If it does not take a long time to say, it is not worth saying

NOTE! The views presented herein are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent my affiliations in any fashion whatsoever.

I borrow the title of this post from the ents from Lord of the Rings, the talking trees. Since the ents talked very slowly, it is easy to dismiss their statement as a physiological necessity for them, but I think we should rather view it as a communicative necessity for us today. Why? 

If we understand the nature of communication it is easy to understand. If follows from the simple facts that thinking is determined by language, and language depends on signs, meaning and context. Signs represents how the language is formed and expressed in practical terms. It can be numerals, words, letters, symbols anything that we can transfer from one individual to another essentially. Meaning is what we attribute to those signs, but meaning is very context dependent. In other words, we find meaning as we see it and expresses it individually, but this is never the same as the meaning others attribute to the same expression. 

“I am tired”, will have a different meaning to me uttering it than to somebody hearing it. We agree about the interpretation on the surface – we all knows what it means to be tired – but on the detailed, deeper level, we can never truly understand what the other person is saying. When we cross different national cultures, as well as corporate cultures, this becomes even more difficult…. 

Another example, as a consultant, I often hear people in different corporations talk about what is ‘profitable’. What do they really mean?  Are they aware of the number of definitions used? Many are oblivious – even among finance people – to all the different definitions that exist. They talk as if it is clearly understood…. It is not. Without getting into too many details and technicalities a simple illustration should suffice. Profitability is highly dependent on time. In the here and now perspective, cash flow is actually a good measure. When time frames are very short, depreciations and such makes little sense to add. However, when you look at the quarter or year or so, Net Operating Profit After Tax can be a good measure, but it still does not capture the entire picture in the economic domain. Investors want return, banks charge interests and so on – there is another ‘cost’ ignored by NOPAT – the cost of securing capital for the corporation; the cost of capital. It is not enough to have a positive NOPAT over time, the corporation must also be capable of keeping its economic stakeholders happy as well. Therefore, almost 100 years ago, they introduce the concept of Economic Profit. If it is calculated using Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC), then a positive EP implies that the book value of the corporation is growing. In other words, the corporation is capable of securing enough NOPAT operationally, that it can pay dividends (for example), keep creditors happy, etc. Within these rough measures of profitability – cash flow, NOPAT and EP – there exists a host of technicalities which renders one number from one corporation not entirely comparable to another. Indeed, some years ago DaimlerChrysler reported loss and surplus in the same year at the same time because using US GAAP and the international accounting standards led to different approach to handle a number of accounting technicalities.  Then we have product profitabilities, which is far more difficult….  And the list goes on and on… The point is that to say something is profitable is a statement almost without value unless it is specified what you mean with profitable. In other words; context is king. 

Because context is king, the context must be either shared culturally or in some other way exist prior to the communication, or it must become a part of the communication itself. This is why it will take a lot of time to say something meaningful. When we discuss issues that in themselves are abstract and hard to grasp, it becomes even more difficult. This means that the ents are right. 

Then, if we leave Middle-Earth and return to our current society – the information society – the problem becomes even more acute. This is because we have a wealth of information but little time to establish context and hence great problem in deriving meaning. Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon put it very well when he said that

What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Without attention, communication is lost. When we fail to grasp the context, we fail at understanding the meaning. We get these pointless debates using slogans and exhortations in all direction, which is so common in media, social media and other places today – even in some capitals as well. Twitter, SMS and similar are all very short media for communication, but completely meaningless as media for communication concerning complex matters. 

This makes me wonder about the public discourse today. Does it really mean anything at all? Is it merely the remnants of an old ritual where people communicated to share meaning? Personally, I have to admit that I did not watch a single debate of the last parliamentary election in Norway because the level of the debates is so low that it is not even on Dilbertian levels. The US election was even worse… although thanks to the outrageous statements of Mr. Trump it was on the brink of being entertaining in one way but even more depressing in another way. His legacy of ‘fake news’ is interesting, though. 

Yes, much of the media are reporting things without nuances, and in that sense, can be labelled as ‘fake’. This becomes clear if you read research articles about the same topic and compare. However, when we are talking about plain facts it becomes comical. If Mr. Trump used some coherent set of sentences, we might understand what he was trying to say. However, if your objective is to communicate not to be understood but to influence, he is quite skillful. He has influenced a large part of the US electorate without saying too much meaningful. This is impressive in one way, but equally depressive in another way. It is impressive in the sense of demagogy – the art of using sign (visual or verbal) to elicit more deeply held emotions – but it is depressive in terms of the state of US democracy (assuming that democracy should be based on somewhat rational discourse). So, maybe the future of democratic processes would warrant not a limit of how much time they can spend, but rather a requirement of minimum amount of time to be spent on a single topic? A bullshit detector would also be useful – for example, an Artificial Intelligence unit scanning all known knowledge at the time and from it judging the soundness of a statement on a 0 – 100% scale.  

If those in position, corporate or government, cannot spend time in a coherent fashion on a single topic it is likely that they really have no clue about the topic at hand. This is because they are talking about things superficially whereas true understanding takes study, time and practice to obtain. Yet, once obtained, the master of a topic can present it in simple terms without being superficial. Then, we are often presented with contradictory statements like atomic particles are both a particle and a wave.  Or like ancient words of wisdom which is often expressed in contradictory terms to force the listener/reader to either reach a higher state of understanding or reject it.  I have tried to shed some light upon the importance of context in communication and knowledge, but it can be much better summarized by Lao-Tzu when he said in Tao Te Ching that

Concentrate on doing nothing and everything will turn out well.