Advice to 2021's Graduating Communications Students

The following is the commencement address I had the privilege to deliver to the 2021 graduating class of Brooklyn City Tech's Communication Design Department.

Thank you, Professor Eli, my Neugebrother.

And thank you, to City Tech's esteemed faculty and staff. 

And hello to the graduating class of 2021!

I'd like to share with you an idea from a guy named Melvin. Melvin was a computer scientist in the 1960s and noticed some quirky things about how work got done. He was mostly working with electrical engineers because back then there wasn't much software to code. One of the things he noticed was that the way people organized their communicatication had a direct bearing on the way they built stuff.

So, for example, if there was a team building an electrical filter and they were split into four teams, they would end up dividing their communications into four parts -- you know, like meeting four times a week -- and, lo and behold, they'd end up building a four-stage filter.

Good old Melvin ended up writing an article about what he observed for an electrical engineering publication called Datamation in which appeared the following quote.

"Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure."

This became known as Conway's law. Because that was Melvin's last name. Personally, I like the sound of Melvin's law, but go figure.

Anyway, this may all seem like some vaguely random and esoteric stuff, but if you think about it, Conway's Law is at the heart of what is both so beautiful about the communications profession and so dangerous. At its essence, Conway's Law says that the way you communicate is what you make. And given that you are literally graduating today with a degree from a Communications Design program, it's a good time to have a think on that.

When I look around myself, I see a media landscape in disarray. It's fractured, fragmented and polarized in ways that I could never have imagined when I graduated from my creative writing program back in the 1990s. It seems like the tweets, Facebook posts, broadcast news segments, advertisements and blogs that engage us actually serve to enrage us.

Broadly speaking, this fragmented and polarized way we communicate is producing a society designed for divisiveness rather than unity. Outrage rather than compassion. Competition rather than collaboration. It's Conway's Law in action, isn't it?

As Professor Neugeboren mentioned in his introduction, I am the founder and CEO of Integral. We're an employee activation agency -- that's a fancy way of saying we do all kinds of communications work for big companies with lots of employees. Some of our clients have hundreds of thousands of employees in dozens of countries around the world. Can you imagine trying to communicate clearly at that scale? It's a trick, let me tell you.

At Integral, we're lucky to have excellent strategists, writers, designers, multimedia producers...the whole kit and caboodle. We even have an alumna from CityTech, Priscilla Rios. She's a superstar.

Every day we create the communications that flood like blood through the veins of very large, global organizations. And every day, we know that we're accountable to good old Melvin. The way we communicate is not just some activity that happens in and around a brand, a school, an organization, a government or a society.

It is the very essence of those things.

We take this responsibility really, really seriously. Are the programs we develop for our clients unlocking their potential or cementing the status quo? Is the content we produce increasing empathy and collaboration, or driving people apart? Are the designs we offer up creating clarity? Encouraging psychological safety? Or just leaving people confused?

My team and I are quite sure that work is an integral part of human identity. In fact, that's why I called the company Integral in the first place. Well, that and because I believe work done with integrity is the only work worth doing. It's that work which will produce organizations with integrity. That's Conway's Law, afterall.

And that's what I'm here to tell you, my fellow communicators: the integrity you bring to your work as a professional is not just about being fair, following the rules or staying out of trouble. Yours is literally the work that will either bring society together or pull us apart.

What you communicate is what you make. Not just for your employer. What you communicate is what you make of yourself. And for all of us.

Over the past decade I've had the privilege to meet many students from this program. You stand out for your creativity, ambition, and selfreliance. That's powerful and impressive, but it's not enough.

Bring integrity to your work. Bring that big-picture perspective from good ol’ Melvin to your craft and your relationships. I know you can and I hope you will. Our profession and our society is counting on you. 

And with that, I congratulate you on all you've achieved and wish you satisfaction, success and profound positive impact in all you have yet to make!

Thank you. And: Congratulations, class of 2021!

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