…text about Silence in organization continues - this is part 6.
4.2 The impossibility to share
everything
4.2.1 We simply
cannot share everything
It is
unavoidable part of normal human life that we simply cannot share everything.
Whenever we encounter other people, one or more, we are always in a situation
that we able to share only part of that whole totality what we see, think and
perceive and also what we have seen, have thought or have perceived, or what we
think that we will see in the future, or what we will think or will perceive in
the coming days. Clearly this whole array of experiences forms a massive entity
of which we could share something but only some tiny part to others. Perhaps we choose the share something of the
present or recent moments, or perhaps we decide to indulge into our memories and
share something from there or perchance we decide to look into future and share
our plans or our anticipations about the future.
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Perhaps we may
not even pause to think or to ruminate that we actually forced to choose what to
share, we may not even be really aware, at least not all the time, that we cannot
share everything. In fact it is even
hard to think what it would be to share everything. It is impossible to define
in any given situation what would be that ALL what one person could share. In
fact, it is impossible to define what is all what we know (experience, think, observer,
dream, etc.) in any given moment.
These lines
above seem to lead to a following conclusion: we cannot know all what we know.
As an executive educator I am tempted to ponder that what this means to our
eternal quest of becoming wiser and wiser, what actually is the way to become sagacious:
a) to learn new things, ie. to gather the pile of knowing higher, b) to learn
more about those things that you already know (at some level, in certain
special way), ie. to become more aware who you are, how you are. Perhaps both
avenues are necessary for an avid learner.
At the same
time it is valuable to notice that it is a decision to choose what we share.
Perhaps most of the time we just share something, it comes naturally we do not
have to focus on deciding what we share. Perhaps sometimes, in new or in
somehow challenging situations we pay our attention to sharing. When someone
asks in the job interview about our weak points, we tend to consider before
answering. But these situations are exceptions. Could it be that in our
professional life we should take the sharing much more carefully. There the
point would be to think what others, and what the whole organization need to
know. That should guide us when we decide what to share. It is part of professional
excellence to understand what to share and to know what is valuable to others
and to whole entity, let it be organization or some other unit.
Clearly the
discussion above portrays a somewhat one sided picture of sharing. At least
implicitly the focus seems to be on those kinds of things which could also be
called facts or pieces of information. In other words as described above we
know and we have seen a lot of things and we can share only part of it. This is
acceptable and these kinds of phenomena are the main focus in this paper.
However, we must remember that choosing what to share is by no means limited to
facts. For example, we also share all kind of feelings and emotions. Hence in
any situation it is often a big decision whether you choose to use upbeat or
downbeat style of speaking and sharing. The choice is yours - how do you decide
to proceed?
4.2.2
Modes
of communication we choose use, modes of communication we choose not to use
Whenever we
establish contact with other person or other persons we are also prone to
decide which modes of sharing and transparency we consider as most important. I
would claim that quite often our attention focus on words and speaking, perhaps
almost solely.[1] We
might for instance ask whether s/he said everything.
It is
interesting to notice how the speaking really gets a high importance in various
situations. For instance, in the court the oath may have the following form: “I swear by Almighty God that I will tell
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” From the perspective of
this paper, the way how telling everything is emphasized in the court represent
something special, and now I am not referring to the law as such but to
something else. What is special here is that in the court people are examining
events which have happened in the past.
It is worth mentioning that in this paper we are not examining past
events but the way how people share or choose silence in the evolving
situations.
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Therefore,
when we are examining sharing and transparency in organizations we must
consider the whole spectrum of different modes of communication which we can
use. We have to consider all the means and ways what a human being can use in
order to communicate something to others. We have to be aware of whole array of
different modes of communicating. In
addition to speaking there are also other modes of communication like: facial expressions, all kinds of gestures, also
all forms of action.[2]
The point
in this chapter is to make us think that when we are examining sharing speaking
is not all that there is. One evocative quote comes from Mark Twain: “Action
speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”
[1] Let it be admitted that this
comment is written by a person who represent a very low context culture. Please
see Edward T Hall.
