Language is a barrier to communication

Ages ago, I wrote a manifesto for this little project of mine¹ where I lay out the world according to Dorian. I’ll admit, it’s largely self-indulgent, but hey, it’s my website. And as an educator, I think there’s a lot of value in telling the people who’re learning from you where you’re coming from when you teach them, for two reasons.

First, because a lot of learning is just putting words to stuff you already knew, but didn’t really know how to articulate. And when someone else can give you a structure behind the words along with the words then things often fall into place more quickly.

But of course—and this is the second reason—when you’re learning from other people, you also have to figure out how to fit their words into your mental model of the world. For that, you probably want to understand their mental model too. How close, or how distant it is from your own. So, slang is the most low-level example I can think of for this. Maybe you come to Australia and you hear someone call something ‘red hot’. Is that good? Is that bad? If it isn’t immediately obvious from the context, you’re only going to understand if you know what kinds of thing the person finds good or bad.²

It’s the same for a lot of concepts you learn. You sit in the classroom or are listening to the podcast or whatever, and you’re not really understanding, until they say something that you can connect with something you already knew, and ‘a-ha’—you finally see what they mean.

A lot of my manifesto is exactly this, but for me. Fitting other people’s words into my own mental model of the world.³ Because nothing in that manifesto is really uniquely mine. Maybe the writing style, or the configuration of emphases, but not the ideas. In fact, this is the point of most of the content I create here.

But, to make the leap from someone else’s idea to your own understanding of it is often troubled by something I call the language problem:

when one said ‘we need them to get to the next level’, no one was really thinking about levels. They all just recognised that someone had named their problem—it was a shared language. But I did not share this language. When they said ‘we need them to get to the next level’, I thought that there were actual levels.

Which is why, when I asked ‘so what are the levels?’ and they replied ‘there aren’t really any levels’, everyone sort-of looked confusedly at each other. It’s my favourite story from my leadership consulting so far, but it highlights:

a very common problem. I’d bet money that this has happened to you. You will say ‘here is an idea, or a solution to your problem’, and people will sort of ignore you. Then someone else says the exact same thing but with different words and people will go ‘oh wow, yes, that was what we needed!’ and you will quietly simmer in your seat. The language problem bites again.

One of the things the brain does is store types of information that are similar to each other together. This is true of ideas too. You cluster ideas in your mind, and they’re clustered near words.⁴ And if someone uses a set of words that isn’t connected to your ideas, then you’re going to have a hard time making those connections.

So I’ll give you some more easy examples before getting complex again. Someone says “I want more quality time”, but one person sees this as an elaborate date, while the other reckons it’d be a relaxed evening at home. Or, someone says they’re “eating healthy” and you assume they’re about to start tracking their macros or something, but actually they just meant swapping out fizzy drink for water. Or, you show up for a day of “onboarding” at the new job, only to find out that it’s not a series of formal trainings and meet-and-greets, but a welcome email and an anaemic set of intranet links you could have stayed at home for.

Your mapping of these words differed from the other person’s, because you’ve attached them to a different set of ideas. Most of the time this is because of a difference in experience. Knowledge is sometimes a barrier to learning, and this is almost always related to the language problem. A single word can be enough to prevent whatever you’re trying to communicate get over the net. This next example is more complicated than the last, but as I’m sure you’ll recognise, isn’t uncommon.

I was giving a talk to a bunch of executive coaches. You see, the idea of amygdala hijack—where the amygdala ‘takes over’ your smart brain bits (usually the prefrontal cortex) when you’re scared or anxious or whatever—is forty-plus year-old pseudoscience written by a journalist to make money. It’s omnipresence in leadership material coupled with the fact that it’s a positively geriatric idea as far as brain science goes makes high-powered C-suite executives sound like children to anyone who has more time to read non-fiction than them. So good executive coaches will try to update their lingo.

Now, I’m basically telling these coaches that you can use the same idea, but just swap everything out for various brain networks, and not sound like you’re quoting a pop-psych book from half a century ago. Same kind of a-ha moment hook, less reputational risk for everyone involved. So I’m walking through this—instead of saying the amygdala is taking over the smart bits, you could say “the salience network is trained to pay attention to certain kinds of threats, and it jacks up the affective networks in response, which interferes with the executive network in engaging more deliberative processing”. Same thing, fancy new language, and it’s correct enough that your C-suite executives won’t be embarrassed at their next fireside chat by their nerdier interns.⁵

I then made the mistake of talking about the Default Mode Network, and how you could use that as fancy language to dress up “thinking more meditatively” and the coaches stop me. “The default mode!” they exclaim, “surely we don’t want to activate that!”. You see, for them, the brain is by default in this state of amygdala hijack, because that fucking journalist knew what viral meant before viral was a thing. So when I said “default mode”, they assumed I meant their notion of the brain’s default state, not the poorly-named but completely unrelated brain network.⁶ And all of a sudden, my entire metaphor was wiped out. I had to explain what the Default Mode Network was, how it has absolutely nothing to do with whatever permanent pre-fight-or-flight mode they had been taught we live in by default, and then re-explain the entire network thing again.

My language and their language in this case were completely at odds with one another. They think I’m telling them something completely at odds with their model of the world. I just think I’m giving them new language to fit to their existing model of the world. All because of the word “default”.

We all think language facilitates communication, but in many ways it actually hinders it, and I’m hoping by walking through all these examples, you’ve been able to map my ‘language problem’ to experiences you’ve had. Because, unlike my last article on this, I’ve sort of worked out the solution.

Patrick Winston’s “How to Speak” talk is an MIT tradition, and isn’t unfamous outside MIT for educators learning to talk to people. He reckons you need to repeat something three times for everyone in the room to have gotten it. But then he moves on to say that we might want to ‘build a fence’ around an idea—to distinguish your idea from other similar ideas. I think that’s not quite the right approach. I think you want to show them how similar your idea to other similar ideas first. If you did that three times, you start to raise your chances of finding where your language and their language coincide.

So, for one final example. A handful of consultants have asked me in to chat with them about this course they’ve sold, and have to now create around leading in uncertainty. They’re stuck on the model—what brain scienc-y model should they use to help leaders promote the right kind of thinking when their team is working in complex and uncertain environments?

So I start telling them about the Yerkes-Dodson Law. You can check that article out for the details, but basically, it’s a bell curve—as stress goes up, task-performance goes up,⁷ but if stress goes up too much, task-performance starts coming down again because you’re too stressed.

What I want to pull out of that curve is what’s behind that initial improvement in performance. You see, a little stress—a little physical arousal fizzing through the nervous system—is the thing that recruits all the physical and cognitive resources you need to accomplish whatever challenge is producing the stress.

One of these resources is the habitual/stereotypical behaviours you usually use to address this kind of problem. Assuming the problem is one you know how to deal with, this kind of cognitive rigidity is very good. In uncertain environments, though, this is bad. You probably don’t want stereotypical kinds of problem solving. You probably want openness to new ways of solving problems because you have no idea what you’re up against. So, you want to tone down the stress, because low stress is associated with less task-performance, but more cognitive flexibility and exploration-behaviour (i.e. creativity).

So I explain this, and there’s a pause as they digest it. And eventually one says, “oh ok, it’s like a thermostat—you need to turn it up and down”, and another goes “or a light dimmer!”, and the third says “I’m thinking of it like a wave—you know, that back and forth”. And it was a wave. A wave of understanding, in this case facilitated entirely not by me but by them, which is probably not what they were paying me for, but we got there in the end.

So, this article was a huge tangent that began as a quick motivation to walk you through some of the ideas my manifesto cribbed from, is similar to, overlaps with, whatever. But since we’ve already written an article, I think I’ll leave the start of that for next week. For now, you get to walk away with a nice big ad for my leadership consulting, and less facetiously, one of the very few things I seriously took away from my early days doing it—the bloody language problem. Tell me it’s not most of your problems too.