The Mechanics of Communication

“The essence and raison d’etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by ‘restraint.’”[1]

My work as a software engineer consists almost entirely of communication, in one sense or another. I not only translate my ideas into functioning code, a painstaking process of telling the computer exactly what to do, I also communicate on a daily basis with designers, product managers, and other engineers. Since I am a systematizer, I take pleasure in deeply understanding the processes that I engage in – in this case person-to-person communication.

I started thinking seriously about the mechanics of interpersonal communication three or four years ago. At the time, my communication style was reasonably effective, if somewhat inconsistent. I’ve since been able to refine my natural style into a repeatable high-bandwidth process. I now do less throw-away work and enjoy higher productivity and more satisfying work relationships. My personal relationships have benefited in a similar, though more subtle way. This kind of improvement is available to anyone willing to take on a few simple models, which I’ll attempt to lay out in this post with the help of some ideas from Bateson.

It’s a familiar trope that a written message may be intelligible even after some of its letters have been scrambled. Yet scrambling all the letters of a sentence renders it unreadable.

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