The Power of Storytelling
4 April 2022
Staying human pays off: why our intelligence is (still) superior to that of machines
7 April 2022
Article by Massimo Berlingozzi – Communication and awareness in the age of digital work – HBR March 2022
It is not easy to summarise in the space of this article the important topic we are going to address, so we will use an example. Imagine you observe two people talking to each other behind glass. The glass is thick and you are quite far away, so you cannot hear their words and you cannot even, due to distance and an ability that is not given to everyone, ‘read’ their lips, unlike HAL 9000 in the famous scene from 2001 A Space Odyssey. To be even clearer: you are unable to understand the text of their dialogue. At the same time, however, you are perfectly capable of grasping the ’emotional fabric’ of their conversation. You will not miss the friendly, or the tense and confrontational mode of their confrontation and you may even go further in catching further nuances: smiles, complacent tones, expressions of embarrassment, etc.
Immediately afterwards, imagine calling a colleague on the phone and having to describe all your perceptions in detail. You would discover that it would take a lot of words to describe a few moments of conversation and that what you are doing is by no means easy, not least because you have not always been able to find the words capable of conveying some of the feelings you have experienced. You find yourself in the difficulty, of which we are almost always unaware, of having to translate from analogue to digital or, more simply, of having to make explicit what had seemed so clear to us at an implicit level. Normally we do not think about this, because when we relate ‘in presence’ the digital (words) and analogue (non-verbal communication) elements of our communication flow freely, simultaneously, conveying to us the meaning of the words and how those words are to be understood. It is clear to everyone that the digital level is bound to a convention and rules that must be respected (e.g. the Italian language), while the analogue part is unbound by a precise convention and therefore understood intuitively, subject among other things to cultural and individual variations.
When we speak we never just exchange information, at the same time we define a relationship, even better:we build a relationship. This almost always happens quite unconsciously, but a closer look should not miss the idea that the nature of the relationships in which we are involved is literally ‘negotiated’, even if this happens predominantly through analogue elements of communication. It is never the case that we explicitly state ‘this is how I would like our relationship to be’. Example: ‘it was nice to meet you, we work in the same office, whenever you want we can go for a coffee together, but don’t ask me to come to your house for dinner, or to go to the cinema this evening because I wouldn’t like that’, or: ‘ok the dinner and the cinema, but I’ll go on holiday on my own! These examples may raise eyebrows, yet they represent exactly what we do, only these transitions do not take place through the use of words, they are instead ‘acted out’ through reciprocal behaviours with which we are perfectly capable of making our real intentions understood. Needless to give examples, each of us has a large sampling.
And here we come to the essential point: knowing how to ‘speak about the relationship‘ is by no means easy, but it is sometimes necessary. It becomes indispensable in conflict resolution, for example. Paul Watzlawick, in his studies on the pragmatics of communication, attributed a very high value in terms of awareness to this ability, called metacommunication. However, we are not accustomed to this, and with a certain malice one might ask: how much did real knowledge and skills contribute to the acquisition of a managerial role, and how much instead did a more subterranean, instinctive and unconscious dimension of leadership, which was nourished precisely by physical space, contribute? And what happens when, be it smart working or remote working, one must be able to manage and motivate employees who are no longer present for a large part of their time?
The digital dimension of work inevitably subtracts space from the oldest and most instinctive part of our communication, but the function of this component is too important to be abandoned, as it is intimately linked to the quality of relationships and people’s well-being. Anew awareness and new skills therefore become necessary. There is no shortage of ideas; the training rooms are the place where this must happen.
