Clear Thinking II

I need to make one other point about these first two sentences of your or other's communication. They need to be so clearly stated that they either are incontrovertibly true or they establish obvious distinctions among things. You may ultimately end up revising the way that human beings think and the categories through which we filter data; but you probably won't do so in the first two sentences. If you, as a listener, are listening to someone who hasn't done a good job in the first two sentences, you have some choices. You can leave. You can try to tease out a few morsels of meaning from what is said (this is what happens, I will say, in 90+% of encounters). Or, you can try to probe them. This is where you generally be laughed at, ignored, stared at with incomprehension or, occasionally, appreciated.

Let us say that the speaker wasn't clear in his/her first sentence. Since the first sentence is the opening to the world, it is as if the entire effort was lost. So, you have to return to that sentence. You say, "Dr. XX...I wasn't sure what you were saying at the beginning. Would you please repeat your opening sentence?" Or, "would you rephrase the first words of your presentation and what you wanted to accomplish?" This will send a signal that you, at least, don't know what the speaker was trying to say. Any speaker worth his/her salt should be grateful for such a question because it means that the speaker hasn't really made a good effort to make sure that his/her audience is "on board" as s/he proceeds.

In fact, one of the things that I think should be de rigueur for speakers is to stop after their first two or three sentences and tease out from the audience if they follow him/her. Since much communication, in my understanding, is lost in the first few sentences, care should be taken to make sure that enough people are "on the same page" so that the speaker should continue. You don't have to make sure that every last person is "with you." You do need to establish, however, that a sufficiently large group follows you. And, you need, as a speaker, to be able to determine this by a real, rather than just rhetorical, test.

II. The only other principle to establish here is that to be a clear thinker/communicator, you need to make sure that you understand each concept before you go on to the next one. So much confusion arises because we grant the speaker, or ourselves, the "courtesy" of using terms before their meaning is established or before we know what they mean. We often hesitate to stop people when they use a term we don't understand for fear of being thought stupid, because we don't want to disrupt them from their "flow," or because we figure that if we listen closely enough that things will become clear as we go along. Sometimes this actually happens. But often it doesn't. Thus, the principle is that you need to be conscious of what you actually understand, what isn't fully clear to you, and then stop when the latter is the case and ask for clarification. What you tend to discover is that the person speaking either is grateful for your question (and thus clarifies) or him/herself is confused as to what is being communicated. In either instance, you have done a signal favor to the person by not letting a concept go by where clarity hasn't been established.

Let's illustrate this by returning to our example of Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency in November 1860. Let us assume that the second sentence has to do with the secession of the Southern states between the election and the inauguration in March 1861. So far so good. But then we think for a moment, and we realize that the concept of "secession," though correct and even helpful, indeed can mask a lot of important developments that happened in various states. A person might just say, "the South seceeded," but that word needs to be caressed and explored more deeply. Which states in the South? When did they secede? How did it happen in each state? Which was the first? What were the Lincoln people doing while this was happening? That is, the word "secede," while a definable word, really masks a process of enormous complexity, human interest and meaning. So, let's strip away the word and try to get to the concept itself. When we do this, we have really put into practice this second principle--of not letting a concept go by us without examining it and making it yield all its secrets to us. Indeed, it may be the case at times that asking one question about what a concept means may be your "life question"--it can open up more granular roads of inquiry until you have come across something that no one has ever cared enough to investigate. Or, in the process of asking the question of what the concept means, you might force people so to re-examine what they mean that you have just lit the match of a new way of definining an event or concept.

Conclusion--Clear Thinking and Knowledge Production

Much more could be written on clear thinking, but the point I would like to use as my valedictory one is that the fruit of clear thinking is ultimately the revolution of knowledge. Rethinking of problems happens when we caress our most basic points of understanding. This can only be done by people who are patient enough and self-confident enough to ask what a person means when s/he uses a concept that isn't crystalline.

So, my urging to you who have followed me this far, is to watch your first two sentences. Take care to frame them to say exactly what you want to say. See where there are holes in what you have said; in how words you have used might be subject to multiple interpretations or themselves don't point clearly to a reality you want to describe. Then, as you add sentences, make sure you have not only anchored the thoughts to the preceding ones, but that the concepts you use are clear to you. If they aren't clear, go to other sources to try to clarify the word. If you still don't know what you are talking about, then don't use the word. Go at the reality from another angle. Dedicate yourself only to using words that are understood by you. You will find, perhaps to your surprise, that people very much appreciate what you are trying to do. They will want more of what you have to say. They are so starved for good information, clearly said, that you will have a ready audience. Just make sure you have something to say...

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