We have learned, mostly through doing the wrong things, four funda-
mentals of communications.
- Communication is perception.
- Communication is expectation.
- Communication makes demands.
- Communication and information are different and indeed
largely opposite-- yet interdependent.
1. Communication is perception.
An old riddle posed by the mystics of many religions--the Zen Buddhists, the
Sufis of Islam, and the Rabbis of the Talmud--asks: "Is there a sound in the
forest if a tree crashes down and no one is around to hear it?" We now know
that the right answer to this is no. There are sound waves. But there is no
sound unless someone perceives it. Sound is created by perception. Sound is
communication.
This may seem trite; after all, the mystics of old already knew this, for they
too always answered that there is no sound unless someone can hear it. Yet the
implications of this rather trite statement are great indeed.
First, it means that it is the recipient who communicates. The so-called
communicator, the person who emits the communication, does not communicate. He
utters. Unless there is someone who hears, there is no communication. There is
only noise. The communicator speaks or writes or sings -- but he does not
communicate. Indeed, he cannot communicate. He can only make it possible, or
impossible, for a recipient -- or rather, "percipient" -- to perceive.
Perception, we know, is not logic. It is experience. This means, in the first
place, that one always perceives a configuration. One cannot perceive single
specifics. They are always part of a total picture. The "silent language," (1)
that is, the gestures, the tone of voice, the environment altogether, not to
mention the cultural and social referents, cannot be dissociated from the
spoken language. In fact, without them the spoken word has no meaning
and cannot communicate.
It is not only that the same words, e.g., "I enjoyed meeting you," will be
heard as having a wide variety of meanings. Whether they are heard as warmth or
as icy cold, as endearment or as rejection depends on their setting in the
"silent language," such as the tone of voice or the occasion. More important is
that by itself, that is, without being part of the total configuration of
occasion, value, "silent language," and so on, the phrase has no
Footnote
- As Eoward T. Hall called it in the title of his pioneering work
(Doubleday, 1959).
meaning at all. By itself it cannot make possible communication. It cannot
be understood. Indeed it cannot be heard. To paraphrase an old proverb of
the human-relations school: "One cannot communicate a word; the whole
man always comes with it."
But we know about perception also that one can perceive only what one
is capable of perceiving. Just as the human ear does not hear sounds above
a certain pitch, so does human perception altogether not perceive what is
beyond its range of perception. It may, of course, hear physically, or see
visually, but it cannot accept it. It cannot become communication.
This is a fancy way of stating something the teachers of rhetoric have
known for a very long time -- though the practitioners of communications
tend to forget it again and again.
In Plato's Phaedo which, among other things, is also the earliest extant
treatise on rhetoric, Socrates points out that one has to talk to people in
terms of their own experience, that is, that one has to use carpenters'
metaphors when talking to carpenters, and so on. One can communicate
only in the recipient's language or in his terms. And the terms have to be
experience-based. It, therefore, does very little good to try to explain terms
to people. They will not be able to receive them if they are not terms of their
own experience. They simply exceed their perception capacity.
The connection between experience, perception, and concept formation -- that
is, cognition -- is, we now know, infinitely subtler and richer than any
earlier philosopher imagined. But one fact is proven and comes out strongly in
the most disparate work, e.g., that of Piaget (in Switzerland), that of B. F.
Skinner, and that of Jerome Bruner (both at Harvard). Percept and concept in
the learner, whether child or adult, are not separate. We cannot perceive
unless we also conceive. But we also cannot form concepts unless we can
perceive. To communicate a concept is impossible unless the recipient can
perceive it, that is, unless it is within his perception.
There is a very old saying among writers: "Difficulties with a sentence mean
confused thinking. It is not the sentence that needs straightening out, it is
the thought behind it." In writing we attempt, first, to communicate with
ourselves. An "unclear sentence" is one that exceeds our own capacity for
perception. Working on the sentence, that is, working on what is normally
called communications, cannot solve the problem. We have to work on our own
concepts first to be able to understand what we are trying to say -- and only
then can we write the sentence.
In communicating, whatever the medium, the first question has to be "Is this
communication within the recipient's range of perception? Can he receive it?"
The "range of perception" is, of course, physiological and largely (though
not entirely) set by physical limitations of man's animal body. When we
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speak of communication, however, the most important limitations on perception
are usually cultural and emotional rather than physical.
That fanatics are not being convinced by rational arguments, we have known for
thousands of years. Now we are beginning to understand that it is not
"argument" that is lacking. Fanatics do not have the ability to perceive a
communication which goes beyond their range of emotions. First their emotions
would have to be altered. In other words, no one is really "in touch with
reality," if by that we mean that he has complete openness to evidence. The
distinction between "sanity" and "paranoia" does not lie in the ability to
perceive, but in the ability to learn, that is, in the ability to change one's
emotions on the basis of experience.
That perception is conditioned by what we are capable of perceiving was
realized forty years ago by the most quoted but probably least heeded of all
students of organization, Mary Parker Follett (e.g., especially in her
collected essays, Dynamic Administration, Harper's, 1941. (1) Follett taught
that a disagreement or a conflict is likely not to be about the answers, or
indeed about anything ostensible. It is, in most cases, the result of
incongruity in perceptions. What A sees so vividly, B does not see at all. And,
therefore, what A argues, has no pertinence to B's concerns, and vice versa.
Both, Follett argued, are likely to see reality. But each is likely to see a
different aspect of it. The world, and not only the material world, is multi-
dimensional. Yet one can see only one dimension at a time.
One rarely realizes that there could be other dimensions, and that something
that is so obvious to us and so clearly validated by our emotional experience
has other dimensions, a "back" and "sides," which are entirely different and
which, therefore, lead to entirely different perceptions. The story I mentioned
earlier about the blind men and the elephant in which each one, encountering
this strange beast, feels one of the elephant's parts, his leg, his trunk, his
hide, and reports an entirely different conclusion, and holds to it
tenaciously, is simply a metaphor of the human condition. There is no
possibility of communication until this is understood and until he who has felt
the hide of the elephant goes over to him who has felt the leg and feels the
leg himself. There is no possibility of communications, in other words, unless
we first know what the recipient, the true communicator, can see and why.
2. Communication is expectation.
We perceive, as a rule, what we expect to perceive. We see largely what we
expect to see, and we hear largely what we expect to hear. That the unexpected
may be resented is not the important thing--though most of the work on
communications in business and government thinks it is. What is truly important
is that the unexpected is usually not received at all. It is not seen or heard,
but ignored. Or it is misunderstood, that is, mis-seen or mis-heard as the
expected.
On this we now have a century or more of experimentation. The results
are unambiguous. The human mind attempts to fit impressions and stimuli
into a frame of expectations. It resists vigorously any attempts to make it
"change its mind," that is, to perceive what it does not expect to perceive
or not to perceive what it expects to perceive. It is, of course, possible to
alert the human mind to the fact that what it perceives is contrary to its
expectations. But this first requires that we understand what it expects to
perceive. It then requires that there be an unmistakable signal--"this is
different," that is, a shock which breaks continuity. A gradual change in
which the mind is supposedly led by small, incremental steps to realize that
what is perceived is not what it expects to perceive will not work. It will
rather reinforce the expectations and will make it even more certain that
what will be perceived is what the recipient expects to perceive.
Before we can communicate, we must, therefore, know what the recipient
expects to see and hear. Only then can we know whether communication
can utilize his expectations -- and what they are -- or whether there is need
for the "shock of alienation," for an "awakening" that breaks through the
recipient's expectations and forces him to realize that the unexpected is
happening.
3. Communication makes demands.
Many years ago psychologists stumbled on a strange phenomenon in their studies
of memory, a phenomenon that, at first, upset all their hypotheses. In order to
test memory, the psychologists compiled a list of words to be shown to their
experimental subjects for varying times as a test of their retention capacity.
As control, a list of nonsense words, mere jumbles of letters, was devised.
Much to the surprise of these early experimenters almost a century ago or so,
their subjects (mostly students, of course) showed totally uneven memory
retention of individual words. More surprising, they showed amazingly high
retention of the nonsense words. The explanation of the first phenomenon is
fairly obvious. Words are not mere information. They do carry emotional
charges. And, therefore words with unpleasant or threatening associations tend
to be suppressed, words with pleasant associations retained. In fact, this
selective retention by emotional association has since been used to construct
tests for emotional disorders and for personality profiles.
The relatively high retention rate of nonsense words was a greater puzzle. It
was expected that no one would really remember words that had no meaning at
all. But it has become clear over the years that the memory for these words,
though limited, exists precisely because these words have no meaning. For this
reason, they make no demand. They are truly neutral. With respect to them,
memory could be said to be truly "mechanical," showing neither emotional
preference nor emotional rejection.
A similar phenomenon, known to every newspaper editor, is the amazingly high
readership and retention of the "fillers," the little three- or
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five-line bits of irrelevant incidental information that are used to "balance"
a page. Why should anybody want to read, let alone remember, that it first
became fashionable to wear different-colored hose on each leg at the court of
some long-forgotten duke? Or, when and where baking powder was first used? Yet
there is no doubt that these little tidbits of irrelevancy are read and, above
all, that they are remembered, far better than almost anything else in the
daily paper except the screaming headlines of the catastrophes. The answer is
that the fillers make no demands. It is their total irrelevancy that accounts
for their being remembered.
Communication is always "propaganda." The emitter always wants "to get
something across." Propaganda, we now know, is both a great deal more powerful
than the rationalists with their belief in "open discussion" believe, and a
great deal less powerful than the myth-makers of propaganda, e.g., Dr. Goebbels
in the Nazi regime, believed and wanted us to believe. Indeed the danger of
total propaganda is not that the propaganda will be believed. The danger is
that nothing will be believed and that every communication becomes suspect. In
the end, no communication is being received. Everything anyone says is
considered a demand and is resisted, resented, and in effect not heard at all.
The end results of total propaganda are not fanatics, but cynics--but this, of
course, may be even greater and more dangerous corruption.
Communication, in other words, always makes demands. It always demands that the
recipient become somebody, do something, believe something. It always appeals
to motivation. If, in other words, communication fits in with the aspirations,
the values, the purposes of the recipient, it is powerful. If it goes against
his aspirations, his values, his motivations, it is likely not to be received
at all or, at best, to be.resisted. Of course, at its most powerful,
communication brings about "conversion," that is, a change of personality, of
values, beliefs, aspirations. But this is the rare, existential event, and one
against which the basic psychological forces of every human being are strongly
organized. Even the Lord, the Bible reports, first had to strike Saul blind
before he could raise him up as Paul. Communications aiming at conversion
demand surrender. By and large, therefore, there is no communication unless the
message can key in to the recipient's own values, at least to some degree.
4. Communication and information are different and indeed largely opposite--
yet interdependent. Where communication is perception, information is logic. As
such, information is purely formal and has no meaning. It is impersonal rather
than interpersonal. The more it can be freed of the human component, that is,
of such things as emotions and values, expectations and perceptions, the more
valid and reliable does it become. Indeed it becomes increasingly informative.
All through history, the problem has been how to glean a little information
out of communications, that is, out of relationships between people,based on
perception. All through history, the problem has been to isolate the
information content from an abundance of perception. Now, all of a sudden, we
have the capacity to provide information -- both because of the conceptual work
of the logicians (especially the symbolic logic of Russell and Whitehead, which
appeared in 1910), and because of the technical work on data processing and
data storage, that is, especially because of the computer and its tremendous
capacity to store, manipulate, and transmit data. Now, in other words, we have
the opposite problem from the one mankind has always been struggling with. Now
we have the problem of handling information per se, devoid of any communication
content.
The requirements for effective information are the opposite of those for
effective communication. Information is, for instance, always specific. We
perceive a configuration in communications; but we convey specific
individual data in the information process. Indeed, information is, above
all, a principle of economy. The fewer data needed, the better the information.
And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly
needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
At the same time, information presupposes communication. Information is always
encoded. To be received, let alone to be used, the code must be known and
understood by the recipient. This requires prior agreement, that is, some
communication. At the very least, the recipient has to know what the data
pertain to. Are the figures on a piece of computer tape the height of
mountaintops or the cash balances of Federal Reserve member banks? In either
case, the recipient would have to know what mountains are or what banks are to
get any information out of the data.
The prototype information system may well have been the peculiar language known
as Armee Deutsch (Army German) which served as language of command in the
Imperial Austrian Army prior to 1918. A polyglot army in which officers,
noncommissioned officers, and men often had no language in common, it
functioned remarkably well with fewer than two hundred specific words--"fire,"
for instance, or "at ease," each of which had only one totally unambiguous
meaning. The meaning was always an action. And the words were learned in and
through actions, i.e., in what behaviorists now call "operant conditioning."
The tensions in the Austrian Army after many decades of nationalist turmoil
were very great indeed. Social intercourse between members of different
nationalities serving in the same unit became increasingly difficult, if not
impossible. But to the very end, the information system functioned. It was
completely formal; completely rigid; completely logical in that each word had
only one possible meaning; and
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it rested on completely pre-established communication regarding the specific
response to a certain set of sound waves. This example, however, shows also
that the effectiveness of an information system depends on the willingness and
ability to think through carefully what information is needed by whom for what
purposes, and then on the systematic creation of communication among the
various parties to the system as to the meaning of each specific input and
output. The effectiveness, in other words, depends on the pre-establishment of
communication.
Communication communicates the more levels of meaning it has and the less it
lends itself to quantification.
Medieval esthetics held that a work of art communicates on a number of levels,
at least three if not four: the literal; the metaphorical; the allegorical; and
the symbolic. The work of art that most consciously converted this theory into
artistic practice was Dante's Divina Commedia. If by "information" we mean
something that can be quantified, then the Divina Commedia is without any
information content whatever. But it is precisely the ambiguity, the
multiplicity of levels on which this book can be read, from being a fairy tale
to being a grand synthesis of metaphysics, that makes it the overpowering work
of art it is and the immediate communication which it has been to generations
of readers.
Communications, in other words, may not be dependent on information. Indeed
the most perfect communications may be purely "shared experiences," without any
logic whatever. Perception has primacy rather than information.
This summary of what we have learned is gross oversimplification. It glosses
over some of the most hotly contested issues in psychology and perception.
Indeed it may well brush aside most of the issues which the students of
learning and of perception, would consider central and important.
But the aim has not been to survey these big areas. My concern here is not with
learning or with perception. It is with communications, and in particular, with
communications in the large organization, be it business enterprise, government
agency, university, or armed service.
This summary might also be criticized for being trite, if not obvious. No one,
it might be said, could possibly be surprised at its statements. They say what
"everybody knows." But whether this be so or not, it is not what "everybody
does." On the contrary, the logical implication for communications in
organizations of these apparently simple and obvious statements is at odds with
current practice and indeed denies validity to the honest and serious efforts
we have been making to communicate for many decades now.
What, then, can our knowledge and our experience teach us about communications
in organizations, about the reasons for our failures, and about the
prerequisites for success in the future?
For centuries we have attempted communication "downward." This, however, cannot
work, no matter how hard and how intelligently we try. It cannot work, first,
because it focuses on what we want to say. It assumes, in other words, that the
utterer communicates. But we know that all he does is utter. Communication is
the act of the recipient. What we have been trying to do is to work on the
emitter, specifically on the manager, the administrator, the commander, to make
him capable of being a better communicator. But all one can communicate
downward are commands, that is, prearranged signals. One cannot communicate
downward anything connected with understanding, let alone with motivation. This
requires communication upward, from those who perceive to those who want to
reach their perception.
This does not mean that managers should stop working on clarity in what they
say or write. Far from it. But it does mean that how we say something comes
only after we have learned what to say. And this cannot be found out by
"talking to," no matter how well it is being done. "Letters to the Employees,"
no matter how well done, will be a waste unless the writer knows what employees
can perceive, expect to perceive, and want to do. They are a waste unless they
are based on the recipient's rather than the emitter's perception.
But "listening" does not work either.
The Human Relations School of Elton Mayo, forty years ago, recognized the
failure of the traditional approach to communications. Its answer (1) was to
enjoin listening. Instead of starting out with what "we," that is, the
executive, want to "get across," the executive should start out by finding out
what subordinates want to know, are interested in, are, in other words,
receptive to. To this day, the human relations prescription, though rarely
practiced, remains the classic formula.
Of course, listening is a prerequisite to communication. But it is not
adequate, and it cannot, by itself, work. Listening assumes that the superior
will understand what he is being told. It assumes, in other words, that the
Footnote
- Especially as developed in Mayo's t vo famous books, The Human Problems
of an industrial Civilization (Harvard Business School, 1933) and The
Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Harvard 8usiness School,
1945).
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subordinates can communicate. It is hard to see, however, why the subordinate
should be able to do what his superior cannot do. In fact, there is no reason
for assuming he can. There is no reason, in other words, to believe that
listening results any less in misunderstanding and miscommunications than does
talking. In addition, the theory of listening does not take into account that
communications is demands. It does not bring out the subordinate's preferences
and desires, his values and aspirations. It may explain the reasons for
misunderstanding. But it does not lay down a basis for understanding.
This is not to say that listening is wrong, any more than the futility of
downward communications furnishes any argument against attempts to write well,
to say things clearly and simply, and to speak the language of those whom one
addresses rather than one's own jargon. Indeed, the reali- zation that
communications have to be upward -- or rather that they have to start with the
recipient rather than the emitter, which underlies the concept of listening --
is absolutely sound and vital. But listening is only the starting point.
More and better information does not solve the communications problem, does not
bridge the communications gap. On the contrary, the more information, the
greater is the need for functioning and effective communication. The more
information, in other words, the greater is the communications gap likely to
be. The information explosion demands functioning communications.
The more impersonal and formal the information process in the first place, the
more will it depend on prior agreement on meaning and application, that is, on
communications. In the second place, the more effective the information
process, the more impersonal and formal will it become; the more will it
separate human beings and thereby require separate, but also much greater,
efforts, to re-establish the human relationship, the relation- ship of
communication. It may be said that the effectiveness of the information process
will depend increasingly on our ability to communicate, and that, in the
absence of effective communication -- that is, in the present situation -- the
information revolution cannot really produce information. All it can produce is
data.
The information explosion is the most compelling reason to go to work on
communications. Indeed, the frightening communications gap all around
us--between management and workers; between business and government; between
faculty and students, and between both of them and university administration;
between producers and consumers, and so on -- may well reflect in some measure
the tremendous increase in information without a commensurate increase in
communications.