If you want to drive yourself crazy, read the live twitter comments of an audience after you give a talk, even if it's just to ten people.
You didn't say what they said you said.
You didn't mean what they said you meant.
Or read the comments on just about any blog post or video online. People who saw what you just saw or read what you just read completely misunderstood it. (Or else you did.)
We think direct written and verbal communication is clear and accurate and efficient. It is none of those. If the data rate of an HDMI cable is 340MHz, I'm guessing that the data rate of a speech is far, far lower. Yes, there's a huge amount of information communicated via your affect, your style and your confidence, but no, I don't think humans are so good at getting all the details.
Plan on being misunderstood. Repeat yourself. When in doubt, repeat yourself.
Phi Beta Iota: Add to that cross-cultural, cross-language, and cross-faith blinders, and you end up with face to face that is at best 20% of what you intended to communicate, and out of context to boot. This would be an excellent change in focus for both the US Foreign Service Academy and all the schools pupporting to teach international relations.
Venezuela-Iran: Die Welt is the original source for the following item, which is too important to overlook.
“Iran is planning to place medium-range missiles on Venezuelan soil, based on unidentified western sources, according to an article in the German daily, Die Welt, on 25 November. According to the article, an agreement between the two countries was signed during the last visit of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Tehran on 19 October 2010.
Iraq: For the record. The Iraqi Defense Ministry disabled al Qaida's “biggest electronic website,” a spokesman for the ministry said on 9 December. The Iraqi army discovered the location of Al-Furqan website and seized its devices and equipment, the spokesman said. He said Arabs operated the website, which Iraq considers al Qaida's ministry of information for the world.
A root cause of the crisis is the application of the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of “the system”, to which the students, the teachers and the parents have to adjust. “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.
The root cause of the problems: factory model of management
Michael Vlahos is Professor of Strategy at the United States Naval War College. His is the author of Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change, an analysis of how war — as sacred ritual — shapes collective identity: And what it means in culture to be human. His career includes service in the Navy, the CIA, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and the State Department. An historian-anthropologist of war, he focuses on the relationships between civilizations, and the creative syncretism that is at the heart of change in history. He appears and posts on Huffington, the National Journal, and the John Batchelor Radio program (WABC).
