Book Foreword
Bill Pepicello, Ph.D.
President, University of Phoenix
As a linguist I have spent my life studying the ways in which human beings communicate. A key observation in my studies is that communication is not a send-and-receive process. People simultaneously send and receive messages constantly and filter the content through their own net of life experience. So speaking and talking are not separate events for human beings, and understanding is a matter of aligning the perspectives of those who are trying to communicate.
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In short, it’s a wonder that we ever communicate at all. Over a long professional relationship and personal friendship with Rich Schuttler we have had the opportunity to communicate on many occasions, and I am convinced that we actually did communicate a few times. But much of our bond comes from those times when we missed the mark and had to work to figure out how that happened and what it was the other was really saying. It is in such exchanges that communication really takes place.
And that is the essence and the value of this book. Good communication is easy to recognize but difficult to replicate. What we learn about communication we learn in large part from bad communication--our mistakes. With any luck we take what we learn and apply it to our next attempts, and sometimes we even get better at it. The goal is to understand how others see the world and rationalize their perceptions in light of our own experiences. We can then establish a common base for interaction.
We employ a variety of tools to accomplish this. A device such as Rich’s stoplight metaphor for the stages of communication development is a good example. Another tactic is to take a basic framework, like a set of communication “laws,” and see how they apply in different contexts. We are often surprised to find out that communication in the corporate boardroom and the hospital emergency room are essentially the same at the core, but very different when viewed through the lens of experience. It’s the ability to integrate and accommodate various perspectives that ultimately leads to communication.
In this book the authors present communication in several dimensions. It is examined in a variety of professional contexts, for example those of business, healthcare, and education. It is also examined in the light of its relationship to individual and organizational performance. In still another dimension the interaction of words and behavior are examined as part of the human condition. What we learn in the end is that communication is somewhere in the intersection of content and context.
The contributing authors demonstrate effectively that the whole that we recognize as communication is more than the sum of the parts. Much of the enterprise of communication is dedicated to the management of content and negotiation of world views. Yet through all of this, communication has an integrity that pervades.
