Successful communication is a grand challenge for us. Possibly one of the grandest. I would even say, the one challenge that will, in the end, determine whether or not we will survive as a human kind.
Whales communicate successfully over 10,000 miles distance. We humans struggle to find a shared understanding with our loved ones who sit right next to us. Even for identical twins, attaining a shared understanding appears to be merely an impossible task!
We communicate a lot. In our digital world now, pretty much all the time. Each day, we are flooded by countless messages that keep our “smart” phones hyperactive and overload our intellectual human brains. Particularly in times of crisis, we can no longer take in this massive amount of information. The information overload pushes us into despair. The question arises: How can we possibly handle this pandemic, when even in non-crisis situations, our communication is failing terribly and causing us so many interpersonal problems?
We fail – not in our sending and receiving of many, many messages. But in attaining a shared understanding with one another.
Over a century ago, we tried to resolve this problem by finding a universal language. “Esperanto.” – It carried the name of our human hope. But the effort in itself was not communication success. Our attempt to make our communication universal didn’t attain a shared understanding among the gatekeepers. All our attempts to bring humankind together in one language failed.
So we invested and published research to better understand and support our human interpersonal sense-making process. We hoped to prevent and heal domestic violence. We tried to reduce conflict and resolve bullying. We set out to prevent communication failures in healthcare, to reduce the countless incidents that cause so much evitable suffering and deaths every day.
Things haven’t really improved that much. Not enough. There is still a lot of space, too much space left for improvement. We need to do better than that.
So we conducted more research. This time to better understand the “why we’re not improving” phenomenon. Why are we not getting better at this persisting communication challenge that sets us apart from other living species on Earth?
Through our research, we identified eight fundamental maxims about the human communication process. Our evidence showed us that our miscomprehension of these simple maxims are the reason why we continue to fail in our communication. We published these maxims two years ago. Like many of our efforts, that information now rests in journals and books. It is information that is read and received, but it doesn’t seem to penetrate enough for eliciting a shared understanding.
What are these maxims showing us?
Most notably, they say that the context in which we communicate greatly influences our communication success. Most often, it is a disabling influence. We often don’t pursue the same goals. We assume that we do, but we actually don’t. We pre-judge others because we think we know them. We don’t really listen to what they say, because we think we already know their point anyway, so “what’s the point.” While whales use the sonar capacity of water that surrounds them for connecting with each other, we stack up hierarchical walls between us that our human words cannot seem to pass anymore. While language is certainly becoming a greater challenge to us than ever before in our current migration crisis, this challenge is not really new to humankind. Migration has always been our human nature. It is only now becoming an issue, in our “modern” context where we no longer have the capacity or time to truly engage with one another anymore for much nonverbal sense-making. The situation is rather the opposite – with the availability of our digital channels, we increasingly strip ourselves naked from nonverbal interaction. I’m not talking about the sending or receiving of nonverbal messages. I mean nonverbal interaction – the success of which is linearly dependent on directness of channel. In other words, the success of nonverbal communication requires face-to-face encounters. It decreases substantially with increasing interpersonal distance.
So, we know from research that most communication transpires through our nonverbal cues.
The question becomes…do we have those nonverbal skills? And do we allow the context for it to transpire?
I am not talking about employers or structures forcing unfavorable contexts onto us – but about us, as a human kind. A species that is allegedly more intelligent than any other species on Earth – are we creating a life for ourselves on this planet that gives space for this fundamental capacity that, when it comes down to it, will be critical for human survival?
If it’s true that “practice creates mastery,” then we are not looking good, in a world where we are decreasing our nonverbal communication practice to a minimum, because we are simplifying our communication to digital pathways. Pathways where our nonverbal sense-making potential is mostly reduced to a decorative display.
Why did we choose digital communication for our future?
Digitization and particularly the availability of social media channels have changed our communication landscape in a way that can make us more efficient. It’s about efficiency. For example, digitization allows us to mass-communicate. We can reach places and humans we were never able to reach before. Which, as we can see now tangibly in the situation of a pandemic, contributes to quick information sharing!
But it also enables masses of communication, empowers masses to communicate, and generates massive amounts of information.
Check. Efficiency is not our problem.
We are a very efficient species. More efficient than ever before in our existence. If any curve is “exponential,” then it is our efficiency curve! Our mass-of-communication curve is not the problem. Our problem is that we too often fail to achieve a shared understanding.
One of the world’s most celebrated neuroscientists, Abhijit Naskar, asserted in his recent book Conscience over Nonsense (2018):
“We have the neurological potential to be truly a wise species, unlike any other species on Earth, yet we act like the dumbest species on earth. We are a stupid species with smart phones.”
Let’s not overload our brain even more with new communication pathways and guidelines. We need to find ourselves in our common denominator again. We need to UNDERSTAND each other again. As humans. As individuals within a species on a planet that we all share.
For years, I have studied and researched safe communication practices in the healthcare setting. Let’s look at some of the guidelines we’ve developed in practice.
One of the guidelines we currently promote is: “When you hand off information, then cover all information with respect to the situation, background, assessment and recommendation (SBAR).”
Last year, I involuntarily switched from being a patient safety scientist into the skin of a patient in that exact healthcare setting I had studied for years. At a young age, I had a stroke. I took my time at the various hospitals as a field experiment, and learned more about our communication problems than any research study would have ever revealed to me.
I witnessed many, many guideline-adherent handoffs.
The accomplished task was: “Hand it off.” Not, “understand each other.”
In the healthcare context, successful communication is particularly challenging. Now we are in a pandemic. A state of crisis. Which poses a particular, much greater challenge for the achievement of a shared understanding.
What communication guideline do we need that will heal our humankind?
It is very simple:
When you look into a person’s face and try to communicate with them, then understand them.
We are more than communication pathways. We are humans. We need to learn to understand each other again. And we can learn that by returning to our core human roots. Not in our brains.
What is our commonality in the roots of our species?
We all share our basic human needs – food, water, shelter. Love and belonging. Survival! We also all share the same emotions, across this planet – happiness, sadness, fear, also anger. We can understand these commonalities, but let us feel them again. Share them. Only this way, we can attain a shared understanding with one another. We are not robots or IT systems. We are people. People in a species. A very intelligent species – but a species that is currently not reaching its survival potential at all.
So, how can we succeed in situations where many people from very diverse backgrounds with sturdy hierarchical walls between them need work together under conditions of high stress, high stakes and no sufficient time?
We could apply for grants to conduct more expensive studies to find answers to this question.
But we could also just open our eyes.
Something interesting is happening right now under Covid-19.
The Covid-19 pandemic is pushing us over the edge into complete despair.
But in that despair, we suddenly come together as humans again.
Is Covid-19 bringing us together in our common denominator again? Is it reminding us on our commonalities? Is it making us feel them again, feel us again as a species? All of us, regardless of our location, position, sexuality or skin color – altogether, at the same time and in the same place?
The stories I hear from clinicians now at the frontline of care are stories of coming together. All of them – nurses and physicians – suddenly find a common denominator in the grand humility they are now feeling in the face of this monstrous enemy that none of them can see. They can only see the manifestations of it, in the virus’ victims.
The manifestations I see, as a communication scientist who has spent years in applied research for improving the successes of “safe communication” at the frontline of care, are just as humbling.
I suddenly see people finding their common denominator again – not through communication skills, but through a virus that suddenly activates the roots of their communication skills. The communication interventions we had planned were expensive and time consuming. Often, this was the reason why our interventions could, in the end, not take place like we had planned. There was not enough time, and not enough money. Now, Covid-19 is “just doing it.”
We are finding ourselves in our very roots as humans again. We understand. Not by a language – but by a new communication experience that Covid is giving us. Covid is “just doing” it – the universal language that we all set out to find for ourselves a long time ago, again and again. It’s here. And the message is much simpler than any communication model or guideline could ever have conveyed to us. It comes in perfect parsimony. It shows us what counts: That we understand. We understand each other. Suddenly. Without elaborate scientific interventions.
The most effective communication intervention was a Virus. In a few days, it has affected our entire human kind.
Maybe we will learn by this experience how to communicate like the whales. Maybe Covid will burst the hierarchies and egos we have created to divide us. Maybe Covid will unblock our message flow so that we too can reach over 10,000 miles distance now by cooperating with our nature around us.
Covid’s message is currently reaching across our planet.
Thanks to our digitization in part, yes.
But not because of it.
We talk about flattening the Covid-curve.
Covid-19 is flattening our efficiency curve.
For teaching us what we really need.
Not for our wallets – but for humankind.
The message is simple and direct.
It says “just do it.”
This message will penetrate – until we understand.
— Annegret Hannawa