Manage-Wise

Communication and community

Most of us in business have heard the advice to make our communication not I-centered but you-centered. Most business writing textbooks, including ones that I have written, tell us to focus not on the sender but on the receiver. They tell us to write not “I will send you a check” but “You will receive a check”.

This advice is good. But it’s not good enough. It’s based on an incomplete model of the communication process.

But this model and the advice based on it ignore the fact that we in business are never isolated writers or speakers communicating with isolated readers or listeners. We communicate within organisations—ideally within communities. The relationship between sender and receiver always has to be thought of in a larger content. As Peter Drucker says in his classic book, Management, “There can be no communication if it is conceived as going from the ‘I’ to the ‘Thou’. Communication works only from one member of ‘us’ to another.”

It is no accident that the words communication and community both come from the same Indo-European roots: ko and mei (pronounced “may”), meaning “together” and “change”. (My company, Komei, Inc, is named after this fact.) A community is a group of people who “change together”. Communication is what allows communities to change and what keeps them together as they change.

Native American cultures traditionally have known that community is necessary for communication to happen. Thomas W Cooper writes that for Native peoples, “Without genuine communion (another “ko-mei” word), there could be no meaningful communication. Thus the entire communication ethic was firmly based on spiritual communion”.

Creation of community

But communication is not only necessary to community, it also creates community. If the quotation in the preceding paragraph was uncomfortably mystical for you, consider this one by dollars-and-cents reengineering guru James Champy: “It is authentic communication that brings people together into a community—listening, responding, confronting, asserting, and disputing—engaged in the perpetual process of change.” So the best business communication is not just I-centered or you-centered—it is we-centered. To make our e-mails, letters, and reports more we-centered, we need to ask two questions.

The first is, “To what community do my readers and I both belong?” Are we members of the same department or division within an organisation? Are we fellow shareholders of the same company? Are we members of the same profession? In short, what makes us us?

Try to find the smallest meaningful community that answers this question. The newspaper USA Today has enjoyed great success with its “we” approach, although sometimes it has been ridiculed for making its community too big. When we read headlines like “We Are Eating More Kelp”, all us non-kelp-eaters suddenly feel left out of the USA Today community.

To ask, “What is the smallest community my reader and I are both part of?” is to ask a very practical “warm worms” question. You will find that if kinds of other decisions will fall into place for you. Difficult pieces of writing suddenly will become easier if instead of focusing on the antagonisms or differences between you and your readers, you focus on the community you are both part of, on the similarities that exist. Even if you are angry will find that you can frame your message in the content of what you both want to happen larger market share, say, or better work environment.

Lee Wood, former writer for Resort Condominiums International, says, “Writing is always an extension of the relationship you have with a person”. She notes that such a focus is especially important now, with so many organisations experiencing great change.

Some writers find it helpful at this step in the process to draw a circle on a piece of scratch paper. Label it with the name of the community you share with your audience. Then around that circle for any larger communities of secondary audience members. Will a memo for your team, for example, also be read by higher management outside the team? (Remember that often you have a secondary audience that exists only in the future, when someone takes advantage of the relative permanence of writing to check what you are writing in the present).

Add to the diagram an arrow to represent your communication. Are you bringing information into the community from outside? Are you taking information the other direction, from inside out? Are you moving information from point to point within the community? You can use your sketch as a visual aid throughout the rest of your writing process.

Personality analysis

The second important question to ask at this step is, “Within this community, how are my readers and I alike and different?” Specifically, consider how you and your readers are alike and different in four ways: personality, attitude, circumstances, and knowledge. To remember them, think of the acronym PACK as you “pack” for your journey around the clock face through the rest of the writing process.

The first dimension in which to consider similarities and differences is personality. The most used way of categorising personality is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) employed in many organisations. The MBTI measures personality on four scales:

Extroversion (E) or introversion (I: roughly whether one draws energy from other people (E) or from within oneself (I).

Sensing (S) or intuition (N): roughly whether one draws information from the senses (S) or from intuition (N).

Thinking (T) or feeling (F): roughly whether one makes decisions based on logic (T) or on emotions (F).

Judgment (J) or perception (P): roughly whether one sets priorities rationally or spontaneously.

Together, these four variables produce 16 combinations or types. Although certain professions tend to attract certain types, this tendency is by no means absolute. A professional colleague of mine, an Air Force major who worked at the War College, once told me that among generals and admirals in the US armed forces, all 16 MBTI types are represented.

If you know your MBTI type and those of your readers, you are especially fortunate: You will be able to answer the “personality” question with great precision. If you know only your own type and can make a decent guess about those of your readers, you will still be able to do excellent planning. Even if you have never heard of MBTI, however, your general people skills will allow you to make very good decisions at this step—and you will be able to understand much of the following advice, based on the research of communication consultant Dan Dieterich:

If you are an extrovert, you may need to get all your thoughts on paper very early; you may, in fact, “think by writing.” Thus you may want to write a very rough draft as part of step 3 and then reorganise it in step 4 so that you will able to write a much more organised draft in step 5. When you write to introverts, be sure to build community. Be careful not to overwhelm them with your position.

If you are an introvert, you may find it hard to move out of the planning stage into “quick and dirty” drafting. You will be helped by this book’s advice, in step 5, about drafting without editing. When you write to extroverts, try to overcome your reticence by projecting self-assurance.

Excerpt from ‘Business Writing & Communication’ by Kenneth W Davis. Reproduced with permission © 2007, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com