Communication is the most important bit of infrastructure in the creation of society. Without communication there is no way for any two people to connect, to share ideas, to determine whether they have shared interests, to collaborate, etc.
We all know that communication can be difficult. But we all believe that it basically works. I think this deserves more thought.
Some communication is purely informative. Take a stop sign. You want everyone to understand it and have the same experience. And generally, this works quite well – even across cultures. Individuals may choose not to stop at a stop sign but that’s their choice. The sign communicates clearly and creates the same experience. But some communication aims to achieve more than to simply inform. Some communication is designed to inspire. And herein lies the problem.
Inspiration draws on emotion. The stimulus for emotion and the specific emotional response to that stimulus are heavily influenced by culture, upbringing, values, personal idiosyncrasies, etc. Native speaker status is a very critical variable. Words can have different connotations and emotional tones in different countries. If you are not a native English speaker, you might understand English but your experience of a particular word can often differ dramatically from that of a native speaker. Even two people who are both native English speakers can experience a word quite differently. Americans tend to like bold words. The British are a bit more reserved in their communication. And so on. Basically, there are 6 billion languages in the world and you’re trying to write in only one of them!
In the world of business communication, most people who have this problem (many don’t even stop to think about it) tend to try and solve it by pursuing the least common denominator strategy. They try to find the set of words that will not arouse any discomfort or displeasure in anyone. This is like “sanding the crystal” and I have previously written about why this is a bad idea. All you get when you pursue this approach is bland, uninspiring, vague pablum. If you like pablum, this is your approach. If you prefer originality and inspiration, do not use this approach.
Instead, reframe your problem. Your problem is not how you can write a document that will appeal to and inspire all of these different people. Your problem is simply how to inspire them. Don’t try to create one document that will do the trick. It won’t. It can’t. Instead, capture your ideas in all of their splendor and glory in whatever language makes sense. Then, figure out how to communicate it to your audience. You might actually translate the document into various languages. The job of the translator would be to capture the intent of the original document but relay it in the words that would work for a different set of people. If you work for a global company, this translation might be very resource intensive. An alternate approach is not to formally translate the document but to have someone communicate it verbally – not simply reading it, but explaining it using the right words and context for the right audience. This can also be resource intensive. Another approach is to annotate the document – capture more of the “behind the scenes” thinking so that even some audience members find that some of the words don’t resonate, they can still accurately apprehend the intent of the document via the rich elaboration found in the annotations.
The more I think about this and the more I work with multinational companies, the more convinced I become that trying to write one thing to inspire many people is the wrong approach.
Now I wish I knew if any of you people reading this were experiencing it the “right” way!
