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Communication sparks images, it never “transmits”
You can’t transplant ideas from your head to someone else’s. But you can spark better ideas in theirs.
How so? Think about this:
We don’t get taught a dictionary at the age of 5. From early years through all our life we meet words in contexts. First an apple is something our mother might purée, then something we pick from the kitchen, then a shop. It could carry good memories or bad.
Later, an apple is a computer or a phone too. My apple might look different from yours — in fact we don’t really know whether we even see the same thing when we say the color “green” — we just agree to share an idea.
And that’s what all communication is — a kind of negotiation of meanings, agreeing to share words for different things.
So what? Well, if you believe there is some perfect code to transmit your exact meaning, you’ll never meet that goal. Think your communication is great? Don’t be so sure. As William Whyte wrote*:
The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.
What to do about it? Maybe loosen up a bit. Remember that your words just spark images in your audience’s minds.
But still spark the best images you can!
And in some situations (discussions, Q&As, written followups), your audience can work with you to clarify the meaning.
*Whyte’s words themselves got changed and attributed to Bernard Shaw. That famous phrase, “The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”.
At least they didn’t attribute it to Einstein, who seems to have said everything else.
We can use these ideas better when we explore them through real examples:
