Get The Message

How do you prefer to get your message across?

There’s a section in a training day on communication that I deliver where we explore the different channels available to us and why we might choose one over another. 

We’ve got a heck of a lot to choose from. There are the older ones, like face to face, letters, telephone, email and text.

Then we’ve got a whole host of new tech channels with stuff like Twitter, Whatsapp, Slack, Teams and Snapchat.

Each social media outlet has got its own communication channel.

Telegrams were once a thing, then they died out, but now we are back in ‘a new era of messaging’ with Telegram.org.

I Hear You Telephone Thing

In my course we touch on the relative age of these different types of comms and it’s fascinating to note that most of the models we use are excruciatingly modern.

The last six I just mentioned all began no earlier than 2006 with Twitter being the granddaddy.

Even email is only about thirty years old. Well, in actual fact some dusty old academics were using a steam powered version from the 70s but for the likes of you and me it only took hold when the 90s arrived.

Telephones, however, have been ringing about 150 years, ever since Alexander Graham Bell made the first call in 1876. Still not sure who he was calling but he was no doubt told “your call is important to us” and had to listen to a tinny version Greensleeves.

Relatively though, it’s all incredibly new. 

As a species humans have been around for around 200,000 years but we only started using written words 5000 years ago. According to my amazing maths that’s a paltry 2.5% of our existence.

And that channel was only for the top brass at the time. Not many plough pulling peasants in Mesopotamia were kicking back on their lunch hour with a well thumbed copy of Take A Break or attempting their daily Wordle.

The Echoes Of My Mind

Way before writing was even a thing we weren’t even able to speak to communicate. Probably just lots of grunting and waving of arms. The organs we use for speech today originally evolved just for breathing.

No one knows for sure exactly when we began to clearly encode our thoughts into sound but it took a good while.

The power of speech came along only once we managed to get our tongues working the right way to articulate certain sounds. I’m presuming that civilisation was held back for thousands of years by words like rural, anemone and squirrel. 

There are some fabulously named theories of how speech came about including the bow wow theory, the pooh pooh theory and the ding dong theory; the latter presumably formulated by Leslie Phillips on his days off.

If You Must Write Prose or Poems

One of the reasons I bring (some of) this up in the training is to highlight the need to consciously choose the most appropriate channel for a message.

That’s no longer an easy task. 

In times gone by if you wanted to get a simple message across you would use one of the voice channels.

If you wanted to communicate but have a record of what was said, you’d use one of the written forms.

Now there’s such a wide variety of choice we don’t always know what the most appropriate medium is.

My way of thinking about this is to consider how best you can serve your audience, the intended recipient of your message. You need to consider how they best like to receive information. 

The easiest way to find out is to simply ask them and then do that. If they prefer you to call them, then call them. 

“Ah, but I need a written record,” you may say.

Fine, simply call them and make a brief note of the call. Or email them briefly just to confirm what you agreed on the phone.

Wait A Minute Mr Postman

Considering the recipient’s favoured channel is especially important when you’re offering gratitude.

As a parent I make a song and a dance about our kids thanking their grandparents for birthday gifts using the channel of physical paper cards, stamps and Royal Mail.

For their younger aunties and uncles being sent a fun photo on WhatsApp or sharing a call on Facetime is a fine way to be thanked but for their grandparents it’s different. 

Their grandparents each enjoy receiving a card in the post.

They enjoy that the postie has delivered it. They enjoy physically opening it with their hands. They enjoy holding it and reading the handwritten words. They enjoy placing the card above the fireplace. Later they enjoy taking it down and re reading the message.

There's a lot to enjoy.

So this weekend, take a moment to consider how the people you care about like to be communicated to. 

Is there something different you could do next time you have a message to convey that would help them to understand better or to enhance their enjoyment of the message you are sharing?