Communicating across cultures – how to be understood!

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then the message is in the ear of the listener.

Thus, when we communicate, a key challenge is to make the intended message match the received message as closely as possible. Thus effective communicators are very good at getting into the mind of the audience and seeing or hearing the message from their perspective.

Of course, not everyone can do this. One way this is resolved is by taking advantage of two way communication – if the listener can paraphrase what you are telling them, as a sort of parity check on the message, then any misunderstandings can be revealed and dealt with. But this requires a good listener.

It is also important that if the message has a ‘thread’ (like a storyline) that the listener does not lose that thread due to some short lived issue – missed words due to accent, background noise or indeed the use of unfamiliar words and jargon.

Thus, when telling a story there needs to be redundancy in the message (just like in electronic communication protocols) such that if the thread is dropped it may be picked up again.

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I recently moved to the USA from the UK and am currently learning how to communicate across a cultural divide.

Anyone would think that Americans would speak English and perhaps they do, but ‘English’ is such a broad church that it allows for different groups to live their entire lives using only slightly overlapping subsets of the language. Observing these vocabulary differences I have noticed a sort of one-way breakdown that occurs in this case…

Diodes only allow electons to flow one way...

Just like a diode can allow electric current to flow one way and not another, it seems that poor vocabulary matching can have a similar effect on a message. It turns out that when Americans talk at me, I can easily recognize the words I don’t know, but when I talk I cannot recognize (or predict) the words they won’t know.

This may seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious, but it is the same effect as the card trick when the magician shows you a bunch of cards, say ten, and asks you to pick one and remember it. He will then shuffle the cards and show them to you again and tell you that your card has been removed. Lo and behold, your card is gone. Amazing, how did they know which one to remove, what are the chances!?

Well the trick is simple, the magician changed ALL the cards with sleight of hand, and relied on the fact that you didn’t bother to memorize the ‘other’ cards.

It is similar to the issue with speaking to foreigners – it is very hard to know which of your words are missing from their vocab. You can spend weeks or months living with them and you will pick up their vocab but you will find it hard to notice the words they don’t use. Thus after a while, a foreigner will understand pretty much all he or she hears, but when they talk, will still be poorly understood as they will persist in using unknown words.

Thus the flow of information is retarded in one direction only. I think this is a neat observation. That is to say, it is cool and clever, not clean and tidy 🙂

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