Last week Rachel and Robert were talking about words and meaning.
Robert Bacal said (about verbatim recording):
> I would NEVER use this technique since it focuses on the words not the
> meaning, and the meaning is not the words (oops, I'm in fortune cookie
> mode....again).
and Rachel replied:
>How else can other people know what you meant without the words you
>used? Yes, of course there is body language, etc., but we have to
>assume that the words we're saying are conveying the meaning, and
>then, I think, we have to check that we used the right words to convey
> the meaning we intended.
This exchange got me thinking. Someone I'm working with has recently been
saying that in his view managers don't always think about the "message
behind their words" - by which I found he meant the message that people
_infer_ when they hear a manager's words.
So, for instance, a manager might say the words, "here is the PC you
ordered - but it's got less memory than you wanted and a smaller disk, I
had to downgrade the spec". The employee hears the words but may infer an
additional meaning, such as, "you were greedy and over-specified your
requirements" or "I know better than you what you need" or "you're not
important enough so I didn't bother fighting to get approval to purchase
your original spec" or "I didn't think you should get a more powerful
machine than me", etc. In reality, any or none of these meanings may have
been in the manager's mind. I suppose this is where the phrase "reading
between the lines" comes from?
I was chewing all this over last night, and the following example came into
my head. Take the word, "Smile!". A single word. Yet it could _mean_
many things, eg.:
1. "Stop frowning, you make me mad when you frown"
2. "Please don't be so sad"
3. "Pose for the camera"
4. "I know you hate what you're doing, but try to look cheerful"
etc. etc.
My friend who says that word to me may mean 2. but I could take it as 1.
and get upset. (Oh, the tangled webs we weave!)
Rachel also said:
>My friends and I used to say to each other, " I know you think you
>understood what you thought I meant, but you didn't understand that
>what you thought I said is not what I meant." :-).
I think this is much closer to the real truth!! :-)
BTW, there's some stuff on the concept of "The Ladder of Inference" by Rick
Ross in The 5th Discipline Fieldbook that seems relevant to this topic. It
talks about how people observe/hear things then select data from that
experience, add meanings, make assumptions, draw conclusions, adopt beliefs
and take actions based on those beliefts.
Cherry
--Cherry Vanderbeke, Wang New Zealand Limited Email: ckv@wang.co.nz "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do"
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>