Why communication is important to me

This blog entry is quite personal since, for me, all communication is personal. Even business communication is personal because one's choice of what and how one communicates is an ethical choice, informed by one's own personal code of ethics. I'm particularly conscious of this in the context of public affairs where one seeks to influence public opinion.

My love of language, and my interest in the power of rhetoric, started early. Back when disco ruled the world, our English teacher assigned us a project that greatly influenced me. Mrs Bimstein was a passionate young American woman who had recently moved to Ireland following the death of her college sweetheart husband in the Vietnam war. We all adored her for her slightly crazy zeal. Looking back, I also see the searing, righteous anger that drove her in part. Perhaps not surprisingly in retrospect, the project she assigned us was a ‘Propaganda Project’. After introducing us to different communication stratagems and techniques that can be used to influence and manipulate opinion, our assignment was to fill a scrapbook with relevant examples from the printed media along with our commentary on the examples we had chosen. That project was the most valuable homework I ever did.

At the time I wouldn’t have known what a ‘subtext’ was if it got up off the page and slapped me in my twelve year old face and I doubt that the term ‘spin’ had even been invented but, unnamed, I learned a lot about them from that project: I learned about the power that exists in the conscious and careful application of language and I realized that I needed always to question what I was being told, why I was being told, and how I was being told. Today, I would talk of this in terms of frames and lenses, to borrow terminology from The Press Effect. Appealing to my analytical side, this questioning fairly quickly became second nature to me.

At home, I also learned a lot about the process of communicating. I grew up in a conservative household where many things were never spoken about; even when things were spoken about, because my parents, like many of their generation, weren’t comfortable expressing themselves emotionally, a lot was left unsaid. As a result, I learned about the importance of listening for what was missing; I learned to hear the unsaid and peer behind the curtain of the spoken words for a fuller message. I also got good at asking questions in a way that made it easy for someone to answer or implicitly confirm.

When my family wasn’t assiduously avoiding Subjects That Shouldn’t Be Talked About my parents strongly encouraged us to form our own opinions and be able to defend them around the family dinner table; many’s the evening I know I left my parents exasperated with my unholy views and many’s the evening they left me exasperated when I tried to get too clever or tricky with my arguments and they called me on it. My first lessons in ethical communication.

It would be unfair to many people, including myself, to suggest that I owe all my communication insights and skills to the redoubtable Mrs Bimstein and my equally redoubtable parents but they certainly laid good foundations for me to build on, both intuitively and by learning further from others, particularly some of the excellent people I have had the good fortune to work with over the years. And sometimes I just had to work it out for myself. As a management consultant, I faced ethical dilemmas writing reports and presenting findings to clients. I knew that how I presented the recommendation options and supporting materials would affect the final decision. In many cases it would have been easy for me to get a particular decision. What was the right thing to do? Does the end justify the means? When does spin become deception? There are no easy answers to these questions.

There will always be more to learn just as there will always be situations where I communicate badly but, for the most part, today I try to communicate honestly and, I hope, effectively.