Here’s an old saw: “Studies show that only seven percent of our communication comes from words. The rest comes from nonverbal cues—38 percent from vocal cues such as tone of voice, and 55 percent from body language.” I’ve heard that hundreds of times, but until yesterday I’d never seen a source for those figures.

I learned yesterday, through an online forum about training and coaching, that the “seven percent” claim is a misrepresentation of studies conducted by Albert Mehrabian. I decided to find out what Mehrabian himself had to say. I searched the web and found that in the few cases where people give a source for the claim, they cite Mehrabian’s book
Silent Messages
. I hopped into my car and drove to the CSUS library, near where I live, to research this.

In Silent Messages, Mehrabian gives the following equation:

Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking

Next, he briefly describes related research by other people about other communication and feelings. Based on that, he generalizes from liking to “all feelings”:

Total Feeling = 7% Verbal Feeling + 38% Vocal Feeling + 55% Facial Feeling

In Silent Messages, Mehrabian refers to more detailed descriptions of his research in another book,
Nonverbal Communication
.

Nonverbal Communication describes Mehrabian’s research. He constructed a number of inconsistent messages about feelings. Each message included three specific components: specific words, specific vocal qualities, and specific facial expressions. Each component was designed to convey a specific attitude (positive or negative) and a specific strength (e.g. strong liking or mild disliking). Mehrabian constructed inconsistent messages by combining components of differing strengths and attitudes.

Mehrabian observed people giving and receiving these mixed messages, and assessed the receiver’s perception of the sender’s feeling. From this information, Mehrabian performed a linear regression to assess the extent to which each component contributed to the receiver’s perception of the sender’s feeling. That’s where the percentages come from.

Mehrabian is very careful in these books not to generalize beyond the specific context of his research: He studied only messages about feelings, specifically inconsistent messages about feelings. Also, he notes that his generalization from liking to general feelings is unverified, and that the specific percentages in the formula are probably not exact. He does seem confident that for mixed messages about feelings, facial messages carry more weight than vocal messages, which in turn carry more weight than verbal messages.

Mehrabian describes his research results briefly on his web site, and offers this admonition:

Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.

Before you try to sell me on some “best practice,” I want you to know that I’ll test it against Emery’s Ironclad Test of Best Practices:

For something to be a best practice, it has to be practiced, and it has to be best.

If there ain’t nobody practicing it, it ain’t a best practice.

If it ain’t best (and how would you know such a thing?), it ain’t a best practice.

This is a simple enough test. How many “best practices” pass it?

However it turns out, the project to build the Olympic stadium for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens will make a great case study for students of project management.

Here are three news stories that give a hint about the status of the project:

• “Greece Starts 100-Day Sprint as Games Loom Large” (Reuters)
• “All Work, No Play 100 Days Before Olympics” (Associated Press via Yahoo)
• “Greece Behind In Summer Games” (60 Minutes, CBS News)

As I scan these stories, I notice these quotes:

“In Greece, we are like ‘Sirtaki’ dance. We start very slowly, and then we speed up. And then at the end, you cannot even follow how quickly it goes. So I believe that’s exactly what happened with us,” says [Athens Mayor Dora] Bakoyanni. “We might be afraid until the last minute, but I believe that we will be ready in time.” (60 Minutes)

“So, granted, there have been delays. And there’s been inefficiency. Call it what you will,” says [former foreign ministry official Alex] Rondos. “The fact is that, as we approach the Olympics, not unlike the condemned man approaching the guillotine, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. And we are there right now.” (60 Minutes)

[Deputy culture minister in charge of the Games, Fani Palli-Petralia:] “We are working triple shifts everywhere and we will be ready.” (Reuters)

Petralia said: “We are turning nightime into day and I am convinced the project will be ready and will be magnificent.” (Reuters)

Those quotes don’t inspire confidence in me. But what does the project’s key customer, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), have to say?

“Our experts who have reviewed these plans say, ‘Yes, it’s feasible. It can be done,’” [IOC overseer Denis] Oswald said. (Associated Press)

“All the reports I receive indicate how fast and how hard Greece is working to complete preparations,” IOC president Jacques Rogge said. (Reuters)

“Feasible” and “working fast and hard” don’t have the ring of high confidence.

All of these quotes, from the IOC and from the project team, seem vague and non-committal. I don’t know whether that’s because the people are saying only vague and non-committal things, or because the reporters are selecting only vague and non-committal quotes, or what. Whatever the reason, these quotes smell funny.

The planned roof on the swimming stadium was scrapped weeks ago. Anyone taking bets on the (as yet uninstalled) glass roof over the main stadium?

(As I write this, news comes from Reuters of a series of three bombs exploding in Athens, near the hotel where Olympic officials will stay during the Games.)

Language Log is one of my favorite blogs. Today Geoffrey K. Pullum posted “Get Your Boyfriend to Move It,” a marvelous case study of communication gone awry. Read it now, before reading my analysis below.

When I teach communication, I use Virginia Satir’s
Ingredients of an Interaction
as my foundational model. The Ingredients model describes the process by which we receive messages and respond to them. First we take in information through our five senses (the Intake step). Next we make meaning of the information we receive (the Meaning step). Then we gauge the significance of the message (the Significance step). Finally, we respond outwardly (the Response step).

Pullam’s “boyfriend” story is a wonderful example of what can happen when we make mistakes in one of the steps.

Early in the phone call, the animal rescue officer makes a mistake in Intake: she hears “feline” instead of “sea lion.” The subsequent conversation, which I’m sure seemed bizarre to each of the women as it was happening, validates a key principle of communication: If you get the Intake wrong, you’re certain to get the Meaning wrong.

When the animal rescue officer suggests that the resident ask her boyfriend to move the animal, the resident interprets that as sexism and lack of concern. That seems like a reasonable interpretation to me, given the conversation up to that point. Reasonable, but mistaken, and the mistake exacerbates the confusion.

When the officer suggests that the resident ask her father for help, the resident, even more puzzled than before, says, “Umm, my father?” It’s possible that the resident is testing whether she heard the officer’s words correctly, but I suspect that this is more a test of Meaning than of Intake. Not, “Did you say, father?” but, “What does my father have to do with this?”

The officer explains her meaning, and the conversation continues, each person working from a mistaken interpretation of what the other is talking about. This exemplifies another principle of communication: If you get the Meaning wrong, you’re certain to get the Significance wrong. The resident increasingly believes that the animal rescue officer doesn’t care about her plight, or even understand it. The significance is that she fears that she will not get the help she needs. She expresses her incredulity through her increasingly annoyed tone of voice.

Eventually the resident says that the animal weighs three or four hundred pounds. Well, clearly, pussy cats do not weigh three or four hundred pounds, so the officer can’t make sense of this. What she’s hearing is so nonsensical that she knows she’s getting the meaning wrong. So she checks her Intake by repeating the non-sequiturial phrase, adding emphasis to express her confusion. “Three or four hundred pounds?”

Yep, she heard right. Then the resident repeats the words that the officer misheard the first time: “sea lion.”

It’s challenging to notice these communication errors. It’s challenging to notice Intake and Meaning errors before they’ve escalated into feelings and Significance. How can we notice these errors in our own conversations?

What were the clues in this story that something was going wrong? The strongest clue is confusion. Each woman, at several points in the conversation, is stunned. Being stunned is a darned good clue that communication has gone off the rails somewhere. And that’s a good time to stop, step back, take a breath, and walk slowly through the Ingredients of an Interaction one step at a time.

Upon being stunned by the officer’s initial suggestion, the resident could check her Intake. “Did you say that my boyfriend could move it for me?”

When the officer confirms that she indeed said that, the resident might then check the Meaning she’s making. She might say something like, “Do you mean that this seems like a small problem, and that you do not want to help me?”

That may or may not clear things up. If not, the resident (the only one who knows, at this point, that the communication is tangled), might check the officer’s Intake. “What did you hear me say?”

The resident may also choose to express her confusion. “I don’t understand why you would suggest that I ask my boyfriend (if I had one) to help me move a dead sea lion.”

Any of these ideas might help to untangle the communication. None of these ideas is hard to do. What’s hard, for me at least, and perhaps for these two women, is to notice the confusion rather than simply acting out of confusion. When I’m stunned in a conversation, I’m as likely as the next person to continue as if it all makes some sort of sense, and to stumble from one non-sequitur to the next, utterly failing to notice that confusion is important information about the quality of our communication.

I’ve been thinking about a number of “flows” within organizations — the flow of authority, the flow of value, and the flow of communication — and how they interact. I have a few ideas and a lot of questions today. No answers.

The flow of authority is defined by the organization’s formal hierarchy. Authority is the organization’s permission to allocate its resources. People higher in the hierarchy have greater authority. That is, they have permission to allocate more resources.

The flow of value is the circulatory system of the organization. The organization functions by arranging the flow of value within and across its boundaries. Across the organization’s boundaries, products and services flow out to customers; and money flows in. Profits flow out to investors; investment capital flows in. Money flows out to suppliers; materials and tools and services flow in. As long as each flow creates value for each person who participates in the flow, the organization sustains itself.

Within the organization, value flows from group to group. Each group acts as internal investors, customers, and suppliers for others. As long as each flow creates value for each group, the organization thrives.

Here are some questions I’m pondering: How do these flows relate to each other? How do they interact? What are the effects of different ways of relating and interacting? What kinds of interactions lead to a healthy organization? What kinds lead to organizational illness and death?

Communication flows along both kinds of channels. It flows up and down the hierarchy, and it flows through the networks of internal and external investors and customers and suppliers. It flows from one channel to the other, allowing the flow of value and the flow of authority to inform each other.

What happens when communication flows less readily along each path? One kind of blockage is when communication flows more readily within a group, but not across the group’s boundaries to related groups. This is the familiar stovepipe or silo problem.

What other kinds of communication blockage are there? Are there organizations, for example, in which the people in each group communicate readily with their internal customers and suppliers, but not up and down the authority hierarchy? What do those organizations look like?

What other kinds of flow are there? How do they relate to the flows of value, authority, and communication, and to each other? What are the characteristic symptoms of blockage in each flow?

I suspect that thinking about flows can help us identify ways to increase an organization’s health.