Communication: The Lifeblood of Relationships
Imagine for a moment that you’re in charge of a group of ten people. Your job is to get these ten people to do something useful together. The catch, however, is that nobody (including you) is allowed to communicate in any form — speech, signing, text messaging… — with anyone else. Try to make a list of all of the extraordinary things you could do. Launch a rocket? Highly doubtful. Write a book? My intuition says no. Plan a movie night? Good luck. If you come up with anything more complex than a “teamwork exercise” your kids might do at summer camp, I’ll be impressed. 
The obvious point here is that communication is absolutely essential in both the professional and personal realms of our daily lives.
Even some non-living things need to communicate. For example, before you were able to read this post, your computer had to contact a web server and request the information. The server then had to oblige and send that information back. In the technology world, one of the most basic forms of digital communication is known as a “ping.” A ping is used by one device to check the status of another; think of it as a computer shouting “Hello?” to another computer. Normally, the other computer responds (”Hello!”) within milliseconds, indicating that it is “alive.”
In human terms, when we “ping” a friend or a neighbor, we hope for a quick response. If we try to start a conversation with a friend who is responding slowly (for example, an instant messaging conversation with several minutes between messages), we might conclude that our friend is very busy, maybe with other conversations. It’s also possible that he may not respond at all. In the technology world, there are several potential causes for this, but nearly all of them are reasons for concern. Our friend may, for some reason, be ignoring us. He may have lost his ability to communicate. He may even be dead!
Just look at what happens when there is any simple communication failure between two people (never mind a larger group). As a very simple example, take a sender (Person A) and a receiver (Person B). In an ideal situation, A sends a message to B; B then responds with another message acknowledging the receipt of the first message. This is, in fact, exactly how most digital communication works — Person B now has the required information, and Person A knows that it doesn’t need to be sent again. There are several different ways this communication could fail — A doesn’t send the message, B doesn’t listen to the message, B doesn’t send the acknowledgment, A doesn’t listen to the acknowledgment… but regardless of how it fails, there will be consequences ranging from inefficiency (if A feels the need to repeat his message over and over) to potential catastrophe (if B doesn’t have information that she needs).
Of course, human beings aren’t perfect. We’re forgetful. We’re “busy.” Our friends/neighbors/significant others/co-workers also have ways of visually checking that our lack of communication isn’t due to an untimely demise. Computers aren’t so privileged; when a neighbor stops communicating, our friend Mac has no choice but to phone its human operator. (”Hey, PC isn’t responding, and I’m getting a little worried. Somebody should go make sure that it hasn’t blue screened again…”) Conversations in the digital world generally involve more transmitted messages and a bit of extra information, but the upside is that both parties have all of the information all of the time. There’s no confusion about your co-worker’s status. Using the example of the last paragraph, what happens if Person B leaves town for a week and forgets to denote this in her voice mail? You can imagine Person A’s reaction… “Hey, Person B, did you get my message? Just checking, please call me back ASAP.” … “Person B, are you there? Is your phone broken? Have you forgotten about those TPS reports? I need them yesterday!” … “YOU’RE FIRED! Just kidding, Person B, I only wanted to get your attention since you’re so busy surfing dontasq.com again…”
Communicate. Listen. Enjoy life. Countless books have been written on various communication skills, but those books deal with subtleties like eye contact, body language, and e-mail etiquette. Before you can worry about any of those subtleties, you’ve got to take that first step and just do it! In my next article, I’ll touch on some of those finer points and aim to give you a whole new look at what goes on when people communicate on multiple levels. Until next time!
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