Things I've missed: the power of the 5 minute check-in & in person meetings.
How much subtler communication and community building has been lost this year when every single conversation required an appointment? And since we are zoomed out, this usually means the email or video meeting is happening to talk about something specific or address a problem, rarely to shoot the breeze. This challenge transcends the classroom. All the smaller clues when we meet or teach in person have been lost. I never counted the times a student would see my office light on and pop in for a quick clarification, but I sure have missed them. This year, it’s been an email or student group chat when they collectively reach the wrong conclusion about what I meant (instead of taking advantage of virtual office hours and asking). In the classroom, so much of the off-the-syllabus storytelling and community building while working was lost.
I recently saw a sign that showed the 7-38-55 “Elements of Personal Communication.”
This is an over simplification and even the author cautions how subjective these qualities are, and that context is also an important ingredient in communicating.
But, by using this graphic, if only a small percentage of our communication relies on the actual words, then how much is lost or miscommunicated when we can’t rely on tone or body language?
An email can be thoughtful, specific, and provide a digital paper trail, but I can’t count the times my tone was misinterpreted or I misinterpreted someone else’s intent. Or, the tonal difference between dashing off a quick, sometimes abrupt response typing from your phone versus sitting down at a keyboard and responding with thoughtful intention. Also, an email is not a conversation. If it turns into a multi response thread, I wonder if it should have been a phone call or a meeting.
A zoom meeting or phone call can help with tone and those can be conversations - back and forth instead of communicating in one direction, but we miss body language and physical presence. Zoom certainly creates some flexibility and saves on travel time, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who occasionally multi-tasks while on a zoom call (in my pajamas).
And now, unrelated to the pandemic, we often rely on social media to communicate. How robust can the communication be if we’re limited to 280 characters? Not only are tone and body language completely lost, we are leaning on other’s graphic design skills, memes, and trigger finger emoji responses. Yes, a picture can be worth a thousand words, but whose words? Remember when emojis were limited to the punctuation combinations of semi-colon, colon and parentheses? They were so limiting, an entire lexicon of graphics were invented (orrrrr, just dusting off an ancient practice??), attempting to capture tone in the nuance of a smiling yellow dot. All those statistics about the mental chemical rush of engaging on-line is very real- … I too check Facebook multiple times a day…but social media has removed not just tone and body language, but context as well in addition to often limiting our word count. Good communication takes time and in our high speed digital world if we are only relying on 7% of our communication tools, a lot is getting lost.
At work, school, and in our theatre making spaces, this year we lost the small conversations that build community and foster relationships between colleagues, peer to peer, and between faculty and students. This coming year, I am hoping to enable a culture that allows for space to slow down a bit. Working with my friend and colleague, Chloe Chapin this spring on ReDressing the Narrative2 we discovered the power of “Hold, please.” In theatre this is what we say when we need to pause for any reason: practice a quick change, allow the LX team to write a cue, the SM to update paperwork, add spike tape to mark something, and most importantly, address an in-the-moment safety issue. Poor communication leads to harm-this harm manifests in obvious ways like missing exit signs in a fire, but in subtler ones as well where micro-aggressions happen and the speaker missed the impact because time was not invested in slowing down. Nicole Brewer suggests that we should have an agenda but hold it lightly. For me, this means reading the room (tone and body language) and adjusting, taking time when and where it is needed. “Hold, please.” It is polite. It’s a complete sentence, & simply a request for a bit more time.
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