If a communication can fail, it will -- unless it succeeds by accident

Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal wrote a quite interesting interview with Nicholas Epley, of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, who comments on the communication hazards present in e-mail. This is a topic we frequently refer to in Blackfriars' communications training courses in the context of Osmo's Wiio's Laws of communication (click here for a humorous exposition of those laws along with many corollaries), which you can boil down to:

Jos viestintä voi epäonnistua, niin se epäonnistuu.

Isn't that profound? Isn't it so true? I always love those Finns -- always kidding around. Must be from all those saunas.

For those that don't speak Finnish (myself included), the English translation has even more meaning, specifically:

If a communication can fail, it will.

As it turns out, Epley sums up the article in much the same way, albeit more cautiously and with many more words:

You should have a general lowered confidence in your ability to communicate things. You also want to be really careful about what you communicate with email. It's great for some things, it's not great for everything. Negative information or emotional information you should handle by phone, or face to face.

There's some scientific justification for these claims. One of them is that we only derive about 15% of the meaning of a communication from the words used; the other 85% comes from other non-verbal cues and information. As a result, we shouldn't be asking why email is so frequently misunderstood. We should be asking, "How do people understand our emails as well as they do?"

Oh, and what Epley says about email goes double for blogs.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Communications, Psychology, email, Wiio