The art of effective communication? Let us brood over this question for a while in simple terms – with the hope that it would help us to realize different kind of clarity. I am posting this as a rejoinder to my earlier post.
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Communication is to relate ourselves with others – in actions and reactions. It takes the forms of talks, speech, writings like in texts, mails and emails, and body-languages. Talks, speech and body-languages are face-to-face communications. With internet – this type also occurs through video-link.
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Nature of communication begins with our thought processes – it is the instigator – a clean and healthy process lets us communicate lucidly. A bad one does the opposite. These processes have another dimension – it is the state of mind at a certain time and place. For all different reasons, this state has can be agitated, calm – or something in-between.
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Communicative actions and reactions vary among people. The difference is due to the personality type as well as by those qualities or lack of them – that are imparted to us during our childhood (as James pointed out) by parents, neighbors, friends and teachers. They range in various degrees in terms of courtesy, politeness, respect, humility, appreciation and thankfulness.
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With internet – another influence is added to qualify communication (more in Artificial Intelligence – the Tool of No Limit). Social-networks and other forms of to-and-fro communications are prime examples. These are already consuming considerable part of our time.
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Wisdom says that one should stop communicating when the mind is agitated. Therefore, staying calm or becoming composed is so much necessary before launching any form of communication. By staying calm, one soon realizes – that the things he or she wanted to communicate with an agitated mind – do not make sense whatsoever.
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But, a communication is multi-dimensional. The immediate two are source ↔ receiver. Which means, a certain communication may appear different to a receiver – depending on his or her state of mind. In a face-to-face communication the receiver may influence the source. In other words, it is the subject-object relationship.
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But, as can be understood, such a relationship is not always strong, because a receiver can display calmness without showing any responsive behavior. This entails that the source communicator –owns his or her communicating behavior – and must take responsibility for it. Therefore, staying calm – as a remedy comes into relevance.
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Staying calm – is like freeing oneself from bad emotions – to let them go. Here time comes with a hand to help. But, it is far from easy – therefore the relevance of meditation comes into the forefront.
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Now let us move on to the core issues of this topic. The first thing to do is to distinguish between two basic types: Chatty Communication and Business Communication. Whether one is an engineer or any other – these two basic types tell what we are in broad terms. We cannot live without them – because all of us have personal, family, social and business lives.
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The importance of chatty communications – or the informal ones – is quite unappreciated in my opinion. Because, such exchanges, more often than not, open up one's personality in honesty and sincerity. I always benefit from chatty exchanges (although I am not so much of an extrovert) – during coffee and lunch breaks in office. This is where we get energy from and give energy to colleagues and friends. It helps one to see things from different perspectives – thus enriching his or her works. In that sense, present pursuance of the concept of working from home, even after the cessation of COVID – appears thoughtless to me. Although, some have genuine reasons to work from home.
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Perhaps most of us are aware that many business deals and policies get shape in private chatty conversations, face-to-face or otherwise. In such instances – mutual trust and friendship play key roles in deal making.
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The formal or the business communications – on which we are sharing our thoughts and opinions on this thread – have a serious tone in it – because they carry more baggage of implications and consequences. Therefore, whatever we are sharing on this thread – are important conversations.
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On Civil Engineering on our Seashore, quoting NAP #12635 Publication – I have discussed a term I have not heard before. It is the engineering "habits of mind" (refer to the values, attitudes, and thinking skills associated with engineering; AAAS 1990) – that are aligned with the required essential skills for citizens in the 21st century. The habits include: (1) Systems Thinking; (2) Creativity; (3) Optimism; (4) Collaboration; (5) Communication; and (6) Attention to Ethical Considerations. On communication it says: communication is essential to effective collaboration, to understanding the particular wants and needs of a "customer," and to explaining and justifying the final design solution.
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There is another dimension to it – in terms of public perception of engineers – and we have shared our thoughts on it in a separate thread. Here are something written In Creativity and Due Diligence . . . The most common view is that engineers have tunnel visions of things. If this view is correct, it is very serious because engineering is supposed to be a creative profession. Unless engineers see a problem from different perspectives, it becomes difficult for them to appreciate multiple aspects of a problem, and be creative and innovative in their judgments. But some others tend to argue that the tunnel vision of engineers is the unfortunate outcome of their own pursuit of perfection requiring them to focus on details. Yet there are others who think that stereotyping engineers as such amounts to blocking their career path in the corporate hierarchy . . .
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As pointed in the earlier post – all these do not solve the problems associated with the lack of measuring communications. But, shall we say, this is something others to ponder. I like to leave it at this.
Original Message:
Sent: 04-09-2024 10:15 AM
From: Dilip Barua
Subject: Communication as part of the engineering skills set
Bill – this is an interesting topic – and I guess we have discussed aspects of it in some other threads before. The shared paper greatly enhances some of the communication issues – in particular within engineering industries.
In this post, I like to limit myself to highlighting some interesting and important observations presented by the author. Referred paper: {Pia Lappalainen (2009) Communication as part of the engineering skills set, European Journal of Engineering Education, 34:2, 123-129, DOI: 10.1080/03043790902752038}.
Here are some of them I picked up from the section on Underestimated role of communication:
. . . Despite the undeniable merit credited to social capital, communication has still not
received strategic status in the eyes of many corporate operators. . . .
First of all, traditionally communication, among other support functions, has been unduly underestimated as a resource-consuming and non-profitable area of corporate operations.
Second, it does not play any visible part in yielding results or profits. . . unlike the core functions, although the role of such communications oriented competences as tacit knowledge, cooperation, human skills, and leadership are already acknowledged and known to bring advantage . . .
Another underlying reason is that unlike many other areas of business, the impact of communication is not easily measurable . . . it is difficult to justify investment in activities whose impacts cannot be verified. This measurement problem has roots in the fact that communication is so closely interwoven with all organizational activities that the mere definition of what is pure communication and what is leadership, personnel management or marketing is close to impossible. . . .
Yet another explanation for the inability to credibly establish the significance of communication is that communication, among other human resources, is associated with soft values, unlike core business activities that entail the potential to yield returns . . .
Topped off with connotations implying abstract phenomena such as culture, human relationships, atmosphere, and communality, communication is often disregarded as irrelevant (relevant?).
. . . company CEOs often take on their piloting duties with a CFO background, making them oblivious to the significance of communications. Naturally they cannot value what they do not understand, and the subsequent CEO-driven value system cascading down the hierarchical . . .
The author's observations – very realistic, reverberating with many of our practical experiences – rightly indicate that communication is yet to get integrated into the business-models. Results are – although all sorts of communications are there – business structure does not know how to measure them to assign value to their importance.
And the art of effective communication?
Dilip
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Dr. Dilip K Barua, Ph.D
Website Links and Profile
Original Message:
Sent: 03-28-2024 03:18 PM
From: William Hayden
Subject: Communication as part of the engineering skills set
"Engineering graduates are facing changing requirements regarding their competencies, as interdisciplinarity
and globalization have transformed engineering communities into collaboration arenas extending beyond
uniform national, cultural, contextual and disciplinary settings and structures. Engineers no longer manage
their daily tasks with plain substance expertise; instead they must be adept at communication, collaboration,
networking, feedback provision and reception, teamwork, lifelong learning, and cultural understanding.
This calls for a concomitant change in university curricula, challenging the current university system to
supply graduates that possess working life skills relevant in today's work communities."
Q. What are you, your employer, and university doing to raise your varied communication knowledge and expertise into
the year 2024 and beyond?
Cheers,
Bill
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William M. Hayden Jr., Ph.D., P.E., CMQ/OE, F.ASCE
Buffalo, N.Y.
"It is never too late to be what you might have been." -- George Eliot 1819 - 1880
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