Over at the brilliant Signal vs. Noise, there’s an interesting post on some rather unknown but super insightful communications theory. Here it is, verbatim:
Osmo Wiio is a Finnish researcher of human communication. He has studied, among other things, readability of texts, organizations and communication within them, and the general theory of communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws.
* If communication can fail, it will.
* If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
* There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
* The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.And I particularly like his observation that anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:
1. Who you think you are
2. Who you think the other person is
3. Who you think the other person thinks you are
4. Who the other person thinks he/she is
5. Who the other person thinks you are
6. Who the other person thinks you think he/she is
Read more about Osmo and his theories on communication here.
Comments
3 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.What a joy to see one of my favourite quotes surfacing after all these years. I first came across Osmo Wiio in a book by Jacques Vallee, “The Network Revolution”, published in the UK in 1984, in the US in 1982. And, “Communication usually fails, except by accident” has echoed around in my mind ever since.
Vallee has another Wiio quote that is worth a good, long ponder:
“Often it is better not to know what other people are thinking. Many conflicts could be avoided if people just kept their thoughts to themselves”
One I coined for myself following in the spirit of Osmo Wiio and works for me is, “Communication is only possible where communication is unnecessary”.
i find that observation about the six people in any two-person conversation to be excessively astute.
i’ve had some frustrating experiences with e-communication lately (regarding my tone and my intent and others’ responses that are dependent on same) that reminded me of the same conclusion, but the quote above expresses it way better than i did. or at least: i like that phrasing better than my ponderings about whether i’m a different person when i’m talking to the various people in my life, and what that signifies and whether it’s genuine ;P
yet one more phrasing: one creates unique context with each friend that one interacts with, and one best be cognizant of the fact that overlapping those contexts might lead to messy venn diagrams.
When creating a presentation on design and its direct correlation with communication I ran across Wiio. Unfortunately his books are very hard to find, and expensive if you happen to run across them.
His words are brilliant, succinct, and guiding.