Are you being clear?
almost certainly not
Clarity in communication is at an all-time low. It’s unacceptable. The basic, minimum, cooperative set of rules we all tacitly agreed to for most of my life is gone.
Are you being clear and complete in your communication? Probably not. Most people are not. You are probably much less clear than you were 20 years ago.
Smart people, dumb people, conscientious people, and lazy people—all of them are much less clear than they used to be.
I think I know why:
Texting and life governed by smart phones. Not only are we now trained to communicate in short, incomplete sentences, but the number of people who can demand our time and attention immediately has skyrocketed. We’re frazzled.
But this means clarity is more important today, not less.
Yes. I am saying that you (and me, and all of us) need to put in more effort.Self-centeredness. Yep. You, me, your mom, and your kid, and your neighbor, and everyone. We are much more self-centered and solipsistic than we were 25 years ago.
One of the results of this shift is that we have become lazy communicators. We act as though our conversational partners can read our minds. We’re not thinking this consciously. But our communicative actions betray that we are, in fact, operating subconsciously in a solipsistic world that thinks the inside of our own mind is the only mind in the conversation.
What do I mean? I’ve written before about how I have to “pull” information from people. That means I have to stop, restate what I think their question is, ask them, “are you referring to X specific thing, or are you referring back to some other portion of our conversation?”
I have to pull to get people to tell me:
a. Which file folder a document is in
b. Who “John” is (we don’t do first references anymore)
c. What their goal is
d. What “Wednesday” means. This coming Wednesday? The one that occurs next week? No, reader, I can’t pick it up from context. I’m not referring to the conversations where context makes it clear, so no need to push back on this. I’ve already accounted for that.
e. What bloody f***ing time zone “9 am means”. Come on.
It’s endless. I have to do this with people I know and love, with people I know but distantly, with clients, etc. Can you tell I’m getting tired of it?
Confession: I was a little disingenuous in how I set this article up. I used “we/us”, but I didn’t really mean it. I did that not to immediately alienate readers, because we are very sensitive in 2023 to the suggestion that we might not have done our job, or we might not be acting in a considerate way to other people.
I don’t have this problem (I have many others, yes). I am a clear communicator and I always have been. It is rare that anyone has to ask me for clarification, because I act with theory of mind: “What does this other person need to know from my priors, and my goal, in order to understand what I’m asking?” That undergirds almost every communication I have with other people. It’s second-nature to me.
Yes, I know. It might sound like I have an “ego” about this. I don’t. It’s a fact that I’m a clearer communicator than most people. This is not about my ego, it’s about my frustration with wasted time and a lack of considerate reciprocity. What I do is not out of the reach of anyone else. It doesn’t make me special or brilliant.
TLDR; I go to some trouble not to waste other people’s time, and often I don’t get that courtesy in return. I’m constantly stopping, re-asking questions, demanding specificity. Not to be a dick. Because I actually want to know what you want so I can provide it to you. I want to help you. But I want you to meet me halfway.
What torques me the most is when I detect other people finding my question-asking tedious. I can hear it, I can read it in the tone of text responses. I know it’s happening.
You don’t want me to waste your time with “annoying questions”? Then stop wasting mine. Be a grown-up, think about what I need to know before you ask me for something, and don’t make me go back and do your job for you remedially.
Nothing I’m suggesting here is weird, abnormal, or “too picky.” It’s what most adults were able to do second-nature 25 years ago. Yes, Millennials, I am talking about you specifically. You are the first generation that has had this problem. . You are capable of doing better, and I wish you would. Does this sound “salty?” Then you need to also adjust your indignation level, because it’s perfectly reasonable.
Same goes for everyone else. I’ve noticed older people doing this, too.
Friends, countrymen, enemies: isn’t your day much nicer and more efficient with clarity and less wasted effort?
Try this: Listen to some Youtube videos showing radio calls between commercial aircraft and the control tower. Notice how the parties repeat back to each other what they think they heard. It’s incredibly useful.
Try to adapt this to your everyday life. If you get into the groove of giving your conversational partner what he needs before he asks, you won’t end up having to speak to each other like you were doing military radio calls.
Example of doing it wrong:
Jane: “Can you meet me at 8 Wednesday my sched. change thx”
Example of doing it right:
Jane: “Can you meet me instead on Wednesday, September 15, a week from this Wednesday? I can meet at 8 am Pacific (that’s 11 am Eastern, your time). My schedule changed. Thanks!”
Coda: It is not a good idea for you to comment here, or text or email me, asking, "Are you talking about me?"
My very strong advice, keeping your own interests in mind, is that you not do this. It will not result in a productive exchange. I trust that my readers can pick up the seriousness underneath this mild way of expressing the thought.
Turns out I have a lot more to say about this--quel surprise.
My 20 years directing a nonprofit consumer protection organization gave me a direct look at how bad people are at communicating. Many came to the organization for help making a complaint against a business.
With few exceptions, it was a lot of work to get the complainant to be clear, specific, and understandable. Given that the organization I worked for dealt with complaints about funeral homes and cemeteries, complainants were understandably more emotional than those who bought a defective washing machine.
The job taught me that I had to take a forensic approach to sorting out what happened, who did what, why they might have done it, when they did it, and what a reasonable response might be.
While the majority of consumers had a valid complaint on at least some level, a very sizeable minority did not have a legitimate complaint once all the facts were on the table. Some consumers were simply overly emotional and, yes, narcissistic and fractious by nature. But the majority of "non-valid" complaints happened because of a failure of communication between the funeral director and the grieving customer.
Both parties are in different emotional states, and have different needs. Funeral service business protocol is second-nature to undertakers, but it is opaque to consumers. Many of these complaints were misunderstandings. It was pleasing when I could clarify the situation for both parties to the point where the customer no longer felt the need to file a formal or legal complaint.
This also taught me that unclear communication is a conscious strategy for a noticeable number of fractious people. They substitute emotion/indignation/grief for facts because that works on most people. "How awful of that mean old undertaker!" is the common response.
But I insisted on clarity, chronological timelines, and when appropriate, evidence and documentation. The "grieving, devastated party" in such cases quickly changed affect, becoming insulting, aggressive, and threatening.
Most people aren't consciously deceptive manipulators (but a sizeable minority is). For most, it's really just bad communication.