
Reality. What I want to say is only the beginning of the communication process.
The digital revolution’s promise that we can have communication however we want it, whenever we want it encourages a me-first approach to a process that’s fundamentally collaborative. This book is filled with ways to keep ego-centered impulses from distorting our communication, for one simple reason: What do I want to say? is usually, and naturally, our first communication thought. But without expending the effort to consider the other person’s perspective—How will my message impact him?—we can’t transition from I-based self-expression into we-based communication.
Communication scholars have struggled to help people move from a self-centered (personal) to a more collaborative, other-centered (interpersonal) view of communication for over a century. It’s normal for our first communication thought to be I-based (What do I want to say?), and this isn’t a problem as long as the next step is to take the other person’s perspective into account and start moving toward mutual understanding and the creation of shared meaning.
Unrealistic expectation #4. Communicating to an audience doesn’t require any special consideration.
Reality. Adding people makes communication harder.
As if the shift from What do I want to say? to How will my message impact him? wasn’t hard enough, the digital communication revolution came along and made mass communicators out of us all. We can send a single e-mail to all of our contacts, reply-to-all whenever we want, and forward messages to everyone we know. It’s never been easier for one person to communicate to large numbers of people—just click and go.
Consequently, we’ve thrown ourselves into mass communicating like it was no big deal, even though it requires us to consider multiple perspectives when we’ve historically had trouble considering even one perspective in addition to our own. The failure to consider another’s point of view or the impact of a message is one reason why so many social media postings feel more like someone is talking at us instead of talking with us. That’s exactly what’s happening.
Interpersonal communication and mass communication are usually different courses of study in academic programs, and for good reason: they are different. Having a conversation with your boss is different from addressing the staff. A discussion with one friend is different from a discussion with 200 of your friends.
The most appropriate channel for our message is not necessarily the channel that can reach the most people. Interpersonal messages seldom scale up for an audience without a loss of understanding, because a one-sized message can’t easily address multiple perspectives.
Unrealistic expectation #5. We’ve communicated once we hit the Send button.
Reality. We haven’t communicated until someone understands our message.
While there might be confusion about whether a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it makes a sound, there isn’t any question about whether a message falling on plugged ears or landing in a clogged inbox constitutes communication. If my social media post isn’t read, if my e-mail sits unopened under a stack of other messages, or if my text message is overlooked, I haven’t communicated.
And although we can technically say that communication has happened when someone reads our message, that’s not always sufficient either. We want people to understand our message—not just see or hear it—and we (usually) want them to add their thoughts and ideas. That’s the difference between sending and receiving messages and establishing real dialogue, enhancing understanding, and creating shared meaning. That’s how we move from hypercommunication to interpersonal communication. The communication we want is only just beginning after we hit the Send button.
A tech-centered view of communication encourages unrealistic expectations that have bedeviled the digital revolution to date. We fell in love with what our tools could do, but we lost sight of the people behind the tools. It’s time to turn that around. Our devices don’t possess the communication abilities we think they do, and people are capable of much, much more.
Years ago, I was consulting on an organizational change initiative. It was 3:30 p.m. on a Friday when I heard two senior executives, including the president, yelling at each other so loudly that everyone in the office could hear.
It put me in a tough spot as their communication consultant. Unless you’re trying to be heard in a crowded theater or at a Green Bay Packers football game, yelling always signals a communication failure. Conversational escalation—which causes relational damage—was happening. I was in that office to help them reduce their dysfunctional communication, and the boss had just demonstrated that yelling—the timeless marker of failed communication—was an acceptable conversational behavior.5
Employees wouldn’t have much motivation to improve their own communication as long as one of the most powerful influencers of their corporate culture was screaming at people.6 My job had just become a lot harder.
Three powerful psychological forces—reciprocity, social proof, and conversational matching—make modeling the behaviors we desire essential if we want to maintain high communication expectations in our organizations and in our relationships. These mutual behaviors can facilitate—or derail—conversations.
Reciprocity means that our behaviors often trigger similar behaviors in others. For example, yelling at someone makes that person more likely to yell in return, laughter often causes the other person to laugh, and forgiveness and tolerance usually come back to you.
Social proof (also known as the copycat effect or as mimicry) is a psychological process that occurs in uncertain situations. When we aren’t sure about appropriate behaviors, we’re susceptible to external cues.7 This is why most people look around a meeting room and quickly adopt the behaviors of others. If everyone is buried in their digital devices, the newcomer pulls out hers; if people are talking to each other, she looks to join a conversation; if the room is silent and people are staring at a written agenda, she’ll do the same.
The third force that makes our own behavior so important in setting positive communication expectations is conversational matching. In general, humans prefer balanced conversations, where both people talk about as loudly, speak at about the same rate of speed, and pause between comments for about the same amount of time.8 Talking too quickly puts pressure on the other person to do the same; long pauses between responses are often matched, and loud speaking yields the same in return. Mirror neurons—neurons in the brain thought to influence imitating behaviors—likely play a role in all three of these processes, and research on the matter is ongoing.9
If you model appropriate communication patterns, each of these psychological forces—reciprocity, social proof, and conversational matching—will exert pressure on your conversational partner to talk and act like you. This means we have to step up our own communication behaviors to get more of what we want in return.
In one of social psychology’s most famous experiments, elementary school teachers were told that among a group of incoming students, a small number had scored high on a recently administered intelligence test. The teachers were told which of their students scored in the top twentieth percentile and were thus more likely to “spurt” or “bloom” academically during the school year.10
In fact, the names of the “bloomers” had been chosen randomly by psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson without regard to their test scores.11
By year’s end, though, bloomers in the first and second grades were scoring significantly higher than other students on intelligence tests. The teachers’ heightened expectations of the students had given rise to a real performance spurt.12
The results of this research, not surprisingly, caused a stir in educational policy circles and among scientists. It suggested that at least some of a student’s performance is impacted by how a teacher thinks the student will perform. The experiment documented what became known as the Pygmalion effect, which occurs when expectations influence actual performance.13 The Pygmalion effect has an important implication for our interpersonal communication: we can’t afford to have low communication expectations. Having high expectations for how we relate to each other isn’t wishful thinking—it’s pragmatic, self-fulfilling thinking.
The fact is that humans are eminently capable of the kinds of productive and meaningful communication that builds strong relationships and fosters interpersonal connections. To get started, we need higher communication expectations of one another and a more realistic sense of what our communication devices can do. In addition, these four reminders will help us restore a more people-centered communication approach:
1. Don’t let a lower-order interruption trump an ongoing conversation. The conversation you are having right now is your priority, so don’t let your buzzing phone disrupt it. Minimize distractions so you can concentrate, especially when you are engaged in a more challenging higher-order interaction.
2. Take the other person’s perspective. Perspective taking elevates your thinking from the personal to the interpersonal level. Before you speak or hit the Send button, consider the potential impact of your message on the receiver.
3. Don’t jump up to mass communication inappropriately. Meaningful interpersonal messages don’t scale up to mass channels effectively. Keep interpersonal messages private and direct.
4. Make understanding a priority. It’s not communication if the other person doesn’t understand. Expedient communication, short on thought and on content, often perplexes people.
It’s time to expect less from our devices and more from each other. That’s how we’ll reestablish communication to its rightful place in our lives as less of a burden and more of a gift. And that’s how we’ll have more of the conversations that build strong and productive relationships.