Cracking the Communication Code

How we communicate is as important as what we communicate.

How we communicate is as important as what we communicate. If we don’t get the way we communicate right, it doesn’t matter how good or accurate the thing we want to communicate is; people won’t pay attention to it.

A strategy partner I used to work with at Accenture used to say that every strategy project could be divided into thirds. The first third was figuring out the problem. The second third was figuring out the solution. The last third was figuring out how to communicate the solution.

He was trying to make a rhetorical point with this, but it’s a good one. How something is communicated often determines whether it will be accepted.

My old executive coach used to tell me that you need to “spin up people’s receptivity” to hear what you have to say. I previously gave an example of this from the boss who sent me to executive coaching in the first place. Before he told me that I needed coaching, he led off by saying, “Even Tiger Woods has a coach.” This is part of the art of communication.

"Even Tiger Woods Has a Coach"

Communication strategy starts with the audience and what you’re trying to get them to accept.

For example, in political or culture commentary, are you communicating to your base or to “normies”? Communications to the base is important to keep them fired up. In the conservative world, a lot of “own the libs” rhetoric is implicitly about reaching the base.

If you want to reach the normie - the average person who is not very engaged in the subject you are talking about and mostly just living their life - then different approaches are needed. You’ll want to make sure that what are you are saying is coded as high status, or at least not as low status.

There are other considerations. One is “frame.” What is the frame within which you are making an argument? Typically, he who sets the frame wins the argument. John Seel previously wrote of this:

Lakoff tells us in his important primer, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, that when the facts don't fit the frame, the facts bounce off and the frame stays. Such has been the experience of anti-Trump pundits. You cannot get people to change frames through reasoned argument—a failed assumption of Enlightenment rationalism. People change frames through the engagement of their imagination—by being captured by a new compelling story, a new visual horizon, and a provocative image.

Since the left is culturally dominant in America, it usually sets the frames people engage with. Conservatives often fail right out of the gate because they accept the left’s frame and try to make an argument within it.

For example, you’ll hear a conservative make an argument like, “If we really cared about black lives, we’d support Broken Windows policing and strong law enforcement, because look at the number of young black men who have been killed since the depolicing movement started.”

This fails because it accepts the left’s moral framing, which implicitly excludes any conservative policy approaches. They are by definition illegitimate under the BLM frame.

Challenging frames can be very difficult because once a frame becomes hegemonic in society, you can suffer significant consequences for rejecting it. Seel’s idea of telling a better and more compelling story is one way to get around this.

Donald Trump is a master of disrupting establishment frames and replacing them with his own, as George Lakoff himself, a fierce Trump critic, pointed out. But few people are as good at this as Trump.

Also important to keep in mind are the components of persuasion mapped out by Aristotle: ethos, pathos, logos. Logos is the content or factual content of communicated. But often more important are emotional appeals (pathos), or the status/character/“brand” of the person making the argument (ethos). In fact, in newsletter #51 I wrote about why if you are debating substance, you’ve probably already lost.

Newsletter #51: If You’re Debating Substance, You’ve Already Lost

There’s also the model of communication laid out by the psychologist Robert Cialdini, who is the godfather of persuasion. He was an advisor to both President Obama’s 2012 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

In 1984 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a must read.

In this book, Cialdini walks through six key principles of persuasion: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, likability, authority, and scarcity. This book is a gold mine of material.

These are just some of the considerations when it comes to communications.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to communicate what I have to say. I think a lot about the frames I want to use to talk about things. My “three worlds” framework is the example where I had my biggest success. I created a way of thinking about the world and evangelicalism that resonated hugely with people.

Not everything I do is that successful, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the “how” of my communication, not just the “what.” You should too.

You may be wondering why I wrote this post. After all, it isn’t my normal cultural critique or analysis. It’s because I see that so many writers in this space end up as overly negative or critical. I wanted to make sure to have a positive agenda, not just a negative one. One of my guiding principles is to build up, not just tear down. I want to give you practical, actionable insights that can help you get better and succeed - news you can use. While commenting on hot political topics generates more clicks and traffic, I’m committed to continuing to try to write these kinds of posts to the extent I have something compelling to say.