It’s amazing that any of us are able to understand each other at all. Communication is lossy. (“Lossy” is a concept usually used to talk about data compression – images, audio, video. But I believe it’s useful when talking about all communication. We try to express complex thoughts and feelings, but we struggle to convey what we mean, and even if we do a pretty good job of it within ourselves, other people might struggle to understand what we mean. Because words mean different things to different people, we interpret cues differently. Communication is lossy.)

Not only is communication lossy, lots of people fail to appreciate that communication is lossy, or deliberately choose not to. If we truly appreciate it, we would give each other a lot more time to revise our statements, because we often can’t know how someone will respond to some of our thoughts until we encounter their interpretations, which can be very different than ours, because their interpretation is derived from their experience, which is different than ours.

Here are several tweets where I’ve used the word “lossy”. I will update this blogpost iteratively if I reference it more often.

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If you appreciate that communication is lossy, you’ll realise that it often makes sense to edit down your comms. Saying two things is seldom even half as good as saying one thing well.

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There are many influences I would credit with getting me to see this, but I can’t remember all of them. I would say the book Made To Stick helped me appreciate some of it. I would say simply writing and journaling a lot has helped me appreciate some of it. If you write a large body of work, you’ll find that it’s hard to remember or even recognise a lot of it, and – while this is admittedly circular – it’s the stickiest stuff that tends to stick. What’s sticky? Material that is simple, unexpected, concrete, emotional… engineerguy has a pretty decent summary of Made To Stick but I really recommend reading the whole thing, it really reinforced some important things for me about effective communication

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to be updated