Welcome to "The Editorial" – an irreverent look at the world of communication and the spectacular efforts of those in business to make a complete shambles of it. Thank you to all of you who responded to last months rambling – it obviously struck a chord and I look forward to your unqualified support in the event of a lawsuit!

So. once again. from the laptop of Brett Rutledge. World Champion of Public Speaking we bring you our latest attempt at informed opinion on the communication issues of the day and cutting edge advice to assist you in developing the most important skill set you can bring to the business environment – your own communication skills!

* 55% from the visual component
* 38% from the auditory component
* 7% from language

Bollocks!!!! The above percentages have been taken out of context and here is why. In the early 70’s Albert Mehrabian (a very clever man interested in how communication was affected by conflicting expressions, gestures and tone) designed a couple of experiments. In the first one, subjects were asked to listen to a recording of a female saying the word ‘maybe’ in three tones of voice to convey liking, neutrality and disliking. The subjects were then shown photos of female faces with the same three emotions and were asked to guess the emotions in the recorded voices, the photos and both in combination.

In a second, subjects listened to nine recorded words, three conveying liking (honey, dear and thanks), three conveying neutrality (maybe, really and oh) and three conveying disliking (don’t, brute and terrible). The words were spoken with different tonalities and subjects were asked to guess the emotions behind the words as spoken. The experiment found tone carried more meaning than the individual words themselves.

Mehrabian concluded when it came to the communication of emotion 7% was derived from the language, 38% from tone and 55% from visuals and unfortunately that became generalized by dipsticks to mean that in all communication 7% happens in spoken word, 38% through voice tone and 55% via forms of body language.

It’s not true. Does an email only convey 7%? Can you watch someone speaking a foreign language and understand 93%? Can you listen to a phone call and only understand 45%?

The idea propagated by wombles selling presentation skills courses that 93% of any message is conveyed by a combination of body language and vocal variety is complete nonsense. Our collective tendency in the business world to work on how we look and sound rather than the quality of what we are saying is exactly what lets us down 9 times out of 10. Structure is actually more important than delivery! Content matters and while delivery can improve good structure it can’t make up for poor structure.

By the way, for all those people out there who have been misquoting Mehrabian for years… try reading him instead.

A euphemism is the substitution of an agreeably vague expression in place of a more direct or unpleasant one. Airlines often use these with expressions like ‘forced water landing’ instead of saying ‘crashing in to the ocean’. They can be funny. For example. British Airways was quick to hit back at reports that more than 5.000 items of passenger luggage had been lost since security measures were implemented at Heathrow Airport.

A spokeswoman for the airline admitted that while bags had been separated from their owners. they had definitely not been lost! What??!!!

It’s a bit like saying. "She’s not pregnant. She’s just been separated from her virginity." Assuming your listener is an idiot incapable of figuring out what is really going on is not the best communication strategy on the planet… not even the second best! Incidentally. Using prefixes to make something sound more important and ending up talking crap instead isn’t any better i.e.

Pre-boarding – getting on the plane before you get on the plane
Non-stop Sydney to Auckland – no I want the one that stops in the middle of the Tasman!
A near miss – think about it… that’s a hit! Look up there – KABOOM – those planes nearly missed. Poor old Johno!

A tautology is even worse than those. A tautology is a statement that is necessarily true but doesn’t actually tell you anything. For example… ‘We regret to advise passengers travelling on QF26 that your flight is delayed due to the late arrival of the inbound aircraft." What???!!! Where did it go? Why is it late? Did it do something unexpected like hang a left at Fiji? Isn’t it your plane and your schedule? Why can’t you tell us? Go on – give us a clue.

It is exactly the same as saying ‘Your flight is late because your flight is late’. It is stupid and infuriating. Just tell us what is going on! We’ll understand… honest! Stop talking bollocks!

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Seriously… get in touch

If anything here has struck a chord let us know and if you want some help in making your communication more effective please get in touch. Thanks for reading and see you next month!