“Adaptive Communication” -- Is it your next business innovation?

Today’s blog was submitted by Brandy Gonsoulin, one of our project and operations managers at Stinson Brand Innovation. 

“I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

My English teacher would turn her nose up at the sentence above, but the point is all too familiar. Communication in all its evolution from the ritualized and repetitious songs, calls, or gestures that we have advanced into a complex linguistic system somehow, still isn’t working.   Your last meeting or project may remind of just such.

Human communication and more importantly, human communication in a group, can be the most intriguing study.  And further globalization has just made it even more challenging. Effective communication is at the heart of every successful project. And since we are and always will be a group of people with our own self-interests, motivations and personalized systems through which we interpret information, effective communication shall and will continue to be challenged. 

Adaptive communication has been a way that we as natural communicators have developed creative systems to extend the conversation. This idea is most obvious in sign language and another most of us do frequently without even knowing, is computer chatting, the most familiar being Facebook.

Maybe we need to look to the theories of adaptive communication and turn this idea inside out (or is it upside down). How we can be more creative in our professional communication, and even further, how can we use the tools and technology to change the face of human communication in our projects and in our businesses today?  One thing is certain, how you communicate today, may not be the way you communicate tomorrow.

I like what the company DynaVox has started.  Click here to check out what they do with the idea of adaptive communication.

And to extend the conversation further on connecting to consumers in different ways, read this Fast Company article.

Finally, here’s a link to a cool image of “multi-sensory” furniture.