Facets of Respect

This past weekend I was at the triennial conference of the International Communal Studies Association, hosted by the Camphill Village communities of Triform and Copake near Hudson NY.

Among other things I listened to someone postulate that one of the foundational concepts that most intentional communities have in common is that their members desire respect. I had a complex reaction to that and want to walk you through it.

My first response was dismissive. Sure, everyone wants to be respected (who would say they prefer to be disrespected?) but in terms of group dynamics it's a trap. A ready surface agreement that respect is a common value implies solidity that's ephemeral—because respect is slippery fish that's hard to net. 

For some people it's not raising one's voice and pausing between statements. For another it's speaking honestly and from the heart—which can be loud and immediate. You can see the problem. Even if people were 100% consistent about engaging others in the way that they would prefer to be engaged, that may have no bearing on how the other person perceives respect. With the wide variety of communication preferences extant in the world it's almost random whether you'll like the way you're approached—even when speakers are trying to be respectful, which won't always be the case.

[I am composing this essay aboard a train—the westbound Lake Shore Limited—and I had a relative minor experience of this very phenomenon within the past hour, buying a cup of coffee in the café car. When it was my turn for service, the attendant asked me what I wanted and I told her, "One cup of coffee, please." Then she paused, looked me in the eye, said "Good morning," and waited. The implication was that she was going to wait there until I responded, and she had all day.

I dutifully mumbled a "good morning" in return, which reanimated her to start pouring coffee, but I was irritated. I didn't need an etiquette lesson, and hadn't been rude in the first place. While I am sympathetic with the desire to set a pleasant (even jocular) tone in the workplace, the attendant was playing a game I didn't sign up for, and didn't appreciate. Perhaps she wanted to be respected—seen as a person more than as a servant—but she came across as someone with a chip on her shoulder (she was fiercely nice, if that makes sense). I had the feeling that if I didn't say "good morning" I might not get my coffee. How was she respecting me (it was 6 am for chrissakes and I hadn't had any coffee yet)?

Essentially she was demanding to be met on her terms, which she'd altered from the normal expectations for a café car transaction, without letting customers know ahead of time that a shift had been made, or asking their permission. It was a power play sailing under the flag of civility, and I didn't like being her guinea pig.]

My second response was more thoughtful. Respect doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's a characteristic of exchanges between people. While I haven't found it particularly helpful to ask (or demand) to be respected, it occurred to me that it might be powerful to commit to communicating in ways that the recipient would consider respectful—to adopt a standard where group members would make an effort to understand what style of communication would come across as respectful to their audience and then try to engage them in that way. 

Even when you get it wrong, it's likely to land better if the other person knows you're trying, because the effort itself is evidence of caring.

While it may seem obvious that it's smart to take into account how your intended audience prefers to receive information (after all the point of communication is to share information and you can profitably work it from either end—refining the clarity of your messages, and packaging them in ways that are easier for the audience to absorb), many of us get no further than the first part before putting one's mouth in gear or hitting send. Instead of taking the time to investigate what our audience prefers, there's a tendency to simply offer others what we prefer ourselves and take our chances. (I style this approach communication roulette.) Sometimes that works—in the same sense that even a blind pig will occasionally find an acorn.

I realize this is fairly radical, focusing on the other person's receptors at least as much as on what you want to say, but if the prize is to be understood it's an excellent strategy, and I recommend it to you.

In any event, that's the pathway by which I've come to have a new-found respect for respect.

The Two Faces of Jargon

I love working and playing with words. And while, yes, that includes doing the NYT crossword puzzle as a daily partnership ritual with Susan, it's way more than that.

Last week I listened to someone give an impassioned plea for eschewing jargon, and it got me thinking. The speaker acknowledged that there was a place for specialized language (inside of specialties) but it was, in his view, a clear mistake to let that leak out into public where people just get confused about obscure meanings. His point—which was a good one— was that the purpose of communication was to be clear, not to obfuscate or to impress people with arcane, insider knowledge.

But I was not willing to swallow his point whole hog. How is jargon (words with a specialty meaning) useful and how is it distancing? That's what I'm going to explore in this essay.

While I agree that the overall context is communication and that the objective is passing along ideas and meaning as accurately as possible, we need to appreciate that everyone's understanding of "normal" vocabulary (even assuming we could define it) is not uniform, so the line between standard definitions and jargon is not quite as crisp as the speaker posits. Where does one draw the line, and why?

Language, I believe, needs to resist change but not be immutable. It has to breathe, and cannot be a done deal. It has to be possible for new terms to become "normal" as the culture evolves. Thus, some of what starts out as jargon gets elevated to standard, and it's often difficult to tell at first what will endure and what will fade. If jargon is banished or never used, there will be no cream to rise to the top, available to be lovingly skimmed off from time to time and added to sweeten and enrich our speech.

Consider, for example, this small batch of recent additions that are now solidly accepted (but were unheard of 35 years ago), all in the genre of emerging technology: email, social media, and tweeting.
 Here are some edgier examples: terms coming into general usage that I believe are likely candidates to become normalized (though it's probably too early to be sure):

•  crowdfunding to describe a broad-based appeal to potential benefactors where you try to raise money from a large number of small donations, typically via an electronic platform (the prime examples of which are Indiegogo, Go Fund Me, and Kickstarter).

•  mansplaining to describe the phenomenon where a man explains something (especially to a woman) in a condescending way in the mistaken belief that he knows more about the topic than she does.

•  cisgender (often shortened to "cis") to indicate people who identify with the gender they were biologically born with (in contrast with transgender).

The thing all these newer terms have in common is that they were developed to meet an emerging need. Because our culture isn't static (thank god), our vocabulary has to be protean enough to keep up. That means jargon needs to tested periodically to see if it's ready for prime time—not carefully restricted to the specialty closet or only invoked in dark corners sotto voce.

And there's more. Consider Donald Trump, who uses a very limited vocabulary, and, in consequence, many trite phrases (for what else is left?). It's often hard to know exactly what he's saying, which is further complicated by his contradicting his staff and his disconcerting habit of disavowing a thing he says in the morning with a follow-up statement later the same day. He's pretty good at conveying a clear energy (disdain being his forte), but discerning meaning from his statements is like trying to follow a drunk home—he's all over the place. (Admittedly, in his case it's hard to tell if he values consistency at all and it's difficult to distinguish whether he's being purposefully obscure, or simply cannot communicate any better.)

I bring him up as an example both because he's readily available and because it seems to me that he's embraced what my friend was advocating: no jargon. He speaks only in simple terms. How well is that working? 

Generalizing from Trump, I believe limited vocabulary correlates with the incidence of hackneyed phrasing. While that may not be inevitable, it's common and it isn't a good thing. Overused phrases typically have a dull edge. They cut poorly and are imprecise at conveying meaning (just as poorly oxygenated blood has trouble invigorating cells). Going the other way, jargon is energizing (if sometimes confusing). Think of it like a pond turning over, stirring up nutrients. 

Do all uses of jargon succeed in conveying meaning? Absolutely not. The more nuanced question is whether the incidence of failure indicates that we should never try, because everyday use of jargon sometimes confuses instead of inspires? For me it doesn't, though the decision to judiciously interlard one's speech with jargon calls for discernment in word choice—and a commitment to patient explanations when you overreach.

What is the value in stretching the language? While there were many aspects of my relationship with my father that I've struggled with, his love of words was something I readily embraced and for which I am grateful. Among other things that seed ultimately grew into my becoming an author and a public speaker, because I love the medium. It's an art form (rather than a mine field). 

I have made the strategic choice to regularly employ less commonly used words in my speech and writing because they have the meaning I want and I rebel against dumbing down the language (and the Orwellian concept of word elimination to control dissent through reducing the vocabulary to express it—a central feature of 1984—which was offered as dystopian fiction in 1949, yet expresses perfectly the horror of what this process can lead to—a version of mind control.

Besides, at the end of the day, I'm just having too much fun playing with the words. And who wants less fun in their life? 

In closing I'm going to ask that you indulge me on a pet peeve. "Enormity" is often used these days to mean large, but it didn't use to. It means evil. Will the language expand to embrace the misuse? Maybe (even though it makes me want to puke). There are plenty of other words to convey large (immensity, for example). On the other hand, Kleenex has now come to mean any facial tissue, not a particular brand, and I think that's probably OK, so enormity is likely to become acceptable as a synonym for large, despite my dyspepsia. Such is life, and my lack of ability to control it.

Closing Contact with the Third Rail of Distress

Almost all people living in intentional community—as well as those aspiring to—value good communication. After all, the heart of community is relationship and that's pretty hard to develop and sustain with weak communication.
That said, all conditions under which communication is attempted are not equal. Some are way more challenging than others. In particular, one of the hardest is when one or more people are experiencing serious distress. In fact, the higher the voltage, the more uncertain and potentially explosive the connection becomes—to the point where it's questionable whether even to attempt it because:

a) Relationship damage may seem a more likely outcome than enhancement (sometimes people express distress in damaging ways).

b) The possibility of constructive exchange may seem too remote.

c) The environment in which the engagement occurs may be too uncomfortable or toxic for the people not in distress to be able to function.

d) There is no clarity about what will be constructive.

e) There is no confidence in anyone present possessing the skills needed to be constructive, even if there's agreement about how to go about it.

However, despite all these reasons to be cautious, reaching out and communicating with people in distress is also when it can do the most good—in terms of helping the person through the distress, helping the group shift back from turbulent to laminar flow, and strengthening relationships through deeper understanding.

So how do you handle it?

I believe that once a person identifies with being in serious distress, the group's prime directive is to make sure that that person doesn't feel isolated, and the way to accomplish that is to establish an authentic connection with their experience—essentially, that means being able to demonstrate to the upset person's satisfaction three things:

1. What's the trigger?
What happened (or didn't happen) that resulted in the reaction? Sometimes it's an action, sometimes it's a statement; sometimes it's a sequence of things that becomes the trigger. Sometimes it erupts out of nowhere and sometimes it's been building for years. Rather than guess, you need to ask.

2. What's the energy?
It turns out that getting the energy right is often more important than getting the story right. That is, in order for the upset person to feel heard, it's important that the person reaching out gets into a similar energetic zone—raising their energy if the person is angry, and dropping down for people who are afraid. Smoke curling out the ears needs to approached very differently than tears rolling down the cheeks.

Sometimes people make the mistake of trying to be an island of calm when reaching out to people in distress (on the theory that matching energy risks further stimulating the overstimulated), but my experience has been the reverse—that upset is far more likely to be sustained when met by mismatched energy. ("If you truly understood what I'm going through you wouldn't be so goddamn calm!")

3. Why does it matter?
The final piece of my triage trio is making a connection to why this matters to the person in reaction. In what way did this touch a core interest or concern? Understanding context can often be a key element in feeling fully held. This is especially helpful when the listener can establish how the concern is reasonable and tied to something valued in the group.

Note that none of the above is about taking sides; it's simply about hearing accurately and establishing connection without ducking hard feelings or assigning blame. Done well, information should now be freely flowing again.

• • •

Now let's spin the above another way. Instead of focusing on someone in distress, think of someone who comes across as stubborn and locked into their position; someone who's perceived as holding the group up by not working productively with the input of others. They're seen as insisting on their right to be heard, yet it doesn't appear that they're living up to their responsibility to work respectfully with the views of others.

How do you handle that?

My advice, amazingly enough, is to proceed in the same way as with people in distress (outlined above). In general, someone balks at reaching out to others not because they're an asshole, but because they don't yet feel that they've been reached out to. Thus, the request to balance rights and responsibilities lands hollowly for the stubborn person because they don't have the sense that their rights have (yet) been honored.

It is not enough to simply assert that you have heard the person, you need to be able to show them through reflective listening. Better yet, feel into their beleaguered position (as an outlier for being stubborn) and establish a connection to why their position matters to them.

Then see if they unclench and are better able to reach out to others and find middle ground. In my experience deep hearing is incredibly effective as a topical balm on raw feelings and as an analgesic for stiff dynamics.

Looking at Both Sides of the Communication Coin

Choosing to live in community means opting for a life that is more intertwined with others. In consequence, one of the key predictors of how well someone will do in community is their ability to accurately track what happens in conversations. While that may seem obvious, it's trickier than you might think.

The front side of that is pretty obvious: how well do you hear what others are saying? It turns out that the back side is also pretty important: how well does what you say align with what you mean to be conveying? In this essay I'll examine both sides of this coin.

The Obverse: How well do you hear?
Pathway A)  Foremost, can you simply track what's being said and the general meaning? While I appreciate that sometimes people have unusual ways of speaking, which includes convoluted reasoning, odd word choice (even wrong word choice), imprecise diction, inapt metaphors, and mumbled enunciation, the truth is that not everyone listens well. To be fair, no one listens well all the time—perhaps they slept poorly; perhaps they're distracted by stress elsewhere in their life; perhaps they're bothered by tension in this conversation, perhaps they're so excited about what they want to say that they're not digesting what's being said.

It can take considerable discipline to center oneself sufficiently to be fully present for listening on a regular basis.

Pathway B)  Beyond the words, how well are you picking up the meaning associated with the inflection, tone, pace, and volume of the delivery? There is a lot here. If you're questioning that, just reflect on all the mischief we can get into with email, where all of this is stripped out and you only have the words with which to suss out the meaning. (In writing, of course, you have available the simple tools of CAPITALIZATION, italics, and underlining to convey additional nuance, yet compared to live conversation it's like having only the red, blue, and yellow crayons instead of all 120 choices that Binney & Smith offer in their deluxe Crayola set). 

In fact, these factors are so ingrained in the way we're used to communicating that with email we make up stories about the undercurrents based on word choice and sentence structure, conjuring up emotional content (and then outrage in response to it) without checking out whether that was a correct read. Sometimes it takes weeks to sort out where the conversation went off the rails—a mistake that would be corrected in seconds in a live conversation.

Pathway C)  How well are you picking up nonverbal clues: body language, facial expressions, eye contact (or lack thereof)? Most of this happens on the subconscious level and is something we start learning in infancy, even prior to understanding spoken language. For people with Asperger syndrome this is a struggle, as they suffer from the musical equivalence of being tone deaf when it comes to picking up social cues.

Another factor is your primary channel for receiving input.
o  For the visually dominant, Pathway C may be much more important than B, and thus unimpeded sight lines and adequate lighting may be crucial factors in being able to understand fully what's being said.
o  For the kinesthetically oriented, Pathway C is also important. In addition, it can make a big difference if speakers have enough room (and permission) to gesticulate, and perhaps stand and move, when addressing others.
o  For the aurally inclined (as I am), Pathway B is more important, and you want to pay attention to acoustical conditions, such as ambient noise, echo attenuation, and sound amplification.

The Reverse: How well do you convey?
Do people generally seem to get what you're trying to tell them on the first try? Does it seem that listeners more frequently get you wrong than others? If the latter, this may suggest something you could adjust in your delivery, making your meaning more accessible to your audience.

While you can claim the right that people should take you as you are—perhaps as a diversity issue—you're shooting yourself in the foot when "the way you are" isn't working that well. If the prime directive is effective communication (by which I mean an accurate conveyance of meaning between parties), then it's absolutely in your interest to adapt your delivery to something that's more easily grasped by your audience—assuming you know what that might be (and if don't have a clue, I suggest you allow that realization to motivate you to do the work to get one).

—Sometimes this is a pace issue: your stream of words may be coming too fast for people to absorb (I know a few people who's regular cadence suggests that they're reading disclaimers for radio ads); or, alternately, so slowly that listeners have trouble maintaining focus ("If you'd just speak a little more melodically, it would be perfect for helping me take a nap.").
—Sometimes it's a hearing issue: your being so loud that the volume is irritating; or so soft-spoken that your audience is missing words.
—Sometimes it's a framing issue: not filling in background or providing sufficient context for your comments to make sense; skipping steps in your reasoning, resulting in gaps that are difficult to bridge; or jumping back and forth chaotically in your narrative without time references or clear antecedents.

There is an art to speaking clearly and concisely (the old saw is that appropriate length is the same for speech and hemlines: in both instances you want something that is long enough to cover the subject, yet short enough to sustain interest) and not everyone devotes sufficient attention to how they're coming across. In particular, how well do you understand your affect when speaking? Is your delivery conveying what you want to be saying?

I want to conclude this essay by giving you three examples of problems I've had with this last dynamic in the past year. In each instance it is a story about how I responded ineffectually when I encountered pushiness that the initiator did not seem to be in touch with:

—Example A
I was working with a community (as an outside consultant) about tensions in relation to the budget allocation for a key committee. Ahead of working this in plenary I met with several individuals and small groups beforehand, to get their take on what the tensions were about. Toward the end of my series of prep meetings I sat down with the committee in question. 

Unlike the eight or so prior background conversations I'd had, I experienced the committee members as pushy, as if they were trying to sell me something. They tried to impress upon me that they were a paragon of good process in the community, diligent workers for the benefit of all, excellent listeners, and generally long-suffering through the budget debates. (They didn't make any claims about being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but you get the picture.) In short, responsibility for the tensions lay elsewhere.

This was interesting for two respects: a) their story didn't match up well with what others were telling me about how they experienced the committee; and b) their energy was adversarial.

My instinct in such situations is to meet energy where it is. (Mind you, I'm not saying this is necessarily an effective strategy; I'm just owning my tendency.) Thus, I raised my energy after the committee's download and gave them back some of what they'd been giving me. I told them that I'd already heard from multiple people in the community that they were viewed as bulldozers and a cabal that played fast and loose with group process to get their way. I tried to emphasize that I did not have an opinion about what was true; I was only pointing out the major discrepancy between their story about themselves and the one that I'd been hearing from others—that was a problem no matter what.

As they had been forceful and direct with me, so was I with them. They didn't like it. They accused me of being biased and not open to their truth—that my neutrality had been compromised by having listened to others first. (Even when I responded to that charge by accurately giving them a summary of their views—demonstrating that I'd heard them fine—they were not mollified.) 

When asked if I had engaged with others in the same way that I was engaging with them, I told them I was (in the sense that I was meeting people with the same energy that they presented) and I wasn't (in the sense that I was pushing the committee, and hadn't done that with others—because the committee was the only configuration that I had experienced as pushy). The committee concentrated on my admission of having treated them differently as evidence of my perfidy, and I was never able to recover their trust.

My sense was that the committee was not interested in the observation that they were highly combative in response to my having shared with them that multiple people in the community experienced them as combative—an accusation they found slanderous, even as they amply demonstrated that there was a solid basis for it. Sigh.

Looking back, I think I made a poor choice in mirroring the committee's energy when sharing with them a summary of how they were viewed by others. I don't regret trying to share that information; I only regret the way I went about it. Key in how all this went south was that the committee did not see how they were coming across (and weren't particularly interested in my, or their fellow community members', reflections about it). For the committee, I started it and they were outraged that an outside consultant would be so biased.

—Example B
In the context of conducting a training weekend, I had a student who was retired from a long career as someone in leadership. This person had the habit of inserting themselves into the conversation whenever they had a question, often without bothering to raise their hand first. To be sure, others sometimes did the same thing, but this person did it the most. 

While they were generally pleasant in demeanor (as opposed to imperious or haughty) there was nevertheless an undercurrent of entitlement and insistence that I found irritating (rather like the response I have to drivers who zoom past a line of cars queued up for an upcoming lane restriction, cutting in at the last minute—implying that their time is more valuable than that of all the people in the vehicles they've just jumped ahead of). Probably, as someone who was used to be in charge, they were rarely, if ever, called on for their tendency to jump into the conversation whenever inspired (who, after, is going to tell the boss to wait their turn?).

Over the course of the weekend, I got increasingly protective of the others in the class whose comments or questions were being pushed to the side to accommodate this insistent person's interjections, and my irritation leaked into our exchanges. At the end of the weekend, this person called me to task for being so critical of them relative to the way I was treating others. Ouch! 

The truth is I hadn't realized what I was doing, and this person was right to call me on it. I didn't have a problem with their comments; only with their insistence, and how I saw that as disrespectful. But instead of addressing this directly—which would have been far cleaner—I was letting my criticism show up in my responses, and they were feeling ill-treated. I thought I was responding to their rudeness; they thought I was arbitrarily picking on them! Yuck.

—Example C
On a different training weekend, I had a participant with a number of needs about which I needed to negotiate details before the weekend began—some of which complicated how I proceeded as an instructor. On top of this, the person also was someone with a lot of questions (fine, in and of itself) and with a style of posing them that was urgent and interruptive (not so fine). 

Already somewhat put out by the need to handle the special requests, I was less resilient than I aspire to when it came to fielding the stream of inquiries or concerns that were often inserted mid-sentence, with eyes wide, leaning into the circle with I've-got-to-have-an-answer-to-this-right-now energy. 

Again, as with Example B, I was responding to behavior that I found problematic, without having named that that was what was going on for me. That's a problem, and that's on me. What seemed obvious to me (the pushy behavior) was a general way of being for that person. That is, they weren't being different in the class. 

Probably it was how they learned to get what they wanted in the world. Never mind that it was irritating—or that there are other, more palatable ways of asking for what you want—asking them to be different was like asking them to not be themselves.

I teach that emotions are OK, so why wasn't their energetic engagement acceptable? (I also teach that aggression is not OK, and this person didn't understand how their behavior could be perceived as having crossed that line.)

Just as in Example B, this person experienced me as picking on them. Just as in Example B, I had not been clean or direct about what I was reacting to.

• • •

Note how tricky this is in all three examples. When the the first party isn't aware of how they're coming across (they're just being themselves!) then it appears that you're discriminating against them instead of responding in kind—almost the opposite of what you think you're doing! Oy vey.

For a continued examination of this humbling and debilitating dynamic, see my blog of July 22, 2010, "… But They Started It."

Tweety 2.0

The Intersection of Mel Blanc & Steve Jobs

"I tawt I taw a
Puddy tat," tapped Tweety. (I
Tweet, therefore I am.)

I was listening to ESPN radio while making tempeh Friday and the commentator was interviewing the Sports Compliance Officer (read Rules Police) for Oklahoma State University, who was lamenting how much the world of communication had changed in the last five years, greatly complicating his job to make sure than communications between student athletes and professional agents stayed sufficiently chaste.

"Today," he said, "It's extremely hard to stay on top of everything because everyone texts, or is on Facebook and Twitter." Hearing that, I paused and shook my head. Everyone?

I probably spend 3-4 hours in an average day treading water with my email, handling phone calls, and even writing the occasional letter. I essentially write the equivalent of a report, essay, or proposal every day. I'm not even counting face-to-face conversations—which I still do—yet for all my dedication to communication I have yet to text a single message (I don't even own a cell phone) or to make an inaugural entry on Twitter. To be fair, I have offered up a handful of Facebook entries the last few years (in service to the FIC Cause page), but I otherwise travel incognito in that realm (where do people find the time?) I was appalled to learn that without even taking my oar out of the water, I may had inadvertently drifted out of the main channels of communication. Yikes!

While I'm not so worried about being out of touch with the musings of 300-lb interior lineman hoping to go high in the NFL draft, I note with dismay the increasing frequency with which my emails and phone messages gather virtual dust as I try to get the attention of friends and family habituated to their Blackberries and iPhones. As communication options proliferate, how many do you need to employ in order to stay in the game?

My wife, Ma'ikwe, loves Facebook, and I believe she derives genuine value from it (this is not an oblique nod to her online Scrabble addiction, the value of which is a bit more suspect), yet it scares me to death. It's an alternate electronic reality and I'm not at all excited about the prospect of yet more time in front of my laptop in order to service it. Does the world need duplicate email platforms?

Reading the tea leaves, I suspect it will soon be deemed necessary for me to be available on Facebook in order to offer clients and my network counterparts the communication option that is most comfortable for them. Sigh. I'm uneasy about it, yet probably cannot afford to become invisible by virtue of insisting on a narrower (less sexy?) palette of communication. While I penned (now there's an anachronism) the opening haiku with tongue in cheek, it's potent because it hints at the dystopian prospect that your existence may come to hinge on your choice of communication. That is, if I'm not on Facebook, will I become faceless to the FB aficionados? I'm wondering.

We talked about this at the FIC spring organizational meetings. As the organization's main administrator, do I have an obligation to play all fields? This blog got started that way (we first discussed the prospect in spring 2005; by December 2007 my blog was launched, principally to experiment with whether a steady presence in this form of contemporary social media would help drive traffic to the FIC website). I'm questioning how many options we need, and the increasing amount of time I'll need to spend learning new technologies, remembering which format is favored by the person I want to reach, tracking whether I posted a message on email or Facebook (or both)—none of which is about content. How much of this is just chasing one's tail?

It used to be that the standards of making progress in the world were getting a job and being able to afford a Montblanc pen. Now it's more confusing, and I'm worried about getting Jobbed and drawing a Blanc. Tweet!

Potholes on the Road to Clear Communication

This past weekend I've been at the national cohousing conference in DC, and one of the breakout sessions I facilitated was on the topic of communication. As I reflected beforehand about where I saw the pitfalls in this arena, I was surprised that I could name so many…

Accessibility
There are a bewildering array of options about how to communicate these days, and it's only getting worse. Here's a pass at some of the more common choices:

—Face-to-face Conversation
o group meetings
o over meals
o one on one
o structured, facilitated dialog

—Electronic Media
o email
o listserves
o Google documents
o wiki
o instant messaging
o texting
o Facebook
o Twitter
o other social networking
o phone
o skype

—Physical Writing
o bulletin boards
o minutes
o handwritten notes
o internal mailbox letters (pages stuffed into your cubby)
o postal letters

(I'm leaving out semaphores, seances, smoke signals, and ouija boards.)

The larger your group, the greater the probability that everyone won't agree on a single channel of communication that everyone is expected to use, and there will be tension between ease and inclusivity. The dominant mode of group communication in most intentional communities today is email (in some form), yet even there it's hardly unusual to have a few folks who plain don't like it and may not even own a computer. While the group doesn't want to leave anyone behind and doesn't want to ram something down anyone throat, it can be frustrating making sure that copies of all electronic communication are printed out and distributed to the Luddites.

If you develop the notion that only "important" communications need to be printed out, who decides where the boundary is (or what's important enough from the perspective of computerless member)? At some point it gets sufficiently complicated that people will start choosing to not communicate about a thing at all, because the benefit of letting folks know has been overtaken by anxiety over the possibility of being accused of not reaching out to everyone equally and it's safer to tell no one! Not good.

Respect
Almost everyone will agree that communication should be done respectfully… but what does that mean? One person's respect may emphasize directness and honesty; another may prefer kindness and appreciation. It doesn't take too much imagination to see how two people operating from different ends of that spectrum are on a collision course. And this is where people are trying to be respectful.

How the Message Defines the Medium
To what extent does the choice of the medium depend on the nature of what you want to communicate? For example, it's generally a terrible idea to give someone critical feedback via email (unless you have a very solid relationship with that person). Going the other way, it's typically a poor use of group meeting time to read reports (it's great to discuss issues in meetings, but mere reports are better handled on listserves or bulletin boards). Some people prefer that delicate conversations occur one-on-one; others feel safer in a group.

How the Medium Defines the Message
Over the years I've observed that many people preferentially respond to communications based on the medium, rather than the message. That is, if they are comfortable with email, they might open and respond to those messages first, independently of whether a phone call or bulletin board message was more urgent. If you know this to be the case with someone you want to communicate with, it's smart to take into account not just how you like to send messages, you need to think about the receiver's preferences as well.

Transparency vs Discretion
In most cooperative groups there's high standard of disclosure and letting everyone know what's going on. This leads to a value of transparency in operations. Having said that, there are still matters in members' personal lives that are private. When private actions have an impact on the group, is there a way to talk about it that doesn't come across as indiscreet?

What's more, this issue comes in different flavors. In addition to how group members handle this, what, if anything, is appropriate to share with prospective members, with family and friends, or with the wider public? When does a commitment to transparency become an excuse to gossip? It gets tricky.

Courtesy vs Authenticity
In general, cooperative groups intend that members be both civil and real, yet these two values in comportment don't always lead to the same conclusion. If someone is angry and expresses it passionately, this may come across as eminently authentic and extremely discourteous at the same time. Now what?

Clarity versus Authorship
I've witnessed moments where one member argued that it's better to allow something they've written about the group for public consumption to stand, even though another member has suggested rewording that everyone agrees is clearer. The person defending the original version felt it was important that other voices by heard and the benefit of plurality and diversity trumped clarity. What do you say to that?

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I want to impress upon you that no one needs to be wrong or pigheaded in order to fall into any of the pitfalls illuminated above. Ironically, the best way I know to successfully negotiate this morass of communication pitfalls is to figure out ways to talk about talking—before you're in the pit.

Full Contact Phone Tag

I have a tendency to interrupt people. Once I think I know how their sentence is going to end, I'm ready to move on. Not surprisingly, this gets me into hot water on a regular basis (even though I usually get the meaning right, it tends to piss people off).

Mostly, I think, I lack enough patience. Sometimes this happens when I get excited and just want things to move along more quickly. Sometimes I do this to redirect a conversation that is starting to stray (from what I think is most interesting or pertinent). Sometimes, as a facilitator, I do it because the speaker has completed their thought and is circling around to say it again, and I break in to bump the needle out of its play/repeat groove.

While I've made some progress over the years in being more mindful about my tendencies—and achieving greater control over my urges—I'm still a work in progress. Over the holidays I got anonymous written feedback from participants at a series of workshops I did in November at NASCO Institute, and perhaps 4% commented about my interrupting as a presenter. So perfection is still some distance off...

What's more, making progress here is more nuanced than merely learning to keep my trap shut. The other day, I achieved new heights (or is it new lows?) in the kind of trouble this can lead to. I was having a one-on-one exchange with a close friend who had already given me feedback about not wanting to be interrupted, when a tricky moment came up that I didn't know how to handle.

We had been working in different buildings and I knew that my friend was expecting a phone call. When the phone rang in my building and it was the anticipated call, I directed the person to try the number in the other building. The caller, however, reported that they'd just done that and no one picked up. Hmm. I was pretty sure my friend was there, but I didn't have anything better to suggest and I agreed to pass along the message that the caller no longer had time for the conversation that day and would prefer to set up a date for another time.

I subsequently went over to the other building and tried to relay the message. I reported that I had handled a call from the expected person, that they had first tried to reach the building we were in, and that no one picked up the phone. I was poised to pass along the message that the caller now preferred to talk the next day, but my friend was eager to explain why they hadn't been able to hear the phone. Now I was at the delicate moment.

While my instinct was to break in with information about the request to reschedule (which was more important, I thought, than details about why the call was missed), I was mindful of my friend's irritation with my tendency to barge in, so I held my tongue. Instead I simply tried to breathe and give my friend all the air space they wanted to tell their story. After a time though, I got in trouble anyway, as my friend could tell what I was doing and accused me angrily of waiting for them to get done talking so that I could respond.

What could I say? They were right! I felt completely trapped. Here I was trying to be responsive to the original feedback, but I wasn't being quiet pleasantly enough. Ai-yi-yi!

No doubt impatience was leaking into my countenance, or was reflected in the way I was holding my body. But I was dismayed to realize that my friend's irritation was probably enhanced by my having not interrupted. (I naively thought I had been making progress on my impatience.) It meant, I guess, that I was aware of the urge to interrupt yet still managed to convey disdain. Where was I to go with this? Must I pretend to be interested in what anyone around me says, whether I am or not? Yikes!

This is a tough one, and I'm still unsure how to do better next time (though I am sure that there will be a next time). Somehow, I have to find a way to be in a state of greater neutrality or acceptance. I need to move beyond my obsession with accuracy and authenticity; I need to embrace listening as a meditation—as a way of building relationship through presence rather than words. It adds depth to the concept of "active listening."

It's a good thing that I typically enjoy personal growth challenges such as this, because I don't seem to be able to conduct my life in such a way that the next opportunity isn't available momentarily.