Weaving Effective Communication

Most people think that communication is all about content. They’re only half right.

Consider communication as a woven fabric, with the warp and the woof (or weft) lying at right angles to one another. Each east-west strand passes, alternatively, above and below each north-south strand, in turn supporting and being supported by the other. A well-woven fabric can be not only a thing of great utility, but also a thing of great beauty– art and science married.

In exactly the same fashion, the fabric of communication has a warp and a woof. While content is important and should always be delivered in a cogent fashion, raw content is just a collection of loose east-west threads of limited utility and little beauty.

What makes your communication effective are the north-south threads, woven through the threads of content. These threads give support to your content, and they work to make your communication piece both useful and attractive.

What are these north-south threads? They’re all the human modalities used to ensure that your message actually arrives and has its desired effect. Depending on your message, your audience, and the setting, these modalities include such things as body language, eye contact, humour, use of analogy and story-telling. These are the human elements.

Unlike humans, computers don’t worry about the north-south threads. When my desktop is talking to the server, there is nothing touchy-feely going on– it’s just pure data, ones and zeros. Data dump to data dump.

But you and I are much, much more complex than that. I will listen to you and accept your story only after I have decided to trust you, and I will make that judgment (mostly unconsciously) by watching your eyes and your face, listening to your tone and style, or having you capture my imagination with word pictures. Even something as simple as your regional accent will make me judge you as more, or less, intelligent and trustworthy.

All the best communicators understand and practice these concepts. With only slight exaggeration, Marshall McLuhan famously said that “The medium is the message.”

What is poorly understood is that the more important the message, the greater the need to focus on delivery. One might think, for instance, that legal pleadings must be cold and dry, but in fact, the opposite is true. They must speak to the conscience of the court as well as its intellect. A well-drafted pleading will, in the very early paragraphs, “hook” the court.

This week, take a minute before you hit the send button, and re-read every serious e-mail to ensure that you are sending a message to the heart and conscience as well as to the intellect. I promise that you will see a marked increase in your communication effectiveness.

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