Have you ever had difficulty deciding?
Have you ever had any conflict in making two parties agree?
Have you ever had a trouble in understanding your client’s or partner’s idea?
What about negotiation? Mediation? and Sales?
If yes, then HOW TO GET THE ANTICIPATED RESULTS?
Initially, we must acknowledge that all the above situations and statuses require one common action: Communication. While communicating, our ideas and thinking process move through different levels: from specific to ambiguous and vice versa, regardless of the content of each idea. So any idea being elaborated we can either be very specific about it or very abstract.
This organization of the thinking process and level of thoughts is referred to as: “Hierarchy of Ideas”.
Being specific or abstract while communicating depends on every individual Hierarchy of ideas, i.e. the ranking of ideas based on their importance for each one of us.
Having said this, the major problems in communicating are:
- Being too ambiguous to a specific person – he might think you will never get to the point or that you are not even communicating.
- Or being too concrete to an abstract person – he will think that you are boring.
Resolution?
It’s essential to match the process of thoughts that is going in the person we are talking to. The procedure of doing so is through chunking up – from specific to abstract and chunking down – from abstract to specific.
Chunk down by asking “what are examples of this?” or a more powerful question “what specifically?”.
One of the very common problems found in business and communication is that the person communicating is chunking at a different level (more abstract or more concrete) than the person receiving the communication. As a matter of fact, talking in ambiguous phrases for a specific person will lead him to spin the abstract ideas inside his mind and get lost. Instead, we must make up the meaning of our thoughts, and transmit it through concrete communication.
Chunk up by asking “for what purpose?”.
Another problem in communication is that people might forget or fail to chunk up. Yet, we might wonder: Why to chunk up? What is the purpose of becoming more ambiguous?
A very powerful tool in business, communication, and in determining the importance of information is to present the bigger picture. It is important to know how what we are doing serves and relates to the overall picture. In Sales, asking “For what purpose?” will give us on overview at the bigger image and the ultimate aim, and will allow us to serve better and match the client’s need. In any organization the purpose of any lesser structure is to serve a greater one. So whenever we have questions about parts of the organization, or how a minor structure is serving a greater one, the answer can be found by asking: “For what purpose?”.
Hence, what does matter now is:
How to communicate? At which level of abstraction or specificity we should be? How to move ourselves and the person we are communicating with from one level to another?
In mediation, chunking up is very helpful. Whenever there is a conflict or disagreement between two people, by asking “For what purpose?” and chunking up enough times, ultimately we will reach an agreement as long as we are willing to chunk up to the highest level, i.e. existence level. When we solve a problem at this level, the problem will appear smaller and simpler. Abstract ideas contain more power and value than a specific idea. Why is that? Because the more abstract idea controls the more specific idea, since the abstract idea contains the specific one. That’s why the simpler the idea is, the more impact it has.
On the other hand, the problem with ambiguous ideas, despite how powerful they are, they do not contain enough information to keep the communication and the clarity on-going. The more abstract the idea is, the person receiving the information will have to use his own imagination to come up with the details, which might be misleading and the ideas made up could be wrong. That’s why chunking down to specific details is very important. In sales, when handling an objection from the client or when assisting a client in making a decision between two parts, chunking down to the lowest level of details will help the client make a decision and will help us in closing the deal.
Merging all the above, we presented an elegant and powerful model of communication, to communicate at whatever level necessary: go down into details or up to the abstract idea. An influential and robust communicator must have enough flexibility to move through all levels and ranges of the hierarchy. This is the power of communication: It is in learning and practicing how to browse comfortably through the entire hierarchy and model of communication, and to never reject either abstraction nor specificity.