The Communication Blog

The problem is us.  The problem is that we continue to listen. The problem is that angry words, demeaning, fiery catchphrases, and motivation by paranoia have become the money that buys exposure. These are the qualities that get people their fifteen-minutes (and more on the Web) of  face-time, images and sound-bites transmitted across the world for anyone to see, to listen to, and to act upon.

It’s not a free speech issue — it’s a selfish issue. From the local news photographer at the latest protest, to the executive producers and network execs who find $40 million dollars to create and broadcast shows which regal in the froth of doomsday prophecies, down to the deeply troubled, one-person vendetta shop, where pages of unsubstantiated, twisted history and research move from computer to printer to paper to anxious hands and into the malleable minds of tortured souls, the real problem for all of us is that we refuse to accept responsibility for influencing and promoting the ideas that fuel the lives of others.

You can’t — whether you are O’Reilly, Beck, a Tea Party leader, a Republican leader, a pundit, a celebrity, an influential Democrat, a Christian, an atheist, an anti-abortion supporter, a segregationist — you can’t separate yourself from the actions of people that you otherwise wouldn’t have anything to do with but who have been influenced by what you’ve said “to them”, because that’s the whole point of your show, your platform, your speech, your meeting, to talk to “them”. You can’t use words like “target”, then merge it with a crosshair symbol, and believe that its affect on someone cannot be attributable to you because you were only giving voice to your opinion.

You can’t scream at a person, or a viewer, or a reader, warning them of some kind of impending doom that needs action taken to prevent it, and then recluse yourself from the consequences by saying that your words are expressing a point of view, and were never meant to incite someone to do something tragic.

You can’t tell someone they’re an aberration against god, that they’re not going to heaven, that they should be removed from common decent society, that they have no right to be in love with whoever they choose, that they are inferior, that they will bankrupt the country, that their presence in society will be the downfall of our nation, that the people who support those kinds of people and their beliefs must be stopped, you can’t do that and not expect someone to believe you’re right and take action based on what you said.

You can tell people you don’t agree with them. You can hate a person’s politics while still loving the person. You can eventually learn not to hate at all. It is possible.

You cannot distance yourself from your words. You cannot stand on the platform of free speech and democracy to build your own empire, whether in a church basement, an ethnic-bashing meeting over coffee, a political strategy session, or network production meeting, and remove yourself from consequences that you had encouraged your listener to strive for.

You cannot bring a gun to a public gathering and expect to be received without fanfare. If you bring a gun to a public gathering, you are doing it to further an agenda, not to keep yourself safe, and certainly not to keep those around you safe. You cannot call someone demonic and describe what they do for a living as deplorable and ignore that somewhere amongst the 20,000,000 viewers of your show, one or two people will do something to please you.

You can’t utter the words “I know someone, and they know it’s true…”, and follow those with Internet-fueled, unsupportable, hyperbolic stories, the kind that come from Web pages with animated waving American Flags and promote patriotism with pithy quotes, and not at least be a small part of the spark that lights an inferno.

Our problems are not pro-gun, anti-gun, easy access, too much information, or too many channels. Our problem is our reluctance to accept our own culpability, our complicity, when hideous events occur. and to remember that complicity so we can alter the course of our lives and stop being complicit.

Every person loses a treasured piece of humanity whenever another suffers at human hands, but more and more that loss occurs long before the suffering is rendered, it occurs the moment we listen to words and views which we know in our heart shouldn’t be said, which we know we should stand against.

There is no suitable “Yeah, but…”

There is only one way forward.

We must change.

My love and thoughts to those who suffer.

"Okay, I want you to take your tank and turn right, no, left, wait...um..."

I’ve come close to saying that, in a slightly different fashion. As someone trying to help a client, and keep the client, a consultant may wish not to offend the client with direct language; instead, one helps the client understand why it might be that…

Aw, screw it. Enough with the nice-nice. Here’s the skinny: PowerPoint can, indeed, make the presenter look stupid, and make the audience feel like the presenter is stupid for making everyone sit through a bullet-laden, sentence fragment populated, “What, there’s a different way to do this?” presentation.

To all my clients, assoiciates, friends and others (?!?), you all know my views on this. Now, as quoted in today’s New York Times, there’s some muscle that supports my never-ending quest to rid the world of bullets, text-dense slides, and slide-reading presenters. The link to the story is at the bottom or this post, but here’s a sprinkling of it:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint  Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He  spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint  presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal  Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal  threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of  control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in  the world are not bullet-izable.”

For those of you who haven’t seen the alternative universe of visual, well-designed, effective PowerPoint slides, I know it can be hard to conceive of a world where PowerPoint slides make you say, “Ooo!” instead of “Oy…”. Until I can show people that world, though, it’s so good and, concurrently, so sad, that the biggest guns of the world’s best place to be have to point out how goofy it is to use PowerPoint to disseminate critical information.

Bullets don’t really mean anything. Those small circles in front of fragments or words only exist to indicate “what follows cannot stand alone to convey what I intend.” There is enough information without context in our lives; we don’t actually need software that enables us to compose nice looking incomplete sentences and short strings of words. What we need is more exposure to presentations that work.

I realize the article has ‘war’ as its focus, but the core of the story — how to effectively, successfully, convey critical information using presentation software and technology — is relevant to every industry sector.

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can  hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic,  persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in  slides instead of legal briefs.

As you read the last words of the article, remember them as you put together your next presentation.

Hmm…might be time for me to put on a seminar, and call it…

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting  information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for  questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr.  Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

How'd they like your presentation?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?th&emc=th

Get a grip.

Know me long enough and you will know this — I firmly believe, and constantly proselytize, that we communicate more often than we realize.

A blog on the Scientific American magazine website has an interesting take on this with a post about what a strong or weak handshake conveys about us.

I’m a firm believer (gawd, here come da puns…) in good handshakes. I won’t automatically dismiss someone who doesn’t seem to have a decent grip, but it immediately puts me in a questioning mode: has no one ever taught you/mentioned to you/demonstrated for you the ‘proper’ way to shake hands?

It’s not a macho thing, truly. I’m not (always) trying to squeeze blood out of your hand’s pores, but, as the post describes, the ritual handshake transfers a sizable chunk of info to the shakers. The post contains interesting historical background on the custom, and very revealing studies conducted over the years, but I found the stories relative to women and handshaking really interesting, including this:

“However—and here’s the important part—those women who did break the gender norm by giving very firm handshakes were at a considerable advantage at getting an offer over men who gave an equally firm handshake. The authors suggest that this is because of a salience effect: prospective employers expect women, but not men, to give weak handshakes, so those who don’t shake limply stand out from the rest and make a lasting impact.”

Want to be a better communicator? Get a grip. (groan)