Defining “Communication” and how I’ve failed at it

Everett Rogers’s definition of communication in his book Diffusion of Innovations has long been a touchstone for me. I was reminded of it today by Mike Bonifer’s great comment about improvisation skills. I wanted to share that definition here:

Communication is a process in which participants create and share information with one another in order to reach a mutual understanding. This definition implies that communication is a process of convergence (or divergence) as two or more individuals exchange information in order to move toward one another (or apart) in the meanings they give to certain events. We think of communication as a two-way process of convergence rather than as a one-way linear act in which one individual seeks to transfer a message to another in order to achieve certain effects.

This simple, foundational understanding has helped me think about how to communicate well, from marketing to participating in meetings at work, from being a friend, a son, and a brother to being a spouse and a parent.

I think communication fails when we get it mixed up, and behave as though it were a one-way process. We can become too attached to the outcome we desire to achieve — whether it is to make a sale or decide where to eat dinner — that we block others’ attempts to participate or we manipulate the discussion to steer decision-making in the direction we want to go. In my experience (and I am guilty of doing these sorts of things many times!) these communications failures may succeed in the short run but their returns soon diminish quite steeply.