When I started
this series of posts on the importance of stories in promoting harmony
in the activities of a family, I intended to tell the stories as
examples of one family's struggles to care for their dying mother to
illustrate the foundation of symmentropy. After six of these posts, I
have been overwhelmed by the response as people have contacted me with
the their own experiences and questions about the ways stories are so
important. So, I am changing the format just a little and will add one
post explaining the theory behind the examples of each of the 12
guidelines for symmentropy. This is the first of those posts and will
feature less story telling and more dot connecting. I will get back to
the stories in the next post.
First, a little bit about symmentropy. I am trying not to describe
the statistical applications of non linear approaches to measuring
communication that was the soul of my research. Those who want to read
calculus, fuzzy set theory and time series analysis can go to Google
Scholar to find plenty of information. All that math caused symmentropy
to happen, but communicating with each other in relationships, families
or businesses rarely allows us time to do the math. We need the summary
talking points to make this kind of theory useful when we are in
conversation. I developed the twelve principles of symmentropy as a
logical structure to explain the calculations, but quickly found that
most people wanted to read the twelve principles and skip the math.
Human terms and human interactions have to be the guidelines for efforts
at understanding each other better.
Stripped down to its essence, symmentropy documents that human
communication only works as a dynamic system that demands creativity and
a sense of beauty to achieve clarity over the long run of conversation.
We are taught from the day we first use words that we should expect a
very nice one word to one word correspondence between what we say and
what someone thinks we mean, but life is messy and that nice, linear
expectation only helps in creating the mess. Once we are taught the way
everyone hopes things will work, we begin the process of learning how to
manage our conversations to survive in the real world.
Cultures create simple sets of rules to help us communicate with each
other that are very helpful for handling day to day tasks. When you
walk into a grocery store with a list, you do not need to know any
information about the employees or owners to successfully purchase
everything you need for even the most festive occasion. All the
communication you need to do follows the rules of courtesy and doing
retail business. If it ended there, symmentropy would not be needed, but
you go to the same store many times noticing how clean the parking lot
is or how many times the employees greet you or how often the apple that
fell on the floor gets put right back in the stack of apples creating a
relationship between you and the store. While you are preparing dinner
or pouring your morning coffee, you remember the details of your story
about going to the same store for a year or more and you realize that
you like going to that store or that you think you might try a different
store to see if it is cleaner or has more of the items that you just
can't seem to find. The strict rules of the communication needed to buy a
loaf of bread do not cover the range of emotions that we might have
about feeding the family because those rules are linear and do not
include the points for artistic impression. Anyone who runs a successful
retail business knows the importance of the complete shopping
experience and the value of the stories that we tell our friends as it
is called word of mouth advertising.
A simple trip to the grocery store involves more than the cultural
rules necessary to prepare a meal, so think about the complexity of the
communication needed to manage a company with ten or twenty or more
employees. Yes, the rules get us started, but they do not prepare us for
the day Bill shows up for work in a dress, announces that she is
transgender and would like to be known as Gayle from now on. It is easy
to say, "treat her with the same courtesy that you did last week", but
the reality is that such a major change requires more information
because we thought we knew who Bill was and what he liked, but we do not
know Gayle or what she likes. We have to learn about her as if she was a
brand new member of the team.
Symmentropy proposes twelve guidelines that will help in
communicating with Bill/Gayle to make sure that the working environment
benefits everyone. I lack the ego to claim that I have solved all
possible problems in interacting with others, but symmentropy takes the
cultural rules that are vitally important and adds reasonable
expectations for responding to the enormous range of possibilities that
exist in the simplest of communication situations. It does this by
recognizing that we want to be understood but we also want a sense of
beauty and balance in our interactions.
Symmentropy begins with the idea that we use communication to manage
the amount of information that we want in our relationships with people
and organizations. This whole conversation begins here because our most
valuable tool in managing information is storytelling. I developed
symmentropy to cover communication in personal dialogues, groups or mass
media, but no matter what form the communication takes, the most basic
skill that we all have to master is storytelling. Our stories are the
foundation of everything else that we do in communicating with each
other. If Bill had shared his story with his coworkers, the arrival of
Gayle would require less effort to understand the meaning of her dress
and new hair style.
The last four posts have featured people using or not using their
skill as storytellers to provide meaning to their actions. Giving your
spouse a grater for
Christmas may not sound like it would be appreciated until you know the
whole story. A grater becomes a sensitive gift that deepens affection in
a relationship when there is a story that focuses on what that gift
meant to both of the people involved. Never talking about a brother
that died before you were born may be an act of privacy or callousness
or any number of other things but without the story, it is not possible
to know what the meaning of that omission. My artist tells the story of
coming home to tell her mother about the challenges of being a young
adult only to be greeted with the conversation ending, “I do not need to
know those things.” In a family that shared their stories, this gives
the appearance of personal rejection. Of course, it could also mean that
my artist's mother just wanted to be a mother and not a best friend.
Only the stories that we tell provide that meaning.
All of these stories demonstrate symmentropy in action. Symmentropy
does not judge any story to be better or worse for the events or people
involved, but it does judge the outcomes in terms of what the
communication means. Today, I can look at these stories and say that
some have turned out well while others have created problems. Two years
from now, there may be more stories that are added that explain more
about what happened or is happening that can completely change this
assessment. Looking at the outcome of a story today does not mean that
the same outcome will apply tomorrow. This is what makes symmentropy,
human communication in general, nonlinear because the outcome will
change as we learn more or manage what we know differently.
The first principle of symmentropy says that we use communication to
manage what we know and what it means to us. For story Chip, it means
that the basic skill for doing that management is storytelling.
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