Reviewing “The Communication Book” by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler

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.