Communication can be seen as a compound mosaic of impressions and information received from many sources. Whether intended as communication or not, everything we do, say or produce as an individual, a group of people, an organisation or even a whole community – and anything said about us - will be added to this mental mosaic.
To have a clear mosaic we need to agree on who and what we are. Then the challenge is to say, act and behave in coherence with the way we want others to see us. Everything we say and do should thus reflect as much as possible our organisation’s attributes, personality (‘enthusiastic’, ‘inspirational’, ‘leading’), character (‘forward looking’, ‘free spirited’) and core values (‘accountable’, ‘transparent’).
But forming a perfect mosaic is not enough, we need to be recognised and stick in people’s mind – in a good way, of course. And since we work for society rather than for ourselves, we need them to know us, to understand what we do, to get our messages across and inspire them enough to engage with us whenever we need.
This exercise goes beyond “sending information”, “delivering messages” or “circulating press releases”. In doing this we tend to stand at one side of a wall and throw messages over to the other, targeting our missiles and asking our audience to passively receive them. But instead of just informing our audience, we need to actively communicate with them.
Communicating involves interaction and should be an instrument for change, not just a way to publicize an opinion. It should go beyond a technical process to simply reflect the views of the sender, and instead provoke a transformational conversation with society that helps it rethink its values and beliefs.
Interaction, however, requires understanding that not everyone thinks like us. Most of the time, for example, we tend to expect a reaction of compassion or anger when an audience is exposed to outrageous figures such as:
§ 75 millions of children are out of school worldwide…
§ About 900 millions go to bed hungry everyday…
§ HIV/AIDS, tuberculoses and malaria kill 6 millions people per year…
We are shocked when these “killer facts” leave the others indifferent, and assume that those in front of us are simply ignorant or heartless, or both.
But this is our fault, not theirs. We spend too little time trying to understand the motivations and needs of our various audiences. If someone does not want to receive a message, they will not receive it. Communication efforts are more also likely to impact with repetition, volume and broad geographical reach - not through one missile shot or occasional actions.
Communication is multi-dimensional and, above all, is about people – in all their complexities. It should address all elements of human understanding and decision making, from the political to the emotional, the economic to the psychological, the spiritual to the scientific. We don’t engage in a cause to reduce a statistic, but to change someone’s life.
When Joseph Stalin, one of the worst dictators, said: “a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic”, he was conveying a grisly truth. Whilst we need facts and figures to convey the scope of a tragedy, we need a name, a face and a story to connect with it.
The challenge of good communications, therefore, is about creating that mental mosaic, but is much more than that still. It is about being interesting enough to be worth noticing, coherent enough to be clear, and open enough to be part of a conversation. It is about looking good and making sense, being noticed and being heard.
Faty.
Faty.
