Translator: Monica Ronchi Reviewer: Jess Chung
So in about 20 years of working with organisations around the world,
to help them communicate more effectively,
there’s one thing that I think
makes a real difference to great communication,
and I want to share that one thing with you today.
And that is:
It’s not really about what you say.
The really important thing is about taking responsibility
for what's understood.
I want to show you an example of what happens
when we are only really concerned with what we say,
and not really concerned with what's understood by our audience.
This is a clip from Channel 9 in Australia
which some of you may have seen before,
interviewing the Dalai Lama.
(Video): Interviewer: So the Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop.
(Dalai Lama talks to translator)
Interviewer: Pizza?
Dalai Lama: Pizza shop, yes.
Interviewer: Yeah, pizza shop. And says:
'Can you make me one with everything?'"
Dalai Lama: What’s that? I’m sorry.
(Translator speaks)
Dalai Lama: Oh, Yes. Interviewer: Do you know what I mean?
(Laughter)
Fiona McNae: Do you know what he means?
I love this piece of communication.
It’s somebody just casually casting communication
in the vague direction of an audience
and hoping that it will be understood,
but really with little regard for the cultural norms,
or for any of the context
within which that communication is happening.
We heard the translator translating the words,
so it’s not about that.
But it’s perhaps about the understanding of the cultural norms,
and the differences there.
Maybe the joke format itself wasn’t understood.
Maybe it’s the culture of pizza ordering itself.
Or maybe it’s just this strapline for Buddhism,
this ‘being one with everything’,
which perhaps doesn’t travel,
even to the Dalai Lama.
So I’m interested in this because
what I see in my work
is that undercurrents of these sorts of misunderstandings
can influence way more of our communications
than perhaps even we are aware of on a day-to-day basis.
And I think today,
as individuals and organisations,
we’re called upon to engage
with some of the most complex communications and cultural issues.
We need to be really sure of our understanding.
We really need to be sure
that we are taking responsibility for what’s understood.
Let me tell you a few stories of things
that I think make a difference
to our communication.
The first one is that context matters.
I come here today
and I am relatively clear of the context.
I need to be here to give a talk to you guys.
And I hope that you guys
have come here to sit and listen
at least to some of what I’ve got to say.
It’s quite easy for me to make some assumptions,
about you as an audience,
and try and tailor my communication around that.
But what we are talking about
are the times when that context is not understood, or is misjudged.
And it leads us to gridlocks in communication.
Let’s take just a single word and see what happens.
The word 'simple'.
In the UK, 'simple' typically means
something like 'uncomplicated' or 'easy'.
But that same word in the U.S. can be inflected slightly differently
and be much more associated with ideas like 'minimalist'.
In France,
it can be used to describe the rural, or the bucolic.
It brings a different meaning with it,
because of the context within which it is spoken.
And in Japan it can be associated
with ideas of smallness, or diminutive.
And this sort of slippage between the word
and what it means in different cultural contexts,
it really underpins a lot of our communication issues.
It could really lead to gridlock.
It can lead to a lack of understanding
and lots of time and energy misspent.
'Clean' as well,
a simple, universal notion like 'clean'
becomes encoded so differently in different cultures.
If we talk about ‘clean’ in Mexico,
we always draw on ideas of moral purity,
the idea that cleanliness is next to godliness, in some way.
Whereas in Japan, with its focus
on a personal cleansing ritual in their culture,
the idea of cleanness is much closer
to the idea of beautiful.
In fact, they have the same word, 'kirei',
that looks to articulate both of those meanings.
And in China, we see 'cleanness' very close to the idea of whiteness.
Both of them are associated
with ideas of aspiration, ideas of progress -
typically progress away from the rural environment.
What I love about understanding these sort of ecosystems of meanings,
these ecosystems of cultural nuance,
is they don’t stay static.
They evolve as well, over time.
Cultures evolve, languages evolve, meanings evolve.
And it takes a degree of attentiveness
just to master some of that.
In the UK, once upon a time,
'clean' was very associated
with the idea of being civilised.
We British Isles were nicely boundaried by our 'cordon sanitaire'.
It kept us safe from the people in Europe.
[Laughter]
But now, thank heavens,
we can see perhaps some more positive associations
of the idea of 'clean' in the UK.
It's much more likely to be used in connection with things like
'clean data', 'being clean from drugs', 'clean energy'.
But the important thing
is that words rely upon their context for the meaning.
And that's the work that we do over the years.
It’s working with organisations
to construct international communication,
to find an idea that can represent a notion across
multiple markets, multiple countries, multiple cultural groups.
Our start point for this work though is that everything communicates.
So it’s really not just the words.
Because images communicate, too.
As do fonts, and colours, and scents, and textures, and sounds.
All of these elements,
or signs as we would call them,
are constructed through culture, interpreted through culture,
to construct meaning.
And we need to be aware of how
all these individual components come together
to create the overall meaning that we are looking to communicate,
and therefore to have a better chance
of being responsible for understanding.
So in this big swirl of words,
and meaning, and things changing along the line,
sometimes it’s really nice to try
and take sanctuary in the language of numbers,
to say, 'Here is a space in which we can articulate an unarguable truth.'
But I’d like to suggest today
that even the language of numbers is subject to interpretation,
and is sometimes subject to misunderstanding.
How about the number 2.
You could see that as quite simple, maybe.
The number 2 is also the number 2.0
or the same as the number 2.00,
just measured to different levels of precision.
And we can happily and cheerfully round up the number 1.56 to the number 2.
Or round down the number 2.44 to the number 2.
So 2 itself could exist anywhere in that space.
What makes a difference is the assumptions that we make,
the context within which we are operating,
and really whether those assumptions are agreed between us as we communicate.
We’re very used in the UK to seeing numbers in the news.
We’re used to seeing numbers construct the truth for us,
perhaps subvert a truth for us,
or create a new truth that we hadn’t thought of before.
We’re quite used to currently seeing
the number for our national deficit
being framed sometimes within the context of our GDP,
and sometimes just on its own,
and those numbers tell two very different stories,
and communicate two very different meanings.
So in a world where big data looms large for us,
in all of our lives,
I would suggest and encourage us
to be thoughtful, and to be intelligent
about the meaning that we draw from those numbers,
and considerate of the meanings
that our audiences may draw from the numbers that we communicate.
The other language that we are really interested in
in our work at the moment,
is the digital language
and how that’s changing.
This, I am sure you are very aware, is the 'tears of joy' emoji.
This year, it is the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year.
Not Emoji of the Year. It is the Word of the Year.
You see, emojis now are getting to the point where
they’re beyond the emotional punctuation,
beyond the text with the smiley face at the end of it.
They are, in some ways, tone of voice for a digital medium
which has no tone, and has no voice, arguably.
They extend our language.
They extend what we are able to describe.
It is quite difficult to say what you will say
in a digital medium with words and an emoji,
without that emoji.
And this is the emoji that is the most widely used
in the whole world at the moment, apart from in France.
(Laughter)
Isn’t that lovely?
I love the thought
that the two emojis that we want to use,
the two symbols that we want to use in the digital space,
more than anything,
are the tears of joy and a heart representing love and compassion.
The raised hand is an interesting one.
Sometimes that can communicate a high-five.
Sometimes it can communicate something different.
It can communicate 'stop', for example.
And that all depends upon context.
So you see,
what we’re starting to understand
is these new digital languages work in the same way as our verbal language,
that the meaning they communicate is subject to context.
That’s important for big organisations
who are starting to want to use these digital languages
to recruit younger people,
or to communicate with different audiences.
But beyond the sphere of the corporates
and the organisations that we work with,
there’s also a real need in the public sector
for us to take responsibility for how we're understood.
How we are understood
by the recipients of the care and the services
that we provide.
I just want to end by telling you a personal story.
It wasn’t so long ago that I was arriving at a hospital
for a radio therapy appointment.
It was the first appointment I'd gone to.
It was a beautiful high-tech hospital,
full of very intelligent, very talented brilliant people.
When I got to reception, the lady said,
'Ah, can you hurry up?
You're on Linear Accelerator 4 in 6 minutes.'
Linear Accelerator 4? What sort of hell is this?
This is what it was.
So, you know, rational, accurate.
But to me,
walking through the door at that moment,
that was a really terrifying proposition.
And as I walked through the waiting room with this in my mind,
I noticed a rack of leaflets.
And one of the leaflets said to me,
'Feel better with a free makeover.'
I thought, 'Oh that's lovely, I'll feel better with a fr…'
But there was another leaflet,
just gently overlapping the other leaflet,
which offered me a service to rapidly make my will.
[Laughter]
So you see, everything communicates.
Everything communicates in context.
The receptionist, the name of the linear accelerator, the leaflets.
All of that built the total understanding
that I took from that communication.
What I needed from the department
was just to take one more step,
to take a little bit more responsibility
for the totality of their communication.
A little bit more responsibility
for how they were going to be received
and going to be understood.
Whoever wrote that sign,
the 'Linear Accelerator' sign.
There was a moment when that could have been a 'Treatment Room'.
There was a moment when that could have been a 'Healing Zone'.
And we're starting to understand
that by using that sort of language,
that language of compassion, that language of empathy,
that there are real genuine positive outcomes on treatment
from communicating in that sort of way.
So everything communicates.
Let me just reflect then on what I think
perhaps are the three things that make a difference.
Remember that context matters.
Just take two minutes to understand your audience.
Take two minutes to just somehow understand where they are,
what assumptions they're making.
Try and make sure you get the context upfront.
It's worthwhile, it becomes intuitive if you practise it.
Remember that everything communicates.
We need to look a little bit beyond the obvious to understand
the other elements of communication,
which perhaps are coming in
and either contributing to or detracting from
the understanding we are trying to create.
And finally,
be aware of this as a receiver, as well as a communicator.
Maybe true enlightenment lies
in knowing that the person who is speaking to you
finds it hard to do this as well.
If we can do those three things
in one percent of our communication as a group of people,
that, I think, will start to make an enormous difference
to the kinds of communication and cultural challenges
that are ahead of us.
So my wish is for everybody today
to have the courage to go out there
and to take some more responsibility
for understanding, and for being understood.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)