I’ve been interested in communication since I was a teenager. I started out reading Deborah Tannen, and have been fascinated ever since about the ways we communicate and the implications of how we communicate, or don’t, in many cases.
Communication is so important to me these days because it is the key to direct democracy, to anarchist organizing, to self-organizing systems, to flourishing in community, all things I care deeply about.
In order to flourish in community, we need to expect and anticipate conflict1, from the mundane everyday to the deep and existential. And we need to have well-used communication systems in place in order to address the inevitable conflicts that arise in a constructive way that moves us forward together.
Resources & Initiatives to Support Group Communication
- The Work that Reconnects
The Work That Reconnects is meant for anyone who longs to serve the healing of our world in a more powerful and effective way. This interactive group process was developed by Joanna Macy, in cooperation with many colleagues, over several decades. The Work That Reconnects draws on foundational teachings, including Systems Thinking, Deep Ecology and Deep Time, Spiritual Traditions and Undoing Oppression.
- Sociocracy
Sociocracy combines consent decision-making, a decentralized system of authority and intentional processes to improve our decisions and processes over time into a governance system that supports effective and efficient process while increasing connection, listening and co-creation among members.
- Ways of Council
- Tools for Community Building
- Training for Change
- Navigating Group Decisions
- ProSocial world
Improving group communications through group reflection (from David Fey)
- If you’re in a formalized group and there is tension brewing that you feel needs to be addressed, it can be helpful to start by recognizing and naming it to bring it to the surface.
- Example: “I’ve felt some tension in our group recently… and I recently learned about this facilitation process that can help groups explore any tensions in a gentle, curious way.”
- Introduce via curiosity first, rather than in a heavy-handed way.
- Facilitator’s Guide for the 5A Group Reflection Process: created by David Fey to “help any group of people interested in working well together to pause, reflect, and learn from conflicts that naturally arise in the course of group interactions.”
- Download the 5A Group Reflection Process Facilitator’s Guide.pdf (PDF)
Communication & Interpersonal Relations
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).
What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs (“I get kinda creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies”) or not (“Let me tell you about the plot of the movie Must Love Dogs…”). Good taking makes the other side want to take too (“I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it’s so crazy” “What?? Was there a ceremony?”). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs (“Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?”) and some don’t (“How many of your grandparents are still living?”). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking (“I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has––how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread––and how I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can”).
There’s some recent evidence that what makes conversations pop off is indeed the social equivalent of doorknobs. You might think that the best conversationalists wait patiently for their partners to finish talking before they start concocting a response in their head. It turns out that we like people the best when they respond to us the fastest––so fast (mere milliseconds!) that they must be formulating their reply long before we finish our turn. Abundant affordances allow for this rapid-fire rapport, each utterance offering an obvious opportunity to respond. 2
Conversational affordances often require saying something at least a little bit intimate about yourself, so even the faintest fear of rejection on either side can prevent conversations from taking off. 2
The main reason we don’t create more affordances, however, is pure egocentrism. When we just say whatever pops into our heads, we may think we’re making craggy, climbable conversational rock walls, when in fact we’re creating completely frictionless surfaces. For example, I’m thrilled to tell you about the 126 escape rooms I’ve done, but my love for paying people $35 to lock me in a room blinds me to the fact that you probably do not give a hoot. I may even think I’m being generous by asking about your experiences with escape rooms, when my supposed giving is really just selfishness with a question mark at the end (“Enough of me talking about stuff I like. Time for you to talk about stuff I like!”). 2
Conversation with others often emphasizes the most well-understood elements of an idea
There’s an unintuitive danger in talking about an emerging idea with others. The clearest, most familiar parts are the ones which you’ll have the easiest time communicating and which your conversation partner will have the easiest time grasping. Often, those notions are already somewhat mainstream or even clichéd; others are likely to have lots of cached thoughts around that idea, and they’ll tend to interpret it incrementally.
But if you’re doing something original, the most interesting elements are the ones which others—and you!—understand least well. Particularly early on, you may not be able to articulate the new element you’re reaching for very clearly. It may just sound like an unusual adverb choice or an innocuous-seeming qualifier. In any case: because their replies will tend to emphasize the most mainstream elements and pass over the elements you least understand, conversation will often drag you back towards the mainstream. It’s a kind of “regression to the mean” for ideas.
Of course, the best colleagues and collaborators actively avoid this trap! One of my favorite Michael Nielsen behaviors is that if he hears me talking about some idea that seems fairly banal, he’ll deliberately tug at the places where I’m straining to reach past typical interpretations.~Andy Matuschak https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zUVSwsgstnaSQ5XfxzEjSnF
Reflections on communication and interpersonal relationships
6 Feb 2023
I have been feeling a bit of “can’t live with or without” people of late… I feel relationships are a series of misunderstandings, miscommunications, omissions, avoiding directness for ease? Simplicity? It always seems to make things more complex and then, if you finally manage to meet someone in person, how long can you tolerate one another’s company? I’m finding in-person 1-to-1 attention spans, as most others, to be dwindling. As Jerry Seinfeld once joked, we fuss over going out, but as soon as we’re out, we’re quite ready to be back in. What feedback loops are causing this predicament? And however will we make our way out of the epidemic loneliness in this present state of social noncommittal and seeming disinterest?
intentional communities
maybe, the answer is to force us into greater proximity on a moment-to-moment basis. like rebuilding movement into our lives, by eliminating various obsessive conveniences like grocery or food delivery (when not necessary for us individually), we can eliminate the convenient distance we have placed between one another, eliminate our commitment to individualism above all else and reintroduce ourselves to life in community. maybe, as a result, we could get better at being with one another, by returning to a casual, everyday means of encounter.
focus and distraction
Our ability to immerse ourselves in one thing fully, for a meaningful period of time is tragically eroded. According to The Wandering Mind, it has been, to some extent, for most of human history. But I really think it’s near undeniable that our new, omnipresent technology has exponentially (read: drastically) shifted our capacity or our willingness (both) to focus on one object, task, for a sustained period. And yet, here I am writing for more than 15 minutes about not much, and enjoying a state of undistraction. however did I manage it? Intention, I think. I formed a dream in my mind, and I sat down to make it happen, forgoing netflix for the night. And it feels good to have done it, hopefully reinforcing a new pathway in the brain to make stronger over time. Nothing overnight, except, perhaps, sprouted seeds.
Footnotes
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”Taking anarchism seriously”, The Grey Area podcast with Sophie Scott-Brown, https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/23997329/anarchism-politics-sophie-scott-brown-the-gray-area ↩
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https://www.experimental-history.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs ↩ ↩2 ↩3