What are you really listening for? How conflicting purposes turn dialogue into disconnection.
“Communication works for those who work at it.” – John Powell
Imagine you are in business with your partner. They have just returned from a long business trip and are complaining about how tired they are. You believe that your partner is asking you to take on the task of making a major presentation to a new client and you bravely agree to do so even though you are a bit insecure about the task. You take the lead and charge ahead with the meeting. After the meeting your partner complains that they felt sidelined and controlled by you during the meeting. You are hurt and angry. What’s going on here?
Let’s also imagine that you don’t slam the door and go back to your office and sulk, but stay in the conversation trying to understand where your partner is coming from. (A big ask, I know.) Eventually, you discover that your partner was not intending to foist this meeting off onto you, but rather was seeking a little sympathy before the big event and fully intended to fulfill their role as the leader with this client. They fully intended to tag team with you during the presentation and carry their full load. Both of you had very different understandings of the other’s intention and different assumptions going into this meeting. You’ve been partners for years, how could this happen?
Whether in a work team or partnership, we have the task of creating a sufficiently shared reality together both to co-exist and to coordinate our activities. Turns out this is not an easy task. Given words and our bodies, we somehow have to convey very complex information that includes our intentions, beliefs, desires, and expectations, conscious and unconscious. It’s easy to see how the task of creating a sufficiently shared reality is fraught with potential for misunderstandings and the hurt feelings and subsequent story-making about one another that follows.
We think of words and the act of speaking as if “information” was some kind of odorless, colorless substance that passes through the air, carried by words from one brain into another (otherwise known as the Conduit Metaphor.) Nothing could be further from the truth. Conversation is an amazingly complex act of co-creating and coordinating meaning, of creating that sufficiently shared reality on the fly.
We make things with talk. Speech is an action. We build bridges, create institutions, destroy institutions, wage war and make peace, marry and divorce, all with talk. Not only do words matter, the context and how they are delivered changes the meaning. For example, if I say to you, “Would you please close the door?” I’ve attempted the speech act of making a request. If you close the door, I’ve completed that action. On the other hand, if I say to you, “You idiot! Close the @#*!! door? Even a simpleton could do that.” I’ve attempted the speech act of both an insult and a command. If you laugh at my insult and don’t close the door, I haven’t succeeded in my attempt to command or insult you. The same words are used in both sentences, “close the door,” but to very different effect. You can imagine the delivery and context are quite different between those examples!
Words alone aren't sufficient to convey meaning. Video has shown us that communication is a complex dance between bodies and brains. If we aren't listening with our hearts as well as our heads, we often miss the unspoken cues in our conversational partner's communication. Just like the old supermarket drawings for a free prize, "you must be present to win" at the game of communication. We are emotional creatures. Listening with your body as well as your mind, and checking your understanding as you go when a conversation is important can make a huge difference in the outcome.
Conversation happens fast. We are conditioned to respond quickly when a speaker stops and it is our “turn” in a conversation. In order to keep that flow, we have to anticipate where the speaker is headed with their speech. Given the situation, our relationship, our understanding of what we are doing in this conversation, we will anticipate each other’s words. This works much of the time, unless we hear the speaker through the filter of expectations that don’t match their intention. Then we will struggle to co-create that sufficiently shared reality. If we are speaking across different cultures, languages, or faith, this can make the task even more difficult as we don’t share a set of common resources for making sense of our lives.
Because we are intentional creatures, goal-seeking in our interactions with our environment, we will interpret one another’s speech through the lens of our expectations of the speaker’s intentions. Rarely do we think to cue in our listener as to our intention for the conversation we are engaged in. A few of the many intentions we may have in conversation are:
Passing time with small talk
Seeking confirmation and validation of our view
Persuading the listener to our perspective (convincing you of “my truth” instead of collaborative meaning making)
Giving directions
And so on.
In his book, Super Communicators, Duhigg suggests identifying the type of conversation we are trying to create. Another way to look at this is what is called “framing.” In other words, I’m going to give you the frame I want you to hear my communication within. For example, I might say to a client, “this is just a wild idea, feel free to correct me if it doesn’t work for you.” I’m creating a brainstorming frame for whatever I say next. Framing can help you “get on the same page” with your listener. It does take awareness of your intentions in the conversation. Your listener might not agree with your frame. For example, my client could say, “I’d rather not hear any ideas that aren’t grounded in solid evidence.” This requires me to renegotiate the frame or purpose of our conversation. Awareness that our talk is purposeful and our purposes don’t always align, and taking a moment to make our intentions clear can save us a lot of miscommunication, blame and hurt feelings. Try it and see what happens in your communications.
This works until we have radically different morals and deeply held values. In their book, Moral Conflict: When social worlds collide, Pearce and Littlejohn take up this issue. I’ll be discussing how we address these situations with more conversational eloquence (and better outcomes) in my next newsletter. Stay tuned!
