Synopsis
It
has become fashionable to say that our present epoch is an information age, but
that’s not quite right. In truth, we live in a communication age and it’s time
we start taking it seriously.
By Greg Satell
When
I was a student, a man came to speak about Winston Churchill. Mostly, it
was the usual mix of historical events and anecdotes, which in Churchill’s case
was a potent mixture of the poignant, the irreverent and the hilarious. But
what I remember most was how the talk ended.
The
speaker concluded by saying that if we were to remember one thing about
Churchill it should be that what made him so effective was his power to
communicate. I didn’t understand that at the time. Growing up I had
always heard about the importance of hard work, honesty and other things, but
never communication.
Yet
now, thirty years later, I’ve begun to understand what he meant. As Walter
Isaacson argues in his book The
Innovators , even in technology—maybe especially in
technology—the ability to collaborate effectively is decisive. In order
to innovate, it’s not enough to just come up with big ideas, you also need to
work hard to communicate them clearly.
The Father of the Electronic Age
Today,
we take electricity for granted. We switch on lights, watch TV and enjoy
connected devices without a second thought. It’s hard to imagine an
earlier age in which we had to use smoky, smelly candles in order to see at
night and didn’t have the benefit and convenience of basic household
appliances.
Michael
Faraday, probably more than anyone else, transformed electricity from an
interesting curiosity into the workhorse of the modern age. Not only did
he uncover many of its basic principles, such as its relationship to magnetism,
but also invented crucial technologies, like the dynamo that
generates electricity and the motor which turns it into meaningful
work.
Yet
Faraday was more than just a talented scientist. He was also a very
effective communicator. As Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon write in their
book, Faraday, Maxwell,
and the Electromagnetic Field , “His scientific genius lay not
simply in producing experimental results that had eluded everyone else but in
explaining them too.”
This
wasn’t a natural talent, he worked hard at it, taking copious notes on his own
lectures and those of others. The effort paid off. His regular
lectures at the Royal Institution made him, and the Institution
itself, a fixture in the scientific world. The special Christmas
lectures for children, which he instituted, continue to this day and draw a
large television audience.
The Magician Who Shared His
Tricks
A
more recent genius was Richard Feynman. He won the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1965, but also made important discoveries in biology and was an
early pioneer of parallel and quantum computing. His talent, in fact, was
so prodigious that even other elite scientists considered him to be a
magician.
Yet
like Faraday, Feynman was not content to hide his tricks behind smoke and
mirrors. He taught an introductory class for
undergraduates—exceedingly rare for top calibre academics—that was standing
room only. With his Brooklyn accent, wry sense of humor and talent for
explaining things in practical, everyday terms, he was a student favorite.
Another example
of how Feynman combined brilliance with exceptional communication skills was a
talk he gave a few days after Christmas in 1959. Starting from a basic
question about what it would take to shrink the Encyclopedia Britannica to fit
on the head of a pin, he moved step by step until, in less than an hour, he
had invented the field of nanotechnology.
Schopenhauer
once said that, “talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target
no one else can see.” What made Feynman so special was that he wanted us
to see it too.
“THESE ADS SUCK”
We
often treat communication as if it were a discrete act, a matter of performance
or lack thereof. Yet meaning cannot be separated from context. A
crucial, but often overlooked, function of leadership is creating a culture in
which effective communication can flourish.
Consider
the case of Google, which I described in Harvard Business Review.
In early 2002, Larry Page walked into the kitchen and posted a few pages of
search results and wrote in big, bold letters, “THESE ADS SUCK.” In many
organizations, this act would be considered a harsh taking down of an
incompetent product manager.
But
not at Google. It was seen as a call to action and within 72 hours a team
of search engineers posted a solution. As it turned out, it was they, not
the ads team, that had the requisite skills and perspectives to fix the
problem. In many ways, it was that episode that made Google the profit
machine it is today.
Yet
Page’s action was vastly greater than a single act. He and Sergey Brin
spent years creating a culture that favored change over the status quo.
When he posted the subpar search results, everybody knew why. He
wasn’t looking to attack—no one was fired or disciplined—but inspire.
Communication
is bidirectional, requiring both a transmitter and a receiver. Both need
to effectively engineered in order to solve problems effectively.
The Myth of a Private Language
We
tend to treat knowledge and communication as two separate spheres. We act
as expertise was a private matter, attained through quiet study of the lexicon
in a particular field. Communication, on the other hand, is often relegated to
the realm of the social, a tool we use to interact with others of our species.
Yet,
as Wittgenstein argued decades ago, that position is logically untenable
because it assumes that we are able to communicate to ourselves in a private
language. The truth is that we can’t really know anything that we can’t
communicate to others. To assert that we can possess knowledge, but are
unable to designate what it is, is nonsensical.
And
so it is curious that we give communication such short shrift. Schools
don’t teach communication. They teach math, (not very well), some
science, history and give rote instructions about rigid grammatical rules, but
give very little guidance on how to express ideas clearly.
When
we enter professional life, we immerse ourselves in the jargon and principles
of our chosen field and obediently follow precepts laid out by our respective
priesthoods. Yet we rarely put serious effort toward expressing
ourselves in a language that can be understood by those outside our tribe.
Then we wonder why our ideas never get very far.
It
has become fashionable to say that our present epoch is an information age, but
that’s not quite right. In truth, we live in a communication age and it’s
time we start taking it seriously.
This article
originally appeared at DigitalTonto and The Creativity Post 
Greg Satell is an
internationally recognized authority on Digital Strategy and Innovation who has
served in senior Strategy and Innovation roles for the Publicis Groupe, one of
the world’s premier marketing services companies. In 2012, Innovation
Excellence ranked Greg #6 on their annual list of the Top 40 Innovation
Bloggers. Previously, he was Co-CEO of KP Media and spent 15 years in Eastern
Europe managing a variety of media businesses ranging from market leading web
sites to history making news organizations to women’s and lifestyle focused
media.
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