“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
Strother Martin as ‘Captain’ uttered those famous words in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke. The words were lost on me at the time. I was caught up in the movie and Paul Newman as the prisoner.
But the words as I now recall them seem to have greater meaning and importance.
Captain’s words are Number 11 on the list of all-time best movie quotes. One could make a case for them being Number 1. Those few words point to the origin of many of today’s problems: whether they be in our families, our workplaces, our government, our politics, our international diplomacy, our schools, our media, our sports teams, our military, our churches. Need I go on?
Before we go too far, we should perhaps define communication.
The Google says, “Communication is simply the act of transferring information from one place, person or group to another. Every communication involves (at least) one sender, a message and a recipient. This may sound simple, but communication is actually a very complex subject.”
I would certainly agree with that last part.
Back in the day, I worked with a retired Navy Commander. He was the project manager for a large gas well automation project we were installing in Western Kansas.
There were flowmeter contractors, roustabouts for piping and manual labor, there were IT people (this before we knew that’s what they should be called), there were landmen, company men, and communications contractors, all with their own agendas. I was the communications guy.
As we would finish our morning briefings the Commander would assign each person or group their tasks for the day. As the meeting closed the Commander carefully listened as each in turn stated what their tasks were. The Commander was often heard to say, “what I heard you say was….” Interestingly, it often was not what he had just said he wanted done.
There had obviously been “a failure to communicate.” Then followed a discussion until everyone was on the same page. That’s the job of a Project Manager. It’s essential that he/she be a good communicator.
A niece recently posted on social media; my wife read her insightful comment to me. She said, “When I was a kid, my dad was speaking English, but I was listening in some other language.” That’s it in a nutshell don’t you think?
Like my niece, I have in the past listened, and maybe still do, in a foreign language.
An example: As a kid I took involuntary piano lessons.
There came a time I was allowed to quit. It wasn’t soon enough for me. I hated piano lessons. I remember Dad telling me when we discussed the subject when he and Mom were going to finally allow me to quit, that quitting piano lessons was something I would someday regret.
He, much like my niece’s dad, was obviously speaking a foreign language. How could any red-blooded boy actually want to take piano lessons? Piano lessons by definition require practice, wasted time that could be much better spent playing baseball with the guys, cops and robbers, riding bikes, anything out of doors. And there was that metronome thing! Tic Toc, Tic Toc, incessantly.
But I digress. I was finally allowed to quit piano lessons.
Some years later, I found myself in Iceland, at a small, isolated US Navy Remote Communications Station. It was just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle.
It was there I came to understand that what my Dad had said was true. I was able to clearly understand the language my Dad had spoken on that long ago day.
The guy who played the piano and, in this case, also the accordion, was everyone’s friend. Officers, enlisted, and civilians all knew and liked him. His name was Speedy. He was from Chicago. He was a great guy. Everyone thought so. I realized that maybe I could have been Speedy.
My Dad knew I would regret quitting piano lessons because he also had been at a military base in a foreign country where the guy who could play the piano was everyone’s friend. He had been stationed at an airbase called Shipdam in England during WW2. Dad didn’t play but had wished he could. And he had wished I could have had that pleasure.
Dr. Peter Caddick-Adams in his very informative book ‘Sand & Steel,’ relates how some of the thousands of American servicemen who suddenly found themselves planted in Jolly Old England spent their time off. It revolved around music.
Dr. Caddick-Adams says, “Every major town had a range of servicemen’s clubs where enlisted ranks–both GIs and their foreign counterparts–could relax, of which the American Red Cross-run Rainbow Corner at the junction of Piccadilly Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue in London was the best known. As dance band leader Corporal Jim McDowell of the 44th Bomb Group, based at RAF Shipdam, Norfolk recalled, ‘The Rainbow was a magnet for off-duty GIs; in the heart of London, it was where the homesick servicemen would go.”
Shipdam was where my Dad had been stationed. I like to think Dad and the Band Leader Corporal McDowell were buddies and rode together to London on the weekends. I do not know that for a fact, but my imagination suggests it could have happened.
My Dad had known! And more importantly he tried to pass that information along to me. But me, I was listening in another language. I was like most kids of any time and most any age under 25 or 30, I didn’t understand that my Dad knew stuff.
There had been you see, a “failure to communicate.”
We are surrounded by examples today. Examples that can actually be both physically and emotionally dangerous when incorrect follow-on assumptions to unclear messages are made.
Sometimes folks think they are communicating but they are not. They are merely sending digital text and images back and forth. There is no honest emotion attached. Well actually there is emotion many times, but emotion in its proper form is not able to be attached to the ones and zeros that make up our digital messages. I know, I know, you send your smiley faced or frowning faced emojis, or maybe use all-caps or worse even make them all-caps plus bold trying to communicate anger, joy, etc. How sterile is that? And how easily misunderstood?
I refer of course to what passes for communication in our advanced day and time, communication that unimaginably originates as clicks on a keyboard. Those messages are carried not by sound and its very important inflections or minute facial expression, but by those sterile ones and zeros zipping through the ether, in and out of satellites, countless routers, some fiber optic cable, even maybe some old-fashioned copper wire to be interpreted by yet another small device in your hand.
Every single day we send text messages, emails, maybe videos and we think we are communicating but in actual fact we are just sending data. What we have many times “is failure to communicate.” Granted some data has been sent back and forth but that isn’t really communications, is it? Actual communication is much more personal than that.
Much of our real communication is accomplished by unconscious emotion, a facial expression; was that a smile or a frown, a slight inflection in a voice, a slight movement betraying a sense of unease, a look away, a fake cough; all this is missed by the digits of todays communication mediums. Hard to put all that into ones and zeros.
Commander Ryan Ramsey (RN) in his recent book ‘The View From Below’, tells of addressing his nuclear submarine crew (he would call them a team) as they stood in formation before him. He says he could tell who was all-in and who wasn’t by facial expression, posture, etc. That’s communication! Both he and they, unconscious on their part, conscious on his.
I’d suggest real communication requires a presence to go with a voice, leaving all those electronic digits unmolested, but I realize that’s a naïve view and not always possible, especially in our mobile age.
So, we must do the best we can. In cases where face to face is not possible, something close to real communications can take place between entities who know each other well. Even that however can be problematic. You may find yourself saying things like, “I wonder what they meant by that?”
Seeing and being with people physically helps make the ones and zeros of the communications of our day somewhat more effective.
Admiral Lord Nelson (1758-1805) in the highly regimented command structure of the Royal Navy of his day broke the leadership mold and made an effort to actually get to know his Captains.
A trademark of his style was dinner aboard his flagship. The social setting allowed the captains to get to know each other and their commander and he them. The dividend came in the heat of battle when smoke and noise of cannon fire made conventional communications impossible.
One of his Captains remarked that they were OK in the heat of battle because they already knew what the Admiral wanted them to do.
They did it, and they were victorious.
A good lesson for today.
And last but not least, not communicating is really communicating. Not communicating sends many messages, most of them not good. The old adage “no news is good news,” sometimes applies; but not always.
Why take a chance?
But that’s for another day.