9Translation
Communication isn’t about the transmission and reception of information; it’s about moving towards a shared sense of meaning.
One of the most critical breakage points in human communication lies in the difference between what is said, written or visualised and what is understood. In fact, most of the challenges we faced in researching this book stemmed from this fact.
Seemingly self-explanatory words such as ‘leadership’, ‘creativity’ and ‘resilience’ mean quite different things to different people. In fact, in different circumstances, the same sets of words, phrases, tones of voice and imagery can simultaneously evoke passion, inspiration, offence and even rage.
We all intuitively understand this, and yet most of our communication strategies are based on communication models that do not take this into account. These models teach us to think in terms of transmission and reception (filtered through interference), when human communication is far more nuanced and much less linear.
For this reason, translation — a capacity to assess, curate, interpret and share ideas and information across different professional, social and cultural spheres — is a Forever Skill.
One of the fallacies we’ve bought into around human communication is the drive to deliver messages that are ...
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