I’m going to talk about communication in this blog – I guess that much is obvious. I’m going to address a number of the different fields in this vast discipline; Communications. So I think that a fair starting point would be to start with the basic question “Communication – what is it?”
And I guess that an inevitable follow-up question of that would be; “… And why is it so HARD?” Let me roll back to that second one in a while, and start off with giving you my view of what Communication is.
Communication comes from the latin word “communicare” which means “making common”. Makes sense. We make knowledge, perceptions, plans, needs, memories and experiences common with the people around us because we want to or we need to share it.
For a long time, the communication process was viewed as a linear process. From sender to receiver. A message delivered. The classic Transmission model (Shannon & Weaver, 1949 ). And that was also how a lot of businesses developed their “information flow”. Understandably. Because this perspective is simple. It’s so simple that it’s kind of beautiful. Problem is, it doesn’t work. It still lives on, though, in one way or another in a lot of operations and organizations. It’s much easier to work with such a one-dimensional flow.
But the overall view on, and understanding of, communication changed as the discipline evolved. It was hard to look past the fact that even if the sender was clear, the message was clear and the receiver was able to receive it – it did not always get received in the way that the sender intended. Which makes us circle back to that follow-up question: “…and why is it so hard?” I’m not going to go all sciency in this blog – there are a lot of scientists out there, doing a much better job of it than I would. I will instead make my case from more everyday based stories, though grounded in communication theory.
Ever experienced “But I have informed them!” – and yet, they haven’t heard it? In your personal life, or in your career? Even though communication is one of the basic skills we learn already as infants – because it is our means to survive – it is still hard.
And as we grow into society and society grows around us – and fast – we need to communicate to larger groups, to larger audiences, with different pre-knowledge, needs and understandings. And that makes the communication process complex. Even communication professionals are struggling with it and there is nothing to gain by denying it. But we have everything to win by understanding it and trying to adjust and adapt. I’ll address this more in my next blog post.
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