HYPERCOMMUNICATION IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION
Long ago when the king of Persia became very sick, doctors told him that the only thing that could cure him was to drink the milk of a lioness.1 Messengers went throughout the land telling the people that whoever brought the king milk from a lioness would be richly rewarded.
A man named Mordechai found a lioness with three cubs, and after feeding her for days, he was able to carefully milk her.
But on his way to the palace, the different parts of his body started an argument, with each part bragging about how important it was. The eyes said they were most important because they spotted the lioness. The ears said it was they who heard the lioness growl in the tall bushes. The feet bragged that they were able to reach the lioness, and the hands said that they were the most important because they put the milk in the jar.
“I think—,” the tongue began. But the others hushed him. “You’re always talking,” they scolded. “You had nothing to do with any of this.”
When Mordechai arrived at the palace with the milk, he was immediately brought before the king.
“Your Majesty, I have brought what you asked for. Here,” Mordechai said, holding up the jar, “is the milk of a baboon that—.”
“What? Baboon milk!” shouted the king. “How dare you mock your king! Take him out and hang him!” the king commanded his soldiers.
Now, the various parts of Mordechai’s body were terrified.
The eyes could see the hangman’s noose outside the palace. The ears could hear the order for the hangman to get ready. The hands could feel the grip of the soldiers. And the feet knew there was nowhere to run.
“Do you understand now?” asked the tongue. “With one word, and in one second, I can change what all of you have worked so hard to do for days. Which one of us is the most important part of the body now?”
“You are most important,” the other parts of the body agreed. “Please help us.”
“Your Majesty,” Mordechai called out, “I was so anxious for you to receive the milk that I stumbled over my words. This is the milk of a lioness. It will heal you.”
Something in Mordechai’s voice moved the king to believe him. The king drank the milk and became well again, and Mordechai received a wonderful reward.
But the tongue’s reward was even greater. From that time on, all the other parts of the body readily agreed: “The tongue has the greatest power to destroy a person, and also to save him.”
Of course, things have changed since Mordechai’s day. It’s reassuring that we aren’t likely to talk with someone who could have us hanged, but in our rush to embrace our exciting new communication devices, we lost sight of Mordechai’s time-honored lesson: our words have the power to save us or to destroy us.
We’ve always known that words are powerful. They shape the course and quality of our lives and of our societies. Our communication creates and sustains our relationships, and our relationships exert an outsized influence on our overall quality of life. Communication has consequences.
But Mordechai’s story also illuminates two other timeless qualities of communication: imperfectability and asymmetry.
When Mordechai said “baboon” instead of “lioness,” he highlighted communication’s imperfectability. Errors, slips, and misunderstandings happen whenever people interact. This has been the case since our ancestors started grunting at each other in the cave.
The king’s reaction to Mordechai’s error illustrates communication’s asymmetry. After days of diligent work to secure the lioness’s milk, it only took seconds for Mordechai to almost lose his head. Words build relationships slowly, but they can cause damage with lightning speed.
In the honeymoon of the digital revolution, we expanded the reach and the quantity of our already powerful words, while forgetting that communication is fundamentally imperfect and asymmetrical. The consequences are troubling, because although more communication doesn’t guarantee better communication, it does guarantee more errors because of communication’s fundamental imperfection. And asymmetry guarantees that those errors will cost us dearly. Paying less attention to more messages creates more problems than we can readily solve.
Samuel Johnson said over two centuries ago: “If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this, by saying many things to please him.”2 More recently, research has documented the magnitude of this asymmetry: it takes approximately five positive interactions to overcome the damage from one negative interaction.3 Our hypercommunicating creates errors faster than we can repair the relational damage.
Healthy, life-enriching relationships at work and at home are built one positive conversation at a time, over months and years. But even our most durable relationships can be seriously damaged in mere seconds of hasty, negative communication. This is why our conversational lodestar must always be to protect our underlying relationships from the asymmetrical damage of our powerful but imperfect words, while we slowly and steadily build up newer relationships with the colleagues, friends, and acquaintances in our lives.
The ability to connect with anyone, anytime, anywhere is a blessing of the digital revolution. It’s also a curse, because these capabilities encourage us to take advantage of instant self-expression with unremitting chatter.
What we don’t say is frequently more consequential than the words we choose. As the writer Harlan Miller said, “Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.”4 The same is true for all our relationships. Less talking provides the vital space that productive and meaningful conversations require.
During a break at a recent organizational facilitation session I was leading, an employee approached me for a private moment of conversation. He hadn’t spoken during the morning session, but he made up for lost time by launching into a spirited description about what he thought was ailing the company and what I should do about it. It only took a few seconds for me to realize that his analysis was significantly different from what my preliminary findings suggested, and while he continued his impassioned discourse, I lined up my counterarguments and what I should say to show him that he was wrong.
Before I launched into that rebuttal, however, I remembered that I was leading a listening session. My role wasn’t to correct him. I stifled my urge to talk and resigned myself to hearing the rest of his explanation.
As the employee finished detailing his version of the company’s troubles, an uneasy feeling came over me: what if he’s right? The more I mulled over his feedback, the more I realized that my initial assessment was off the mark and that he was correct. During a five-minute break, an employee dropped into my lap the answer to a problem his company had been struggling with for almost two years. And I almost talked right over it.
Less talking provides the space for more listening, and it’s amazing what people disclose when someone’s listening. Early in my consulting career, I felt a strong urge to try to say something insightful whenever there was a conversational pause. But after more than a few incidents like the one described above, I’ve become much more interested in the things that I might hear. Less talking made me a much better consultant.
Years ago, when I was an army officer, I was given temporary command of an infantry company during a night live-fire exercise. Toward the end of the exercise, a claymore mine malfunctioned and failed to detonate. It fell to me to determine if it was safe to continue or whether we should cancel the rest of the training due to the potential safety hazard posed by the unexploded claymore. It was probably harmless, but under the cover of darkness it was impossible to tell. I consulted with a few people and ultimately chose the safe route.
As word trickled down to the soldiers that the training was canceled, a senior sergeant, who had advised me earlier that the unexploded mine was probably harmless, came running up, shouting and waving his arms to get my attention.
“Sir, I can’t believe you canceled the training! That claymore’s a dud—it won’t hurt anybody!”
To prove his point, he ran out onto the hillside and proceeded to jump up and down on the partially exploded claymore, yelling, “See! See!”
Since he didn’t blow himself to smithereens, it was obvious to all the soldiers around us—who mercifully averted their gaze and pretended not to notice—that he was right about the claymore and I was wrong. I was embarrassed, and everything inside me wanted to shout right back at him. But the soldiers on the hill knew both of us well. They knew that I wasn’t a clueless officer and that the sergeant wasn’t normally prone to drama. We were both having a bad night. So instead of lashing out and making things worse, I choked back my words and started down the hill in silence.
I hadn’t gone 50 yards before the sergeant was at my side again.
“Sir, I am so sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I should be supporting you and making your life easier—not making things harder. I can’t believe I acted like that.”
Delighted to have the sergeant, a man I respected and liked, back to his normal self, I told him not to worry about it. We turned and walked down the hill together.
People have a wonderful capacity to recognize and change their own bad behavior and their problematic communication, but only if given space to do so. A quick response to someone else’s poor conversational choice enflames the underlying issue and denies the person any opportunity to self-correct. This is like giving a big push in the wrong direction after a single step down an undesirable path. Instead of reflexively responding after a conversational misstep, less talking provides the space for people to recover from their mistakes.
Quantity is no guarantee of quality in communication. The underlying mechanics of dialogue break down when we cram too many words into our conversations. Too much talking generates confusion, crowds out thoughtfulness, and encourages superficial interactions that are often unproductive, unfulfilling, and error prone.
It’s less, not more, talking that often facilitates an interpersonal connection. People require some space to absorb information, formulate their response, and deliver it, and this process repeats many times throughout a single conversation. Too many words create a barrier to understanding.
The more that words pile up, the harder it is for shared meaning to be created, and the more likely an interaction is to fail. Reducing the quantity of our words encourages understanding and increases the likelihood that our conversation might spark a genuine interpersonal connection.
In the movie A Thousand Words, Jack McCall is a big talker until he realizes that a magical tree in his yard is tracking his every word. A leaf falls off the tree with every word he says, and when the last leaf drops, both he and the tree will be goners. It takes McCall almost until the final leaf falls to realize that he’s talking himself into his grave, but you and I don’t have to wait until the relational reaper is tapping on our shoulders to learn the value of less talking.
The good news is that even though the three timeless qualities of communication—powerful, asymmetrical, and imperfect—have worked against us so far, two other timeless qualities of communication—primordial and vital—give us an opening to rehabilitate, and possibly even transform, the underperforming communication revolution.
Our primordial urge to connect with other people has driven our technological innovations, from the earliest writing to the latest tablet computer. This same innate desire fueled the current communication revolution. We want to connect, and we love new ways to do so. And we keep trying to connect even when some of our interactions go astray. Our primal urge to communicate draws us to people and gives us second, third, and fourth chances to make productive and meaningful connections.
This also explains why the revolution to date has been as frustrating as it has been exhilarating: connectivity doesn’t guarantee a connection.
Communication is vital to humans in every sense of the word: it’s invigorating, dynamic, and essential. It’s an understatement, not an exaggeration, to say that communication is an important part of our lives. In fact, communication is how we make our life.5
This primordiality and vitality is what affords communication resilience in the face of our mistakes, bad habits, and even (some) damage. We want—we need—to communicate. Our most recent conversation might have been awkward and filled with errors, but communication’s vitality and our primordial urge to connect pull us forward into the next interaction.
Poor communication is a solvable skills deficit, not a fixed personality type. The fact is that many issues you currently consider relationship problems are actually communication skills deficits. Upgrade your communication competencies and many of your relationship problems will disappear. The ultimate reward for improving your communication is that good communication = good relationships = good life.
We are indisputably in charge of our communication. As the CEOs of our tongues, we can issue an executive order to stop talking. Then we’ll need to strengthen two essential communication skills—restraint and containment—to protect our underlying relationships from the asymmetrical damage that’s always lurking when two or more people interact.