Mostly, people have trouble saying exactly what they mean. Language is a complex thing. Encoding your message successfully in words can be difficult.
Then, the receiver needs to take what you have said in words, and then decode what you were trying to say: ideally, they should seek first to understand, but that doesn’t happen as much as we’d all like. A good listener will compensate for the difficulty in expression by working with you to get the meaning from what you said.
Teenagers, and many stupid adults, fail at a few points of this interchange:
- failing to do their best to communicate their message clearly in the first place, which happens regularly in written communication (business emails, marketing stuff etc) but fail less often in spoken word
- the listener stupidly thinks they can take the message literally, and that the meaning intended by the speaker is exactly whatever literal meaning is given by their words (this one pisses me off, it’s so Neanderthal)
- the listener does not try to work out the speakers’ intent or meaning nor verify their understanding through rephrasing when necessary.
There is also, very often, a subtext beneath what people are saying, caused by the subconscious of the speaker and encoded (unconsciously by them) into their words, body language, omissions and so on.
The catch is the speaker is unaware of all this extra data they have encoded in their speech, so they have no idea why the listener is upset or reacting in an unexpected way. It’s because the listener didn’t miss the full message.
Then of course the speaker, having had no idea about the full message he gave, gets upset at the listener and blames them for the failure to communicate. If the speaker had more self-awareness, this drama would not have happened.
The absence of all this mess, a really good conversation where you are heard and you listen fully, is a great experience. Doesn’t happen often enough.
Official forums are also rife with the manifestations of these communication phenomena, particularly since there are a lot of young teenagers talking who do not yet have all the faculties. I was one, I’m sure, back many years ago.
A wonderful book on the human potential of organisations is the Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge. It talks about mental models, which is the internal representation of reality carried around in your head, which implicitly effects your judgements of business situations. Usually unconsciously. He also describes how proper dialog can work to expose those models, and thus allow you to see reality as it really is, not how it should be.
If only my workplace had some leaders who understood and wanted to progress this kind of thinking!
This video, whilst intended to convey a completely different point, goes along the same lines I’ve described. The actors are verbalising the subtext, you could say, rather than using the actual words you’d normally see in a film.
That said, it’s pretty funny too.