Effective communication is the heartbeat of any project. Be it a romantic relationship, a business partnership, or running a company of 150 people, how well you communicate is a key determinant of success.
One of the oft-overlooked elements in communication is the selection of your mode of communication, or the channel in which you communicate. In the rush of company-building, it’s easy to think that all communication channels are created equal. This line of thinking commonly leads leaders to optimize for the fastest and lowest effort channel.
Maximizing speed and minimizing effort above all else in communication is a costly mistake. A great deal of relationship debt accumulates from a fundamental mismatch between the quality of a message being delivered and the channel it’s delivered in. If you’ve spent any time in startups, you’ll know that relationship debt is one of the more common killers.
When selecting a communication channel, there are three primary attributes to consider:
In networking, latency is the time it takes for data to pass from one network node to another. Latency is a measure of delay. The inverse of latency is speed.
In communication, we’ll consider latency to be the delay between having something to communicate and that communication being received by the intended recipient.
A high latency communication channel is one with a long delay between having something to communicate and that message being received. That may include scheduling a meeting for the future or waiting for a recurring meeting
A low latency communication channel is one with a very short gap between having something to communicate and the message being receive. That might include chat apps or picking up the phone and calling someone.
In systems theory, resolution is the amount of detail that you can see in a system. Higher resolution means higher information density.
Think of a computer monitor: a higher resolution means more pixels which means more data. This increase in data creates more clarity around what is being displayed.
In communication, resolution is the amount of information available while communicating.
The most common mistake that companies and leaders make when communicating is around resolution. The unconscious logic goes something like this: resolution is largely determined by the content of the communication. If I provide sufficient content the receiver will have sufficient resolution, and therefore the communication channel doesn’t matter.
Here’s the mistake: communication is like an iceberg, and content is its tip. Maybe 10% of the data is contained in the content. The other 90% is contained in how you are when you’re communicating it.
Humans evolved in face-to-face tribal environments. There is a massive amount of information communicated both consciously and unconsciously via body language, facial expression, and tone of voice. These are hugely important data points for us to have about one another. Knowing my CEO is stressed about an initiative gives me valuable insight into how I might want to approach it vs. if they’re relaxed. I might err on the side of faster, more detailed, and in more of a finished state vs more high-level and exploratory. Knowing their state empowers me to ask these contextual questions, at the very least.