Exponential Dynamics of Communication in Business

Business communication has evolved slowly initially, just like the linear evolution of the human brain, only to enter into an exponentially fast increasing mutation, causing challenges and opportunities never seen before. Where will this kick into overdrive lead?

Just think about it. The discrepancy between technological progress and human capacity to follow. How did we adjust so far, how are we doing now, and what’s in store next?

Humans started verbal communication an estimated 500.000 years ago but it took 400.000 years until simple words sounding like what they describe turned into actual speech. And almost another 100.000 years before we could write that down and send long distance messages using pigeons. 1.400 years later we got printed books, followed a couple of hundred years after by newspapers. Photographs took another 150 years. At the same time, about 120-150 years ago, telegraph and telephone ushered in telecommunication and changed the business world completely. Television arrived only 100 years ago, and just some 45 years later the telefax facilitated further business. Add another 15-20 years, and PCs and the Internet brought even more disruption. And since going mobile, the last 30 years we have seen our communication world being completely upended. Smartphones arrived only 15 years ago, bringing all sorts of apps and new ways to consume and create information. WhatsApp started yesterday, in 2009 (Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010, TikTok in 2016) and new ones are being announced (like Artifact recently launched by the Instagram founders).

In the meantime, our brains were growing slowly, very slowly: our neocortex, notably implicated in executive functions such as planning, decision-making, social behavior, speech and language, had reached about 30% in size of our brain when our ancestors started communicating. And it has barely changed since. On one hand we have ever faster accelerating communication technologies, which on the other hand we are supposed to control with a steady, barely evolving brain that is still piloted by some almost prehistoric behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms.

We have just entered in a very concrete manner the AI world, with chat bots getting quite good at copywriting and digital media strategy. And AR, VR and the metaverse are not too far either, all powered by an upcoming web 3.0 that will see a complete decentralization of who controls (or no more controls) what. This exponential evolution of communication technology makes it simply impossible for our minds and emotions to keep up if we do not adjust how we apprehend, use, and adjust to this “brave new world”. But there is hope, meaning opportunities, to rephrase it in business terms.

Shouldn’t we envision that those new AI-powered technologies are to our brain what the car or plane must have been for our ancestors’ legs when most people still were asking for “faster horses” as Henry Ford famously put it. A radical change of paradigm that most of us barely can phantom, while some visionaries have an indistinct feel of what it might look like, using divergent thinking and seeking to take advantage of it, making non-geeks feel nervous about it.

Episode 1 of the Business Communication Essentials course about strategic communication, presented by HEC Liège Luxembourg and Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce, will be exploring this topic. Interested? Be my guest and join by registering here: https://www.hecexecutiveschool.be/mba-luxembourg?

Stay tuned for a sneak peak of episode 2: impact of communication on business, understanding underlying science, how to best use these mechanisms to inspire and engage audiences, build trust, both inside and outside organizations.