In
The Communication
Book: 44 Ideas for Better Conversations Every Day,
authors Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler hit a sweet spot of condensing
complex theories into simple chunks of easily-digestible information, both in
text and infographic form translated seamlessly from their original German by
Jenny Piening and Lucy Jones. Subject matter runs the gamut from Aristotelian principles
of rhetoric to the FoMO phenomenon. Every chapter is preceded by a “chalkboard”
style infographic that illustrates the theory, rules, or other information that
is detailed in the pages following.
Here are a few chapters I
found interesting:
·
The Salami
Tactic – the idea of presenting an idea or proposal in small, “bite-sized”
slices rather than overwhelming your audience with a full-fledged plan and all
its details.
·
The Spiral of
Silence – the phenomenon that, the more one believes their opinion is the
minority or unpopular, the less likely they are to voice that opinion.
·
White Lies – did
you know there are different colors of lies aside from black and white? In this
chapter, you learn there’s also gray and red. (But no blue. Which is good, since
blue is my favorite color, and I can’t imagine blue would ever lie to me.) The difference
between the four is “who the lie benefits.” A white lie, for instance, supposedly
benefits the person it’s told to. (Which is a red lie, if you ask me!)
·
L’Esprit de
escalier – Which is the French term describing that feeling going into a job
interview feeling completely prepared for every possible tough question, tanking
the interview, and then waking up in the middle of the night from an epiphany
of the perfect thing you should have
said.
·
The Standpoint
Theory – Describes a feeling that has been growing in me of late, that the more
power a person has, the more likely they think their perspective is the fair
and balanced one.
That said, there are a few
flaws to this book:
1)
Its easy
readability is a bit deceptive. That is, I was surprised when I started reading
it to find how fast I was breezing through it. As I was reading, I felt sure I
was understanding everything. However, understanding and retention are two
different things. In retrospect, if I were to suggest a pace of reading this, I
would say to read only one chapter (a total of a couple pages) at a sitting. Otherwise,
it might be better to keep on hand as a reference book rather than reading
through in a linear fashion.
2)
Like so many
books published after 2016, this one seems to make certain oblique allusions to
political figures and events. I’m sorry, but I’m tired of tripping over these
sorts of things in current publications. It’s lazy, somewhat tacky, and—the weakness
of making “current” comments being its inherent transience—I don’t believe it
will age well.
3)
A few times the
subject matter skirts on the equally-fascinating (but perhaps tangential) topic
of logic and commonly-implemented fallacies. If there was one thing I wished to
see more in this book, it would have been a more detailed investigation into
these, since logic (and identifying bad logic), is such a huge part of
communication. (Although admittedly this is the first book by these authors
that I have read, so it’s possible that they’ve already done so in a different
publication.)
A Few More Thoughts on the Subject of Communication in
General
If you’re an introvert like
me, you may look to “scientific research” to learn how to communicate with people.
It’s not that I feel like I don’t understand what people are communicating to
me, but whenever I try to reciprocate, there is often a dissatisfied feeling that
I’ve fallen short. I end up walking away thinking
“That is not what I meant
at all,
That is not it, at all.”
...and any conversation that
ends with me feeling like J. Alfred Prufrock is not a successful one.
The thing is, there seems
to be some intermediary level of the Study of Communication that I can’t seem
to grasp. "Small talk" I can do, although I dislike it inherently; it’s so
disingenuous, me asking questions that I don’t care about the answers to, and
answering with inanities any questions that might be placed to me. The only
sort of conversation I really enjoy, and which I wish I could achieve more
often, is the deeper sort of interchange of thoughts, opinions, feelings, and
ideas.
To swap memories or suggestions,
discuss alternatives and hypotheticals…actually, now that I think about it, “discuss”
rather than “converse” is the real activity I enjoy. I blame college for enhancing
the expectation that adulthood would be filled with such stimulation. Whenever
I have encountered a conversation that discusses something that really
intrigues me—literature, for example—I have almost exclusively been met with
glazed-over eyes when I allow myself to be fully engrossed in it. Apparently,
people are fine saying “Oh, I love to read!” but don’t want to have to prove it
by talking about it.
In short, to move from my
favorite poet (T.S. Eliot) to one of my favorite authors (Jane Austen, in Persuasion):
‘My idea of good
company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal
of conversation; that is what I call good company.'
'You are mistaken,' said he
gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.’
My problem, then, seems to
be an inability to transition from the undesirable small talk (or, to use the technical term, “chit-chat”) to the more desirable, deeper discussion...which is
where this sort of research comes into play.
In the end, The Communication Book is
more about the why, such as “why do
people communicate in such a way?” or “why do we interpret things according to
this mindset?” rather than the how of “how
do I use this information to communicate better?” or “how can I put this into
practice?” While this book didn’t quite provide me with
the tools to overcome this “mental block,” it did cover a vast amount of topics
that I think I’ll find useful in the long run. In particular, this book seems like
a great fit for learning about workplace communication.
