Failure to Communicate Equals Failure
““What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” – Cool Hand Luke (1967)”
Four articles (links below) all focus on grammar and its impact on effective communication. Grammar is a foundational element of quality communications. Because of poor messaging, how many great business opportunities have been lost? How many mistakes have been made? We take for granted the ability to communicate through the written and spoken word. We also underestimate how hard it can be to share our ideas well.
Communications is a five-step process.
You have an idea.
You translate your idea into words, sometimes with illustrations, charts, graphs, etc.
You send the message to the recipient.
The recipient receives and translates the message.
The recipient shares the idea.
If the idea in step 1 is the same, or very nearly the same, as the idea in step 5, congratulations, you have communicated well.
There are three main points where this breaks down.
The Step 2 translation does not tell a cohesive story. Meaning gets lost in translation without a solid story structure. What is most disappointing is when it is evident that the sender does not what they want to say. They have no story.
The Step 2 translation includes more than is needed to tell the story. In a misguided effort to answer every conceivable question someone may ask, the message becomes three, four, or five times bigger than it needs to be. This effectively buries the lead.
“He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” Abraham Lincoln
Step 3 uses the wrong medium. The choice between in-person, phone, text, and email is the first choice. A second dimension is the platform choice – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe, etc. Too many people rely on PowerPoint to the exclusion of all other media.
Taking time to think about our individual messages and crafting them well will prevent many frustrations.
Large programs with multiple messengers and audiences need communications professionals to manage those efforts. For those to be successful, we must be able to share the story.
First Round - A Founder's Guide to Writing Well
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – AN INTERACTIVE GUIDE TO AMBIGUOUS GRAMMAR
Aeon – A history of punctuation
Mental Floss - Can You Tell an Author’s Identity By Looking at Punctuation Alone?
