Friends, subscribers, fellow humans, We’ve reached a pause. One year. What a year. I came up with this idea for sharing weekly content in late summer/early fall of 2019. I didn’t see anyone talking about communication as I was envisioning and I was looking for an outlet. I wanted to write…
One of the worst things you can do with respect to communication is to think about it as nice, neat, simple, straightforward. I know it’s tempting. I know it’s easy, But communication simply is not like this. That communication is linear, direct, and easily moves from A to B, let alone that…
Among other things (information, meaning), communication is about change — movement from state to state. Old form to new. Change is always happening but we don’t often feel it due to incrementality. It happens just a little bit at a time. Change also quite often feels like stasis, which…
Communication is full of paradoxes. Two opposites, somehow connected to form a larger whole. Paradoxes, you know. “You gotta be cruel to be kind” as Nick Lowe teaches us, or the Ship of Theseus, or the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Paradoxes, two things that despite their apparent oppositeness…
"What do you mean?": The Innerworkings of Intentionality
Concept of Com | Ontology
People put a great deal of belief into “intent” when it comes to messages and communication. We like to think that our intended meaning matters. It’s comforting, right? But what if there is no there, there? What if our intended meaning doesn’t actually matter much at all? How…
To anyone who works with code, “==” means “equivalent to.” When coding, programmers can use “==” to make one thing the same as another. communication == relationships Communication and relationships are essentially the same thing. How you communicate with someone…
Before I can go any further, we have to talk about what communication is. Let’s start with a definition. I know, BO-RING. But definitions matter. Definitions shape how we see things. They orient us, point us in directions, and help us ask the right questions. For example, how a company defines…
