On Effective Communication

An old joke: “— What do you do when people don’t understand you? — I talk louder.”

There are countless books, courses and frameworks devoted to effective communication.

But what is effective communication, really?

In my view, it’s the ability to hand over your thought so that it becomes the other person’s thought. When an idea is taken into someone else’s mind as their own, it starts to shape how they think and act from then on. The gap between how the same idea sits in the heads of the two people talking — that gap is the measurable indicator of how effective the communication was. Roughly speaking, it’s how identically each of them understood the same thought, concept or task, especially in the details.

How do you pull that off? It’s harder than it looks.

In a conversation we tend to fixate on what we want to say, working to phrase our thought clearly. We assume that the clearer we lay it out, the more we’ll get through. But the real question is: clearer for whom? Usually — for ourselves.

Effective communication is built not from us, but from the other person. We all think differently: different life experience, education, interests, social circles, the books we’ve read, the wounds we carry, and plain differences in how our nervous systems and brains work. And none of this can be scored on a “worse — better” scale; it’s simply other.

As the saying goes: “You don’t bring your own rules into someone else’s monastery.” Only instead of a monastery, picture someone else’s mind. The proverb starts to apply to the words, phrases, turns of speech, slang, examples and comparisons we use — and even, perhaps first of all, to the nonverbal gestures and signals.

Ideally, each thought is delivered inside “the other person’s world” — through the lens of how they see reality, their worries, their hopes, their fears, their mood in that moment. If we slipped into their body, how would we hear ourselves?

For instance, if the person is a fisherman, the argument that you should go where the customers and proven demand already are, instead of trying to manufacture demand where no one has ever bought anything, lands better through the image of a fisherman who goes fishing where other fishermen are already pulling in a good catch, rather than at some random spot in the sea.

Hence the conclusion: communication with each person has to be individual, and the ability to switch quickly between the worlds of different people is a hard skill to build — but a deeply valuable one.

That’s exactly why we sometimes see leaders who, from the outside, can come across as a bit rough, inarticulate, unpolished in their speech — and yet they’re extremely effective. Eloquence is great on a stage; in business what matters is how fast and how precisely everyone understood each other, and there all means are fair.

Here’s to the skill of delivering our thoughts inside the other person’s world! 😎