Communication needs Symmetry
The golden rule of digital communication.
Any entrepreneur who has ever applied for a government grant will know that Friday afternoon is the favourite time for sending automated rejection messages. My business partner spent time putting together an application for a startup grant recently, and we received our response last night.
This email made me feel bad. 😥 This post is about why.
It was not because we needed the grant — we have never depended on public money and we will “progress” without it (regardless of their dire prediction). Not even because we think we deserved the grant — I accept there were other startups who perhaps deserved it more.
It made me feel bad because it was automated and generic. Quite apart from the words, it was this knowledge that made us feel dissatisfied. We had put a lot of emotion and effort into our application, but we got no emotion and no effort in response.
It’s a pattern I have seen again and again over two decades of being interested in communication. And it has led me to my golden rule of communication:
Communication needs symmetry of effort and emotion.
Every time this rule is violated, communication breaks down, hurts someone and makes people feel bad.
Symmetry of emotion— if I pour my heart out, no amount of automated empathy will work — I need real empathy. For any emotion on one side, communication needs an authentic emotional response on the other.
- if someone reaches out with depressed or suicidal thoughts, don’t send them a set of “useful links” and “resources”
- if a customer calls with a frustrating problem, don’t send them to a bot or voice menu for troubleshooting
- if an employee is anxious about their job, don’t ask them to “check the intranet” for a “status update” (true story)
Symmetry of effort — if I spend days crafting a submission to your exacting criteria, an automated response hurts. An imbalance of effort on both sides of a communication is felt by us as a negative emotional state.
- if someone sends you a personal message, don’t get your LinkedIn bot to write back automatically with your standard response
- if a customer sends a thoughtful message about your product or company, don’t send them a generic thank you
- if an entrepreneur brings you a genuine and considered proposal to work together, don’t say “sign up to our partner portal”
And so on. If you’ve been in business for a while, the examples write themselves. It’s a rule that makes a lot of business problems clear and can even predict ahead of time whether communication will work.
(Automation has its place for sure. But if it’s violating the golden rule, it’s only going to hurt. Automate where emotion and effort is low on both sides e.g. daily reports, minor issues, newsletters etc.)
It’s not rocket science. Communication is really just good karma — giving back in proportion to what you get. Anything less is just not right.
