How do we decode people?

Manipulating the knowledge of ourselves and what we believe in learning everyday about communication. – Part 1 –

What comes first into your mind when you hear the words “outside-in-perspective”, “inner-world”, “outbound-driven”? Anything related to technical or mechanical engineering? Artificial intelligence? Or even human psychology?

When you take a vote for question number three, you are far more akin to self- and people-awareness than most people are. Which would not surprise me because it is you who is also interested in that kind of matters and read about it.

In any case I wish to briefly get your attention on why I think it is so highly important to make ourselves aware of these three buzzwords and the meaning behind them. When we think about our daily lives, we would connotate it with “stress”, “no-time”, “offshore calls”, “one more meeting”, “bugs and fix it”. When we ask what is most important for your daily work it would be “smartphone” and “laptop”.

But what would we do within a world of no electricity? Imagine you would have to listen to people? Communicate with hands and feet? Understand their meanings and sense-making? Would we ne more stressed or would our word cloud of the day suddenly change dramatically to something like “relationships”, “communication”, “negotiation”?

The surprising truth is that we actually don’t need to switch off electricity to have these buzzwords being present.

Because all what we do thanks to all that technology is in fact communicating and distributing knowledge from one person to another.

A click on Amazon buy communicates that I like the product and want to have it. A predefined time-set washing machine says that I want to have my laundry done at a specific time or care about economic efficiency. All these subtle things actually tell a lot about our preferences, our personality and our understanding of communicating through third-parties. It is fascinating and at the same time disturbing. Because without realising it, we don’t tell our human environment anything about our life anymore but all our digital devices become our true soul buddies. Creepy right? Especially when I wonder why my colleague does not understand what I am trying to tell him. Why? Because we unlearned to listen and to understand humans.

Humans are slightly different in terms of communicating with one another than computers.

They are subjective, emotional, intuitive and sometimes irrational. All ingredients in the formula for perfect unpredictability. What is it then that we need to do in order to decode people in the human way? And again, there is no one “zero’s and one’s line of code” that is the magic recipe. We need to ask ourselves everyday what is more important in this conversation. The human receiving a signal that a task is complete, the device fulfilling the task correctly, or the communication between the two people mutually understanding and agreeing on the needs and deliverables? Technology helps us to forget the world inside of us and blinds us from the world around. We function like robots, jumping when a device pings and wants to “tell” us something. And we jump higher and faster than in any other form of human conversation. The phne is with us at diner, at work, when we go to sports or to sleep. In the fear of missing out on something. But while constantly chasing the digital world, we forget the real world, the present, the people around and with us.

Now you might ask, how can I relearn human communication?

First and foremost, try to learn and decode what people say. This is not purely a matter of words and sentences. Connect their emotional state of being with their tone of voice, mimic and personality before taking into account what he/she just verbally said. And this decoding can’t happen via mail or text message. You need to be with that person, give them you full attention and listen to all messages that are sent out. It might be difficult and we will never be a native speaker in that human language because each person has his/her own. But we can definetly try and learn from one another.