Copyright © 2002 Ken Tangen.. All rights reserved
Communication is like pushing an elephant through a straw. It involves planning, effort, and a bit of magic.
Most speakers and writers already have enough information to make a large elephant. It’s the accumulation of insights, thoughts, research, and years of experience that you want to transmit to others. Regardless of the content (chemistry, language, theology or sales pitch), there are a limited number of ways (straws) to get it through to an audience.
Although it seems like an impossible task, it’s the job of a communicator to convey that data to someone who lacks your extensive vocabulary, experience, and high level of motivation. It’s hard work. It can be frustrating. But also is very rewarding. When we are unable to communicate, we are miserable. When it works we’re like a master magician, reveling in the success of our sleight of hand.
The same challenges exist whether you are home schooling, lecturing at a major university, leading a Rotary committee or preparing a speech for Toastmasters. The same restrictions apply. There is much to say and only a limited amount of time available. Our elephants are huge, our straws restrict information’s flow. In order to communicate effectively, we must squeeze our knowledge into a tight space.
Although communication seems magical, it involves only three types of elephants and three kinds of straws. The elephants are facts, concepts and behaviors. The straws are structure, illustration, and modeling. The trick is to choose the right straw for your particular elephant.
I’m suggesting that there are only three things we can communicate. Although there are millions of individual items, anything we wish to learn, teach or communicate can be shuffled into one of three categories. There are other things in life of great importance, such as emotions, dreams, and even spiritual revelations, but these items can not be learned. Emotions, for example, aren’t learned, but their expression is. We learn the behavior of expressing our emotions, but the emotions themselves need not be learned. Exuberant people differ from those who are shy only in the ways in which their emotions are displayed, not in the emotions themselves.
Consider the following list, and decide into which category they should be sorted:
- 1. Columbus sailed in 1492
- 2. People should forgive
- 3. Jade is often green
- 4. Your conclusions depend on your initial model
- 5. Seattle is the capital of Washington state
- 6. Reading
- 7. Golfing
- 8. Composing
- 9. Watching
- 10. Investing
Even without a detailed explanation of the three categories, I suspect you placed items 1, 3 and 5 in the fact pot, called items 2 and 4 concepts, and clumped the last five together as behaviors. It’s not difficult to do. You could have done it with a much longer list.
But what if I gave you: love, fear and bowling?
Obviously, some items are easier than others. Although it is clear that bowling is a behavior, love and fear are less clear. Perhaps love is a concept, yet it is something I do. Fear is what I feel when the IRS sends me a letter. Does that make it a fact?
We do not like facts very much. Facts are details, small bits of information. It is not that they are innately bad, but they are rather ugly, and tend to attract paperwork. In and of themselves, facts are too small to be likable, so we avoid them whenever possible.
We do not like to admit it, but most people who see a fact headed toward them cross to the other side of the street. It is shameless but true. Face it. When was the last time you sat down and had a good conversation with a fact. Have you ever invited people over to watch a pictorial display of facts (slides of your vacation, for instance)? Then you know, we hate facts.
We dislike facts so intensely that we get other people to take care of them for us. Somewhat like hiring others to raise our kids, we employ people to handle disgusting little facts. We call these fact keepers secretaries, supervisors, administrative assistants, clerks, and accountants. The farther away we are from facts, the better we like it. No one wants to have a prison, a leper colony or a fact farm in their neighborhood.
We hate facts so much that we call them names. We characterize them as being dry, useless and easily misplaced. We say, "Do not bother me with the picky stuff, get to the point." We even tell our children that facts are dull. "Now, learn your times tables, dear, someday your calculator may break and you will need to know this."
And, in truth, facts are dry. Facts are like statues: when you see your hundred you say: "So?" There is a sense that something needs to be done with facts, that they are not very interesting and should never be taken to parties.
Facts are not interesting until they are combined. It is the variety of combinations, the patterns, which we like best. By themselves, facts do not have much personality.
We not only dislike facts, we even try to get rid of them. When we encounter a fact, we tend to write it down. That way, we do not have to think about it any more. It is a subtle way of killing them off. Down on paper, out of mind. As if that weren’t enough, we make computers and calculating machines that are designed for the expressed purpose of crunching facts. The poor little things never had a chance.
Facts include names, dates, phone numbers, checkbook balances, social security numbers, procedures (do this first, then that), and most of the course content from kindergarten through graduate school. A great deal of our lives is spent pushing, pulling, squelching, and searching for facts.
Most of our dislike for facts is that they trick us. We like to think of facts as being truth. If it is true, it is a fact. Actually, truth is independent of its form. Facts need not be true. The statement "Seattle is the capitol of Washington state" is a fact, as opposed to being a concept or a behavior but it is not true. Olympia is Washington’s capital.
Our three categories (facts, concepts, and behaviors) describe the form of the information, the way in which we process it. The truth of a statement, from the point of view of how we process the information, is unimportant. We treat all behaviors alike, ignoring whether they are good habits or bad ones. We treat all concepts the same, regardless of their content. We treat all facts alike, independent of their truth. Indeed, one of our favorite sports is to argue about which facts are true and which false (hint: our facts are always true, other people’s facts are false).
One thing about facts, there certainly are a lot of them. I’ve heard that rabbits breed quickly, buy you can start with only one fact and soon find yourself knee-deep in facts of all sizes. Let’s see a rabbit top that.
It would require a huge amount of storage space to carry all the facts we know personally, let alone the millions of details we have not yet met. So, we do not take them with us. Instead, we carry some general rules about the world, and look up the details when we need to. This way, we use facts only when they support our point of view.
In their defense, I would like to say something nice about facts. I’d like to, but I can’t think of anything nice about them. Facts live very lonely lives.
I suppose, to be fair, I should point out that facts are quite useful, when linked together. If I were to tell you about my parents’ experience of living in Peking, China, or their imprisonment during W.W.II in a concentration camp in the Philippines, or about their travels to the Middle East and Africa, you might find a particular fact I mentioned more interesting than the others, but, more likely, it is the story which would interest you. Tell you that my little brother was named Jimmy, no big deal. Add to it that he was a profoundly retarded Mongoloid with a blood disorder like leukemia, and the pattern becomes more interesting.
History is composed of facts. At least, that is how it is usually taught. You know from your own experience that history is either fascinating or as dry as the dust on Aunt Marie’s encyclopedias. It is not the individual points which make the subject one or the other. It is how they are strung together.
Facts are those tiny bits of information which we tend to isolate by themselves. Name the three ships Columbus led to America. Now, tell me how many people were on each one. Even if you can do the first, you probably can’t do the second. My guess is that you learned the ships’ names by rote, that is as independent pieces of information which are unrelated to anything relevant in your own life. By themselves, facts are tiresome, but when linked to our goals and activities, they are extremely useful.
Concepts are easy to carry rules which can be applied to a wide variety of situations. We like concepts. We will spend hours watching them on TV, movies and plays. They are so adorable. Concepts are easy to learn, easy to carry, and easy to share with others.
One of the nicest things about concepts is that they are so simple that everyone understands at least one. Within the first year of life, children acquire one of the most basic concepts: "it Worked Once, Try It Again." This concept is applied to being cute (drop the bottle, Mommy laughs, try it again), being adventurous (push on the door and it opens, try it again), and driving Sister up the wall (cream as loud as you can, get picked up, try it again).
We like our concepts so much that we are inseparable. We travel with our prejudices, drink with our sorrows, jog with our status symbols and work with our insecurities. We pamper our beliefs, sacrifice our principles, salute our achievements and sail with our dreams. We diet with our self concept, lunch with our ego, and party with our libido.
If you think your bank card can be widely used, consider the lowly concept. With a single concept, say the idea of generosity, you can raise millions of dollars for starving people, build hospitals, furnish libraries, and make a child’s Christmas dreams come true. It all begins with a concept, an idea.
Concepts have at least three disadvantages, lest you think them prefect. First, they are very simple. Yes, I know I listed that as a point in their favor, but it is also their weak point. In order to share a concept, complex combinations of alternative explanations are reduced to simple rules. In the reduction process, a great deal of information is lost.
Second, concepts are not always fashionable. It is not that the ideas themselves change that much, concepts are quite stable fellows, but what was "in" last season may not be "rad" now. Although concepts are long-lasting, we seem to bounce between them. We get tired of the same old ideas and want to try some new ones. Have you had your concepts rotated recently? It is not as painful as it sounds. We do it all the time.
Third, and in my opinion the greatest disadvantage to emphasizing concepts, we can learn what to do but not know how to do it. The danger of "book learnin’" is that students may know the themes of British literature but not know how to write a decent business letter. Most of us know people with more education than us and less brains than a pet mouse. In every day life, concepts must be put into action.
The general rules that we carry around wit1 us are very easy to recall, very difficult to implement. Take the old example you mum and dad taught you: "Always Be Polite." That is an easy rule to remember but hard to put into practice while driving in traffic, and nearly impossible to apply at after-Christmas sales.
Oddly enough, concepts are often disguised as facts. Watch out, for example, when people say they are going to share with you 3 steps for financial success. Although they describe them as steps (facts), they are usually principles (concepts). Steps suggest that one item must be completed before another, but most concepts are independent of each other.
The reason for calling a concept a step is to fool people into thinking that the idea is more truthful because it is more concrete. Since concepts are difficult to verify, this thinking goes, let’s call them facts and people will think that they are true. Like facts, however, the truth of a concept is independent of its style. Some concepts are true, and others are less than fully accurate. No matter, they are all concepts, and we process them all in the same manner.
It should be obvious that something with great positive potential also has great negative potential. Just as nuclear power can be used for good or evil, concepts are also bi-moral.
Ideas can lead to helpful behaviors, such as laughing, helping, sharing, and caressing. Ideas can bring disastrous too. Depression, frustration, and loneliness start as ideas. So do murder, tyranny, divorce, child abuse, and rape.
Despite their potential danger, concepts are still our favorites. we like concepts so much that we give them fancy names: heuristics, principles, beliefs, dreams, rules, ideas. We collect our favorite concepts and keep them in some kind of pattern. It may be that we use a hierarchical tree, with the most used concepts on top. Or, we might keep our values listed in order of acquisition, importance or emotional impact.
Although it is fun to speculate on how ideas are combined together, it is enough for our current discussion to note that, whatever their organization, ideas, values and beliefs are so important to us that we organize them in some form of mental structure. Whatever the electro-chemical mechanism, we store them with great care.
Our ideas are so important that millions of dollars are spend every week to change, shift or influence them. Advertisers show a picture of a pretty girl by an expensive car because they think that we have a rule in our heads that says: "Two Things That Appear Together, Come Together."
These advertisers are betting that (a) we will want to impress (or be) the girl, (b) that we will select the appropriate mental rule, and © that we will act on the rule and buy their car (or suntan lotion).
Strangely enough, we do have a rule something like that. I remember how badly I wanted to be a singer. Whenever my favorite vocalists were on TV or giving concepts, I went to see them. There was one fella who wore a gold bracelet on his left arm and a gold watch, upside down, on his right. I just know that if I wore the same accessories in exactly the same way, I too would be a famous singer.
I am still waiting.
Behaviors are the things we do. We ask, answer, bank, breathe, bob, belch, catch, cry, crawl, creep, dip, dive, drink, erase, elope, fight, flirt, gush, growl, grovel, hit, hide, hug, hustle, hurry, haggle, jog, jostle, jump . . . You get the idea. Behaviors are all the things we do, big and small.
Behaviors are usually verbs, or at least can be logically changed into verbs. An airplane is a thing but airplaning—whatever that may be—is an action, a behavior. Playing a piano, writing poems, and running cross-country are samples of behaviors. So are listening, sharing, praying, and bicycling. If it requires practice, it is a behavior.
Although everything that requires practice is a behavior, there are behaviors which do not require practice. There is a special group of behaviors which come as standard equipment when we are born. These behaviors, also called instincts and reflexes, come ready to use. Babies can blink, suck, cry and go through an amazing amount of diapers without any practice at all.
Aside from some of these basic skills, the rest of our lives are spent learning, practicing, and perpsychology tends to focus. How do people in general answer questions, solve problems, select colors? How do people, in general, feel, think, relate, understand and care? How do most people learn? To answer these questions, researchers look at the behavior of people; what people say and what they do.
The primary advantage of behaviors is that they are observable. We are not left to guessing, performance tells all. We even tell people "demonstrate in a specific sequence of behavior what you are saying." Well, maybe we are more likely to say "Put up or shut up,: but the message is the same.
Being so observable, behaviors are easy to track. Need to reach a goal? Defining that goal in terms of specific behaviors makes it easier to know when you have reached that goal.
Unfortunately, there are some difficulties in focusing on behaviors. First, behavioral explanations tend to be reductionistic. That is, after a complex behavioral pattern has been broken into smaller units, and then divided those smaller units into even smaller ones, there may not be anything left.
Another problem with behaviorism is that it doesn’t always work backwards. Given a person’s motives and thought processes, it should be possible to understand that individual’s behavior, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Remember all the hype about body language a few years ago? The impression was that you could tell what people were thinking just by looking at the way they sat, held their arms or crossed their legs.
Like most pop-psych fads, there is some truth in it but not much. When people are feeling threatened they do tend to fold their arms and sit further away from you. But that is not the same as saying that when people fold their arms they feel threatened. They could be cold. Behaviors are one-way predictors.
Given the concept on which they are based, you can understand a behavior, but behaviors only provide a hint at the concept behind them. I know a lady who make all her fellow workers angry. They thought her behaviors were rude and inappropriate. She thought she was being assertive. Same behavior, different conceptual explanations.
Third, behaviors can be hard to change directly. Notice that advertisers do not try to directly change our behaviors, but use concepts to indirectly affect them. It is not that advertisers are morally opposed to the notion. The problem is that our behaviors are inaccessible to a media blitz.
Learning behaviors is the most difficult activity we attempt. It is easy to acquire the concept of time management but very difficult to learn the associated behaviors.
Ever been on a diet? Easy to understand the concept of calories, isn’t it? If you want to lose weight you can lower the amount of food you eat, increase your output (through exercise, work or heat dissipation), or do both at the same time. It is an easy concept.
Ever tried to stop smoking? The concept is easy: do not put a lit cigarette in your mouth. The behaviors of not doing it require a lot of practice. Former alcoholics often refer to themselves as recovering, an active on-going state. They are continuing to practice nondrinking behaviors. Concepts are easy, facts are tedious, but behavioral patterns are hard to modify.
In truth, facts, concepts and behaviors are more interrelated than I have suggested. The three categories can not be completely separated. Learning to play the piano, for instance, involves facts (this key produces this sound) concepts (phrasing), and behaviors (key pressing, sequencing, and timing). We use behaviors to acquire facts and concepts, we apply facts and implement concepts in behaviors.
The value of this little model of learning is its simplicity. Although facts, concepts and behaviors are jumbled together in the actual learning process, we can emphasize one aspect of the trio and de-emphasize the other two. This divide-and-conquer approach to teaching allows us to focus on the underlying processes and teach components of complex tasks one at a time.
Although shoe tying and computer repairing differ in complexity, they share the same structure. Because both are behaviors, and are governed by the same underlying processes, they can be taught in the same manner.
It is the underlying structure which determines how best to communicate it. Facts need structure. Concepts should be illustrated. And behaviors must be practiced. Each content area has its own unique characteristics. All three areas require a different approach to communication but each teaches us something about this important, if not magical, process.