Clear Communication: MOSTLY Possible

A work friend who is also an editor pointed me at a recent post by Seth Godin where he issues some platitudes on the responsibility of a communicator for failures in communication.

"What's helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you communicate. You can design your products to be easy to use. You can write so your audience hears you. You can present in a place and in a way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you. Most of all, you get to choose who will understand (and who won't)."

Now, in a way, it goes back to something I learned when I did stand-up: "Never blame the audience." If you bomb, it's because you didn't get a feel for the audience and hit them right. The same set might not work in the same club on two different nights. That's why you watch the warm-up comic or emcee work the audience, because that club's your coal mine and he's your canary.

But when you're doing stand-up, you have a lot more freedom to improvise and vary your set on the fly than you do when you're an HR trainer and you're giving a presentation on company sexual harrassment guidelines (that Legal has been over with a lawnmower 10 times) to a group of employees who have to attend or be fired.

The way he talks, he seems to assume that you have total control over venue, timing, methodology, and audience.

In an ideal world, you can "present in a place and in a way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you" and "choose who will understand (and who won't)." In the real world, sometimes you have no choice but to play the hand you're dealt. Sometimes, you go where you're told and convey the assigned bullet points to an audience that doesn't want to be there. If you're a good professional communicator, you can shine that big stinky turd of a project so bright that your audience can see themselves in it, but at the end of the day, you're not going to turn that turd into a fairy princess. At the end of the day, it's still just a bright, shiny, turd.

It's not when you're making all the choices that you test your mettle as a communicator. It's when most of them are being made for you and made badly, but you still manage to grind out a win. And sometimes, no matter how good your work, that win is beyond your control.

If we really got to "choose who will understand (and who won't)," you'd be able to discuss religion, sex, and politics at family reunions.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Online Marketing And SEO, Success.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.