My experiment with clear and direct communication
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A similar strategy to this "clear and direct communication" that can devolve into the same place is the concept of Radical Candor[0]. It can begin as a "helping" to awaken others to things they may have missed, and can end up being an avenue for tearing people down instead of growing them. The only difference is the intent of the speaker.
Assuming the best in people and striving to have positive outcomes tends to work better. This puts you at risk of other people much like the author was previously, who seek to undercut and deceive and manipulate, but those people show their true colors pretty quick and they end up on a different tier of communication that no longer gets the privilege everyone else is afforded.
A pivotal change within my own life and communication was reading about Adler's work [0]. Separation of Tasks as a concept is very applicable to interpersonal relationships at the office. I no longer struggle with trying to explain why people are rude and pushing agendas that don't make empirical sense. None of us are infallible and we all are seeking to shape our world in different ways and it's helpful to delineate what we really care about and not. Which hills to die on.
[0]: https://www.radicalcandor.com/ [1]: https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/lessons-from-alfred...
Most people think they are good listeners, but I come at this from the world of training coaches. Coaching starts with being a professionally good listener which is much different than being an amateur good listener.
And when you try to reach this level of listening at a professional level you start to realize the millions of ways in which you block yourself from listening.
An obvious one that the author did touch on was that he recognized his prior communication as manipulative. Right! We all bring our own agenda and this is one of the ways in which we can filter what we are hearing. What has the person said that supports my agenda? What threatens it and how can I disprove that? Thinking that way doesn't allow you to realize that your judgement might be wrong.
The other big ones are anxiety and need for esteem. It's like when you can't help but give advice because you are deeply desperate for validation. You're not broken, that's a very human way to be.
Listening is hard and so a good starting place is to separate listening from judgement. The word I use most is curiosity. Just focus on being curious as a way to crowd out all these other feelings. Then later you can make a judgement.
If you are a clear communicator and a bad listener then the result is just that you go around being clearly wrong a lot of the time.
Also the easiest way to improve your listening skills is reflective listening. That is where you simply say back to the person the key ideas they expressed to you.
First, assume that all I can do is observe behavior: what I see, hear, read. I cannot figure out why a person is exhibiting a behavior; guess sure. But know? No way. What's between the ears is between their ears and inaccessible to me.
Second, assume the PCA (principle component analysis) of behavior is control, inclusion, openness. Read "Human Element" or get an old copy of FIRO from him or his son Ethan Schutz --- excellent stuff and perfect for the office: it's like healthcare on the battle field: pointed, focused, can-do, common sense, but not so simplistic and removed for the bigger world of medicine that it's silly or merely palliative. With that setup in mind:
1) you cannot resolve significance issues through control. More generally you cannot fix a problem along PCA axis 1 by doing something along another orthogonal axis 2. Often makes it worse. Giving advice is control behavior, which the writer says, was really about significance. Yep, that's me sometimes. It's helpful to know when I misuse one skill to badly fix something else.
2) Behaviors are goal seeking and directly connect right into feelings which hits right into self-esteem. See the book or smarter people here. This is feature rich location of being human.
3) I've worked 30+ years and spent the last 14 years working for large companies. As posters here have said, behavior comes with a zillion motivations. But from time to time I have dealt with programmers, managers, young, and, old who strongly point out they should --- more: it'd be dumb not to try! --- to manage perception on the other side because perception is reality.
Now in some artificially distorted way, it does capture a truth but at the expense of omitting a lot of relevant context. But:
-- As Schutz says, we know we ought to be open but in the fact that's the last thing we'll ever do because it's not safe. Openness requires safety. If I start being open I might say something to get myself fired. If my boss talks openly I might get yelled at. That's anxiety making. If a co-worker talks openly about me I might get fired. Better to keep quiet about that co-worker so he'll be quiet about me. Fear is a lot of what prevents openness.
-- While words are pouring out one should not assume the speaker is open in two facets. First, the speaker may have low self awareness. If so, trying to make sense of that is doubly impossible. Two, the implied success of getting one over me by having the counterparty play to my perception requires low self-awareness my side. And among other things implies lack of choice/agency my side which is along the control axis to respond appropriately. So ... really where does the cause start and effect end. It's more nuanced.
-- The insistence on perception as reality is seated, I feel, either in trauma or in that shadow of maladaptive behavior some people come with. But it's the insistence that to me, indicates the perpetrator is the most insecure of all: they don't believe they have control, or are significant, or would want to be included ... and so in the absence of choice through control ... lie to themselves and the world to get by. They're fragile and they cast the world in a fragile light too.
https://thehumanelement.com/pages/firo-theory/ https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
It took me many years to learn that speaking in honest, innocent truths is not all there is to communication. Even if what you say is topical and meaningful, the way it is perceived by recipients has little correlation with how truthful your message is. This is what is meant when "factual information" is only one of four aspects of communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model (see in particular the example at the bottom of the page).
Essentially, the best way to communicate something always depends on the receiver.
My approach has thus been to try and run everything I want to say through a "if I were the other party and heard this, what would my reaction be? Is that reaction what I'm trying to achieve?" filter. I understood the article as this being the "manipulative" element that the author wanted to eliminate. But for me personally it's been life-saving to have some way of making sure that I'm not completely misunderstood. And that will happen if you present the right information at the wrong time, in the wrong context, to the wrong people or with the wrong presentation. Yes, I deliberate a lot over how I word my emails...
This take on "communication is not just truths yelled into the void" is also reflected in several XKCDs: https://xkcd.com/1028/ https://xkcd.com/1984/ https://xkcd.com/1860/
And this one in particular is very poignant: https://xkcd.com/1576/
Tangentially, I also found the way Alan Turing was portrayed in The Imitation Game to hit extremely close to home in this regard. E.g. this key scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjMfUCgyyw. Regardless of how historically accurate it is, the movie contrasts these differences between interacting with computers/math and other humans (in that the former is solely about "factual content" alone) very well in my eyes.
You build a performance that engages the audience by having a commitment to your character's goal. You are constantly aware of how people react, which isn't just about what you say but how you say it. Everyone does that already; actors just get practice doing it more consciously and explicitly.
As you say, empathy matters for communication, and considering the other person's feelings isn't manipulative. On the flip side, I've experienced the danger of explicitly choosing how I want the other person to feel - that part crosses over, for me.
NVC is really helpful in that regard, because one of the core tentets is that you communicate your own state. So, if I'm afraid I might use the wrong words, "Hey, I'd like to talk to you about X, but I'm afraid I might not use the right words. I would like outcome Y of this conversation, please let me know if I'm straying from that goal".
XKCD1028 makes that point beautifully - the goal of the communication is "I want you to know about something", not "there's a hole in the ground!".
And thank you for the Four-sides model. I hadn't heard of it before, and at the same time it maps nicely to NVCs four components: observations (fact), feelings (self-reveal), needs and requests(appeal).
I do see that at least my understanding of NVC doesn't directly map on the relationship aspect of the four-sides model. (It's implicit, but not called out)
Food for thought...
so, just regular empathetic communication then?
This is context-dependent. If someone is e.g. coaching you in something, it is expected they'll critique, and that will not carry connotations of attack. There's also a level of closeness where giving someone shit is actually affectionate. Etc.
"Linguistic scholar George Lakoff was among the first to acknowledge the Sanders milestone, comparing it to a President Richard Nixon quip from 1973. Lakoff tweeted, 'When you negate the frame, you activate the frame. When Nixon said, ‘I’m not a crook,’ people saw a crook.' Lakoff didn’t go there, but President Bill Clinton likewise negated the frame to activate it in 1998 when he insisted that he had not had 'sexual relations with that woman.'
Context and contextualization is an important point to honest, open communication. What might appear as factual differences or a stubborn opponent might really be stepping into the conversation with intersection free frames. Sometimes we tend to frame things in such as way as to remove our agency, or posit the other guy as the jerk etc.. So knowing your frame, and knowing a frame often enters into it (ex. DBT deals with this) is an important element to honesty to self and honesty with your your audience.
Talking without a filter; that is without constantly editing oneself to make it PC or conform to the normative organizational human structure in the room is a kind of openness too. On the other hand merely free-form raw, honest feelings or bottom lining the situation to avoid social norms to let the "truth" out isn't per se really open.
To are caveats here: there are a range of defensive behaviors (see below on Human Element and Dr. Schutz) so that while one may come across as honest and authentic (ex. not PC, not catering, not-careful) are in fact non-self-aware behaviors one exhibits to avoid conflicts with self-esteem.
Consider a prototypical alpha-male: as long as I criticize and blame someone on their lack of competence and failure to succeed ... could seem like honest feedback. Or it's the fog I hide behind to avoid dealing with myself. As long as the other guy is on the hook, I don't have to look at myself. All the more so if this is my go-to in difficult situations. Other people don't do criticism. Their go-to is playing the victim, or playing it off (what problem? what are you so upset about?) etc ... these behaviors often arise in heated, hard to solve situations when one is unable to cope well.
Openness in the good way, and the ultimately the most beneficial way wherever pairs of people interact has a strong focus on self, feelings & fears about self, and is less outward looking that might otherwise be thought at first. And it's worth pointing then genuine openness needs safety. An office that's doesn't promote safety will just get a bunch of people who say what they have to or what they can get away without without losing their job or so pissing off someone that there's payback.
Obviously "clear" and "direct" are both positive-spin words, indicating that the author thinks there's some value to this.
As somebody who used to be incredibly blunt, and still is much blunter than average, I'll tell you that social graces, white lies, and indirectness usually serve purposes. The only time you need to be more direct is when people don't understand what you're saying (which actually happens a fair amount in business).
Take for example the PIP (performance improvement plan). On the one hand, the name of it is so whitewashed you could worry the meaning might be lost. However, renaming it to the blunt title "were-probably-about-to-fire-you-documentation", though refreshingly direct, would probably be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people.
Does changing the words around it lessen the pain (in the long term)? Unclear, maybe it just spreads it out, maybe it makes it more shameful, because it indicates it's too severe to be addressed directly.
It's generally not helpful to say "Your plan won't work because of A, B and C" and then leave it at that. Are you trying to find problems or to help?
Don't get trapped into thinking that pointing problems is helping. It's good in school when you're a teacher, but almost nowhere else.
Most people proud of their directness are simply blunt ogres and proud of that, in my experience. Took me a while to discover that I can do better.
It can be subtle, it can be clear as day, but the pattern is 'I'm telling it like it is' attitude without considering anything else. Turns our you very often can consider something else while being direct.
It is perfectly possible to be clear and direct while praising someone or thanking someone. Or apologizing to someone. Or asking for help, refusing help or providing help.
And clear and direct criticism is also taken more positively when done by people who dont use "direct" as excuse to unleash all their anger and frustratin on someone.
The process of producing speech is the result of the direct or slightly indirect activity of billions of neurons. That activity, in turn, is the result of inputs that take into account the strength of trillions of dendritic connections which encode (in a lossy fashion) the history of a persons experience.
Speech is compressive and lossy. You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech. You have a limited vocabulary whose meanings do not map one-to-one in the mind of any other person who hears you speak. So not only are there multiple limitations on the output side of the channel, there are limitations on the receiving side as well.
This is why effective communication is so hard! As the sender you don't have full introspective access to the contents of your brain, so you can't even know what the full message is you're trying to send. As the receiver you're operating on a highly compressed message without a fully shared codec.
So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.
3+4
2nd-smallest double Mersenne prime
Number of continents
Right, but that's not even the purpose of speech. Abstraction is a feature, not a flaw.
Even with electronic systems where perfect and complete transfer is possible, we prefer simplified serialization of messages.
> So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.
I half-disagree with you here. Given that language is so ambiguous, it's admirable to try to reduce unnecessary ambiguity, when your goal is to communicate a specific message.
Dumping a complete terabyte state of your internal system state onto your listener would not be helpful, even if possible.
Second to being informative and actionable, communication should be useful (to you, to them). If being blunt or overly straightforward renders it useless, for any reason (even just sensitivity of the listener), then you need to take that into account and consider how it affects the outcome you want.
It reminds me of this Yudkowsky quote from [0]:
> “what you say is another issue, especially when speaking to nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don't have fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they're going to misinterpret something then you shouldn't say it to them no matter what the words mean inside your own head”
This article from Beck is little more than pretense to feel entitled to treat people rudely and act as if that is pragmatic. Very disappointing.
[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t-kn...
The problem with that is if you offer no solutions, positive encouragement, or proposals on what is better, people quickly tire of hearing the negative honesty part of your mind. And they start to learn that it's because your speech reflects a negative person underneath.
I think he has another couple of years "experiments" needed on his personality.
> I told an ex-girlfriend that I loved her and I was offering her a long-term relationship. I told my daughter who is getting shot with rubber bullets that I am terrified and that I am proud of her. I told a project at work that I wasn’t impressed by their goals.
> Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of relationships with them. They told me they weren’t interested in romance but they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another talk.
I read a bunch of good books on communication and what stood out was that effective communication is mostly about strategies to get the other person to open up, while also sharing your perspective. It's about realizing that the other person may get defensive and insulted about things where you meant no insult. Accept that as the normal state of affairs, even with reasonable people, and then move on to dealing with that. Accept that most people, much/most of the time are poor communicators/listeners, and set up your framework appropriately. There's little point in becoming very good at communicating your perspective if you don't account for the fact that misconstruing what you say is virtually the norm. Don't account for it by repeating something verbatim (the worst) or by finding N different ways to say the same thing. Solving it is by getting the other person to open up about what they are hearing.
Everyone says "listening is more important", but that's a bit inaccurate. You can't listen if the other person doesn't talk to you (as Martin experienced). Effective listening is actually about getting the other person to open up and communicate with you - I prefer to call it Active Listening.
Certainly, how you say things matter, but it's perhaps 20-30% of effective communication.
One book put it clearly:
Stage 1: You worry too much about how people will respond to what you are saying, and you take ownership of their negative responses.
Stage 2: You stop worrying about it. You realize that as long as your intent was fine, and your communication was not misleading/unclear, you are not responsible for the other person's feelings. You free yourself of that baggage, and speak without worry.
Stage 3: Even though you are not responsible for other people's feelings/responses, you have empathy for them and decide to help them out and find ways to find ways to have them open up to you (without feeling manipulated, etc). At this stage, you don't care when someone insults you or shouts at you for something innocent you said, but you don't drop the conversation either.
Many people get to Stage 2 and stick to it. It's a better place to be than Stage 1, but you have a higher chance of people perceiving you as uncaring, rude, etc. Those who want to get better at communicating try to get to Stage 3.
Difficult Conversations: Also a great book on describing the landscape. It has good strategies, but the book is written in a way to be hard to follow in a real conversation. Consider it more of an educational/reference book as opposed to a guide.
Nonviolent Communications (NVC): The best I've read in terms of giving concrete advice. Poor on describing why the strategies work. Had I read this without reading the other two I likely would have dismissed it. The book's advice will seem very wishy-washy, but upon reviewing my notes of the other two books, I realized the advice is pretty much the same in all of them - merely presented differently. Warning: There is a bit of NVC cult out there (similar to TDD, Agile, etc) - ignore the cult/hype and just focus on the stuff in the book.
NVC is very polarizing on HN. However, most of the criticisms I see here about it are clearly from people who've never read the book. And some people are triggered by the use of the word "violent". Hard to help people who judge books by their title.
Getting Past No is also a pretty good book.
BTW, I do not want to come across as an effective communicator. I'm still far from it. However, I think reading all these books and occasionally reviewing my notes has made it much easier for me to identify the communications problems that I witness (mostly at work). I've been in teams with communications problems, and I often fantasize about synthesizing all the stuff in the books into a series of blog posts, using solely examples from work. When I first started reading the books, I kept saying to myself "Ah, this part of the book describes me!" and then "Ah, that annoying guy at work - he's in this book!" and before long all the annoying folks at work were to be found somewhere in there :-)
Here is why I think this:
- saying things in a way is different than understanding them
- communication is happening on all channels: verbal, non-verbal including context, rhythm, tone, time, moods ... So only being honest verbal does not assure that the other will understand the same way the non-verbal or the context
- I understand that maybe mathematics is a honest way of communication. But takes a lot of practice (building concepts one from another and all from a starting point) from everybody to understand from a book the same things. And this is not usually possible between two people. Maybe can be done between long term partners
- I think focusing on the I without putting effort into making sure how the other understands be a trap of deluding ourselves that we are honest. We are honest when the others also understood what we said and only after that they can truly respond to who we are. At least this is my believe.
For every attempts to swing either way, there's pros and cons. I am now on my "direct" phase. I guess that's just the nature of communication, it is all contextual.
But is it also possible that they have things on their own side that you need to hear and understand. And so on the basis of all that you come up with what you need to say, and also how to listen and ask questions.
All the specific rules, like reflective listening and Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, are just putting these attitudes into practice.
However, it is also the case that sometimes the person on the other side is not well-motivated, either because they are a bad person or they are in a situation where in order to get along in life they have to screw you over. In that case clear direct communication can fail or even be dangerous. So you have to make a judgement as to whether or not it is smart to go ahead and be direct.
Correct! There are some people fortunately < 5% from what I can tell who are mal-adaptive and sometimes mal-adaptive and intelligent. That's a different ball game indeed.
Still digesting it. I think it is a variant of what I’ve heard before, which is that I leap from A to C assuming everyone understands that A and C both connect to B.
It’s frustrating because that’s the style I enjoy for receiving information. When someone makes a jump like that, it intrigues me especially when I don’t see the connection. It triggers easy questions when needed.
Another one I run into is assumed consensus. I make a statement without saying that it is a team consensus, and people outside the team assume the opposite, that I’m going rogue or something.
Then there is dismissive agreement, something I both do and dislike when done to me. Basically “yeah but that’s not what I want to focus on”.
I’m intrigued by the Amazon style of memo writing and reading in advance of meetings, as I think a lot of communication issues can be solved by making clear why we are sitting in a room talking right now, and ensuring everyone has the same background information.
How often do you get this feedback? Was it from just the one person? If so, have you asked others if they perceived you similarly? Of all the people you asked, how many agreed/disagreed?
Unless there is consensus, don't assume it is true. The majority of times someone gives you feedback like this, it is about them. They usually have a need, are expecting you to provide it. Instead, focus on what that need is. Heck, even if there is consensus in the feedback you get, you should still try to figure out what their real problem is: Yes, you speak at a low level. OK - so what? What problem is that causing for them? The trick is to learn to ask these questions nonconfrontationally (definitely do not respond with "So what?")
General steps would be to indicate you've heard them, express some concern, and then ask. Something like:
"It would concern me if my voice level is creating problems for our communication/work. It would help me if you could give me an example so I understand better."
(This is not the best phrasing, but is probably adequate). You can take it from there based on the response. Ask how they would have preferred you said it. In the end, though, try to find out why it was a problem. Are they intimidated by you when you speak passionately? Are they mishearing you because of the low volume?
The other issue is the use of "too" in their statement. How low is too low? How much is too much? Best to get examples so you get an idea.
BTW, it's not unusual to find out that it really wasn't a problem when you probe them. People use "too much" even when it isn't.
I once took a communications workshop where the instructor drilled two messages:
1. Everything anyone says or does is in service of his/her needs.
2. Never believe what people say about you.
The first one is your example. They're giving you that feedback because of some need they have that's not being met. The second one is not a license to behave however you want, but is tied to the first. People can get frustrated by something, and are not good at expressing it, and often take it out on people.
I would get all kinds of negative feedback about me, and it was very confusing. When I probed others if they felt similarly, I would often get sharp divides - a lot of people felt there was nothing wrong about my behavior (or even advocated for it) - others hated it. Only when I got more into effective communications did I start realizing that most of the people who were complaining about me merely had different preferences, and it wasn't that I was loud/stubborn/impatient/dull - it was that they had unspoken expectations from me that I wasn't meeting. Often having a mere conversation about the issue would resolve the problems without my having to change my behavior.
All this is not easy to do, BTW. I'm still poor at it.
Women in tech -- and I know a lot of them -- talk about how the only "acceptable" way to call out a guy's Glaring Error without him getting mad at you is like this:
"Gosh, I don't know, I maybe don't really understand the requirements that well, but it seems like {huge mistake} isn't right, what do you think? Of course I could be wrong."
We don't like doing this but we are told we're "not team players" if we dont do this.
> > Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of relationships with them. They told me they weren’t interested in romance but they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another talk.
He considers himself to be a “direct” communicator, when this is an example of very indirect communication. The guy wants to date and/or be intimate with someone — telling them “I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” is so much more indirect than asking “wanna get dinner?” it’s not even funny. His barometer of “clear and direct” is totally off in this case.
This guy’s take on “clear and direct communication” is sophomoric and there’s a reason adults don’t communicate in the most direct manner at all times. Sometimes you need to give the other person plausible deniability: asking “wanna see my etchings?” is a cultural shorthand that is just a more respectful way of asking “wanna sleep together?”, but this guys interpretation of clear and direct communication doesn’t seem to have room for a question like that.
Sometimes speaking vaguely rather than directly is a way of respect to your conversational partner. This guy doesn’t get it
“I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” = not vulnerable, not a question, not direct, not clear.
Also I don’t respect this article so I don’t feel compelled to demonstrate respect — I’d rather practice what he preaches to demonstrate its fundamental rudeness than do any preaching of my own
While you may be correct that his statement wasn't direct, I would say your alternative would be the very definition of "indirect".
Being direct in such situations may not be the best approach, and I suspect that is what you're trying to get at. However, "wanna get dinner?" when you want something more than just dinner is almost a textbook definition of indirect.
“Wanna get dinner and maybe have sex?” might be more direct in a textbook way but it’s also unecessary because the second part is already implied, and unecessary words make a question less direct IMO.
I think “wanna get dinner” is the most direct way possible of stating your intentions unless you’re talking to someone who’s not familiar with, or can’t interpret, cultural shorthand.
This dude’s article could alternately be titled “my experiment with treating everyone like they have autism and seeing how that makes them feel.” Prediction: not great