Communication Archives | W. David Phillips

Podcast – Communication and Ideological Change

Systems theory helps the world understand the interactive relationships that exist in many domains of life and events that occur throughout the universe. Kenneth Burke’s theories on ideology explore how, through communication, people develop interactive relationships that create a common framework through which life is interpreted. It is only logical to explore how systems theory can reveal the implications of communication in an interconnected world.

A system is an interrelated collection of several things, be it ideas, principles, people, or planets. Those elements are connected through a set of relationships that allow the individual pieces to operate as a whole. Communication helps forms an ideology most effectively the same way a system is formed: from the bottom or through self-organization. That happens best as communication and persuasion works its way through the social networks of individuals.

Small groups of people are dynamically formed through communication and persuasion. As connections between various small groups are found or made, a large group consisting of multiple, interrelated small groups form. The network gets larger, creating more possible connections between groups. If this happens, dramatic shifts in thinking or a dramatic change in action can occur. The communication and persuasion that accompanies it every day in a community can function like gas-soaked wood waiting for the spark that will create a blazing fire.

Podcast – Communication and Ideological Change

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Do we communicate meaning by what we include and exclude?

“It was very disgusting,” Newton said. “That’s as blunt as I can be. I could say other words as well. We went back on YouTube and looked at Cam Newton’s post game interviews. I was like “oh my God,” I see what people see. I see how people are viewing me. When they see this selfish player, or see this childish temper tantrum that I was throwing, I’m like “that’s why people look at me like that”

Those were comments Cam Newton, the quarterback of the Carolina Panthers, made in an interview with Laura Okmin of Fox Sports.

Something fascinating happens when we start listening to our own words. I hate listening to my own speeches. I used to think it was because of how I sounded. I now think it’s really more about being afraid of what I said. But when we listen to ourselves, we uncover what how we present ourselves to others. And we may even learn something about our belief system.

Language is a fascinating exploration into the mindset of a person. Listen to what they say, or sometimes even what they don’t say about a person or subject, and you will learn a lot about them. You can learn what they believe. You can learn what is important to them. You can uncover their credibility and character.

Recently, I read the personal account of a lady who went into a Christian bookstore. She was Catholic, and lives in Southern California where there is a large population of Catholics. As she walked through the bookstore, she asked about a Catholic-oriented bible. She was told they don’t keep those in stock.

That statement, and that policy, says something about how the Christian bookstore views Catholics. This action intimates that the bookstore doesn’t view Catholics and Catholic literature as “Christian.”

Language, including the lack of words, communicates a specific philosophical and ideological understanding of life, one that we may not even realize.

Why does this matter?

Because when we communicate, when we speak, we influence people. And how and what we communicate influences the belief system of others.

Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of The Gettysburg Address, one of the most important speeches in U.S. History. By not going to the ceremony celebrating this speech, President Obama communicated a message? What was he communicating?

The image I used for this post communicates a message as well. Can you interpret its meaning?

Q4U: How often do you work back through what you say to understand how you are conveying meaning?

Over the Hump: Good midweek reads

Get over the hump by considering these reads from the last week!

Why Inspiration Matters
“When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.” — Rudyard Kipling

In a culture obsessed with measuring talent and ability, we often overlook the important role of inspiration. Inspiration awakens us to new possibilities by allowing us to transcend our ordinary experiences and limitations. Inspiration propels a person from apathy to possibility, and transforms the way we perceive our own capabilities. Inspiration may sometimes be overlooked because of its elusive nature. Its history of being treated as supernatural or divine hasn’t helped the situation. But as recent research shows, inspiration can be activated, captured, and manipulated, and it has a major effect on important life outcomes.

Inspiration has three main qualities. Pyschologists Todd M. Thrash and Andrew J. Elliot have noted these core aspects of inspiration: evocation, transcendence, and approach motivation. First, inspiration is evoked spontaneously without intention. Inspiration is also transcendent of our more animalistic and self-serving concerns and limitations. Such transcendence often involves a moment of clarity and awareness of new possibilities. As Thrash and Elliot note, “The heights of human motivation spring from the beauty and goodness that precede us and awaken us to better possibilities.” This moment of clarity is often vivid, and can take the form of a grand vision, or a “seeing” of something one has not seen before (but that was probably always there). Finally, inspiration involves approach motivation, in which the individual strives to transmit, express, or actualize a new idea or vision. According to Thrash and Elliot, inspiration involves both being inspired by something and acting on that inspiration.

3 key elements of leadership communication

Consider music to help you communicate. Music is composed of three things: “melody,” which is made up of notes along the scale, “harmony,” which is the chords, and “rhythm,” the beat of the music. In listening to this explanation, it was easy to draw parallels to how leaders communicate messages to their teams.

Think about the next important message you must communicate. As a leader, are you making full use of all three musical elements? Here’s how to ensure your communication hits the right notes.

Make it memorable. In music, a melody is defined as “a pleasing series of musical notes that form the main part of a song or piece of music.” The melodies to our favorite songs are easy to remember and something that we enjoy hearing repeatedly. A catchy tune on a TV or radio commercial lingers long after we first hear it. In much the same way, your message’s main point must be memorable and easy to repeat. For example, a vice president of claims for an insurance company implemented a “one-and-done” customer service philosophy to emphasize the need for claims representatives to close claims after the first customer contact.

Technology Doesn’t Work Without Poetry

Change has always been with us, but the rate of change is changing. It’s no longer evolution, it’s revolutionary. The trajectory is changing, and the momentum is accelerating. It’s acceleration and trajectory change all at once. And three dimensionally.

But you really have to recognize that what moves people is not state-of-the-art technology, it is state-of-the-heart technology. The idea that this technology is a cold comfort. Unless the engineer can be the poet and the poet the engineer, unless there’s that connection between the two, technology doesn’t do anything.

Unless it moves something, unless it renders a benefit, unless it makes the distances closer, unless it makes it more resonant, more memorable, unless it offers a deeper meaning into your heart, into your soul, a deeper purposefulness, it’ll be vestigial, it’ll be gone.

So the idea is, don’t abandon state of the heart for state-of-the-art. Ask yourself a very important question. The benefit of this technology, how does it make us connect better? I don’t mean connect technically better, that’s important but how does it make us connect better. How does it get more and deeper heartfelt connection between people? Now I think a Twitter is an incredibly invaluable tool.

Power Shift: How car buyers are leveraging information

Car salesmen no longer have the power of information. Shoppers now have access to the same information, and that shifts the power from the dealer to the consumer. The dealer is now competing against other manufacturers, other dealers with the same vehicle, and the leverage held by the shopper.

A new model for persuasive communication

Traditional persuasion, giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities has two problems, according to screenwriter, professor, and consultant Robert McKee. First, the people spoken to will have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. While the communicator is trying to persuade them, those people are arguing back in their heads. Second, if the leader does succeed in persuading them, they have done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone.

You influence others in ways you don’t even understand

“I’m not hurting anybody else. As long as I’m not hurting someone else it shouldn’t matter what I do.” Ever heard something like that? Ever said something like that?

It would be nice if we lived life in a vacuum. It would be nice if how we lived didn’t affect or influence others. It sure would be nice to do whatever we wanted without any concern as to how it might impact someone else’s life.

Unfortunately, we influence those around us in ways we cannot even fathom! Here’s how.

Kenneth Burke was an American literary theorist and philosopher. The political and social power of symbols was central to Burke’s scholarship throughout his career. He felt that through understanding “what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it”, we could gain insight into the cognitive basis for our perception of the world. For Burke, the way in which we decide to narrate gives importance to specific qualities over others. He believed that this could tell us a great deal about how we see the world.

One of the central tenets of his philosophical framework was that symbols held great power. One of Burke’s definitions of rhetoric was “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols (emphasis mine)” (Burke, 1969, p. 43). For Burke, the essential function of symbols is to be the means by which we understand our world, and therefore understand what constitutes our reality. Burke would say, “[h]owever important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall picture is but a construct of symbol systems” (Burke, 1966, p. 5).Continue Reading …

Communication that motivates others

Resonance is a physics concept that describes a system “in which an abnormally large vibration is produced in response to an external stimulus, occurring when the frequency of the stimulus is the same, or nearly the same, as the natural vibration frequency of the system” (resonance, n.d.). To understand this, consider what happens to a crystal glass when exposed to a musical tone of the right pitch. That right pitch is its resonance frequency and the result is a shattered glass. Applying that to rhetoric, when our communication “resonates,” change happens.

How do we best create resonance? According to Duarte, we need to become a storyteller. Why? Storytelling utilizes multiple psychological and emotional triggers and creates an experience for the audience. “Creating desire in the audience and then showing how your ideas fill that desire moves people to adopt your perspective. This is the heart of a story”

Should business leaders use logic or emotion to persuade?

If we are primarily emotion-based, business leaders attempting to persuade their employees to follow them through one more change in how the company functions have a practical decision to make.

Get more here

Three considerations for communicating to the masses

By David Phillips

About ten years ago, I took a doctoral class in Mass Communication at the University of Alabama. In part of our discussion, I learned that research begun in the 1940′s began to reveal something very interesting in the field of mass communicating, something I didn’t anticipate. The research showed that mass communication (speeches, advertisements, etc) really wasn’t for the masses. In fact, it’s influence among the masses was limited. Instead, the research showed that all forms of mass communication influenced what became know as opinion leaders. It was the opinion leaders who actually influenced the masses. And those opinion leaders changed depending upon the topic. This was the foundation of what became the Multi step Flow Model.

Plato originated the term rhetoric. However, prior to that many scholars believe the term logos was a precursor to the actual term rhetoric. Now I know there maybe a difference of opinion regarding the validity of that but assume with me for a moment that was the case.

Just for intrigue’s sake, please allow me to bring in some Greek from the Bible. There are two verses in the New Testament that I want to highlight. John 1:1, that says, “In the beginning was the Word (logos)…” Then in verse 14, “and the Word (logos) became flesh…” I realize that logos used here may be a technical term. However, in using it, the biblical writer is noting the relational aspect of the Word (logos).

Let’s now do a little integration. Combine the meaning of logos from rhetoric and the meaning of logos from the biblical writer and what we come up with, in effect, is a relational rhetoric. Persuasion, influence and change happen within the context of both the masses and the minute (not the time, but …read more

How do you persuade others to follow you?

By David Phillips

Aristotle’s three appeals – logos, pathos, and ethos – are effective tools in the rhetorical framework, or the art of persuasion. Using all three as part of a rhetorical strategy, in fact, is one of the most effective methods of persuading others, and as a result, changing how others view reality.

Many people, however, have elevated the appeal to logic, or logos, over the other two, despite Aristotle’s belief that ethos is the most effective of the three. The emergence of contemporary brain research, however, demonstrates that emotion (pathos) is the primary driver of thinking and behavior. As such, strategies may need to change regarding the method communicators use to effectively lead others, persuade others and motivate them to action.

In this first post, let’s look at a brief summary of Aristotle’s appeals.

Considered one of the most important people in the development of Western philosophy, Aristotle developed one of, if not the most important works on persuasion ever written. In it he defined rhetoric as “the art to see or identify in any given circumstance the available means of persuasion” (as cited in Smith, p. 67). According to Aristotle, persuasion is made up of three appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. Each of these three rhetorical appeals can, or at least should, be found in any persuasive process.

Logos, as used by Aristotle, attempts to persuade using rational arguments. When a communicator employs statistics, what they deem to be credible sources, or reasoned arguments, they are utilizing logos in their persuasion (Wright, n.d., para 6).

When a communicator uses pathos as a persuasive strategy, they are making an emotional appeal. When the rhetorician appeals to the needs, values, or emotions of an audience, this constitutes an argument based on pathos (Wright, para. 7).

Ethos references the character or credibility of the communicator. Ethos is conveyed through reputation, credentials, tone, or style. Seeking to establish the trustworthiness, expertise and …read more

Imagination and preaching

I want to talk for a few posts about the storying process. In this post, let’s talk a moment about images and imagination.

Here’s a trick. Let’s suppose I say, “Not everything that appears to be valuable is actually valuable.” If you heard that, you might understand me in a general kind of way but it wouldn’t be very interesting. In fact, you might even turn me off.

But if I said, “All that glistens is not gold,” you literally “see” what I “mean”.

If you speak in works that evoke the senses, if your language is full of things that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched, you create a world that your listener can enter. And they will listen to your story. And they will be moved.

Too often, our sermons are abstractions, generalizations, and judgments. When we can replace those with a sense image (gold, child, ocean, fish) and with verbs that represent actions we can visualize (glisten, leap, wag, fall) our preaching can come alive. This does not reject ideas, generalizations and judgments – they are actually present in the images we share.Continue Reading …

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