Communication and cooperation in the company

In 1772 Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne arrived on the Tasmanian coast becoming the first foreigner Tasmanians saw in 8,000 years.

Fagan (1998) recounts how, when she set foot in Tasmania, Marion du Fresne found the natives picking up wood arriving on the beach. Du Fresne and her men, approaching cautiously, offered them gifts. The Tasmanians rejected them as they gestured in front of the stacked wood. Confused, the captain considered that, as a gesture of goodwill, he could help them light the bonfire that he believed they were preparing. In doing so, the Tasmanians fled in terror to a nearby hill and began to throw stones at the bewildered French. The hasty flight of the Tasmanians suggests that they were at least as troubled as their visitors. What else could you want to make a pile of wood for on the beach? The French would think.If they burn our pile of wood, what else do they want to do but attack us? Tasmanians would reflect.

From that first contact, the lack of communication that separated the Tasmanians and their successive visitors, led to the accelerated extinction of those in 100 years.

This mutual misunderstanding was almost the norm in the days of the great European exploration. Even seasoned travelers, such as James Cook, were puzzled that "primitive" people had no interest in improving their economic situation in their rich paradise setting and were content to simply live. Something incomprehensible to Europeans. (Fagan, 1998).

Even the simplest and seemingly universal forms of communication, such as a hand gesture, can have different meanings depending on the culture. At the end of the 60s of the last century, David Attenborough had the opportunity, already unique then, to meet face to face in New Guinea with a tribe that still remained without contact with Westerners. The only effective way of communication that both cultures, the English and the local, found, were a few gestural movements of the face, such as smiling (Fagan, 1998).

There are no longer first encounters between cultures, and although having a common language can mitigate the seriousness of the matter, the communicative difficulty continues to occur. If you travel to China, you may be able to communicate in English, but you probably won't finish understanding much of what you see, and causing strangeness among the locals by committing "social clumsiness" such as not knowing how to drive politely, eating, chopsticks.

The reason why it is difficult to understand ourselves has to do with the fact that each of us shapes our minds according to a specific culture that teaches us, from our experiences, to interpret the world we perceive in a particular and particular way. shape. It is from our past experiences, and the meaning we then attribute to them, that we interpret our present ones.

It can be said that with those past experiences we build a filter that we carry embedded in the mind and with which, unconsciously, we see (and distort!) Reality. The question, what is the best breakfast? it does not have a single universal answer. The majority of humanity may eat something in the morning, but the importance given to this action, its meaning, how and with what it should be done and how it is finally done, varies enormously.

What is the implication of the above in a company?

The same principle of assigning different importance and meaning to things according to our previous experience, operates between "cultural partners". Our automatic mind filter is not only shaped by a culture common to many other people, but also by experiences shared with a few individuals, and still others unique to oneself.

After a certain size, a company must organize its employees in some way. This assumes that people are separated into different groups. Thus, relatively isolated areas of experience are generated.

In our role as employees, if we are part of the company's management, our experiences will be different from those of middle managers; Those of those who work in the Logistics Department will be different from those who work in the Purchasing Department; etc.

Those experiences will make different people filter and interpret the same fact in a different way. Interpretive distancing may lead one to end up considering the perspective of the other as absurd, just because it is different !, turning us into French eighteenths compared to Tasmanians. This was my experience in a company, when those who worked in the production centers, rightly complained about the misunderstanding of their "real problems" by those others who, working from the offices, we had to help them solve.

The ability to shape the mind from concrete experiences contributes to the enormous adaptive creativity of the human being; We use it both to survive as a species and to find solutions to daily contingencies in a company. However, it involves creating barriers to mutual understanding and communication. Although we must live with this difficulty, it is possible to reduce its effect significantly. For this it must be borne in mind that all people have incorporated a distorting filter embedded in the mind that unknowingly conditions them to generate and accept as true one, their own, among the many possible interpretations of reality. And the same thing happens to you.

Each one of us can enrich communication and cooperation around his position in the company if it includes, as a periodic task, approaching with understanding curiosity, not arrogant like that carried by most European explorers before the second half of the 20th century., to others to find out about new possible interpretations of reality that complement and enrich their own.