“I can’t get Terry in finance to return my calls, he doesn’t seem interested in our new AI training program and must want our department to get less funding this year,” says Sarah, the head of talent development at a nonprofit, to one of her colleagues in marketing.

A week goes by and Terry’s name and number pops up on Sarah’s phone. She picks up. “Sarah, I’m so sorry that I haven’t gotten back to you sooner with my approvals for your new program. My elderly father who lives three states over had a serious fall this past week. I was so busy getting him to the hospital and getting his long-term care set up that I haven’t had a chance to set my email to ‘away.’ I wanted to let you know that I just approved the forms you sent, and all will be fully processed by 5pm today.”

Sarah paused for a moment and then responded, “Oh, thanks for letting me know and I’m so sorry to hear about your father. When you’re back, let’s connect over coffee so we can talk about the process for these approvals moving forward. I have a few ideas to share.” “That would be great. I’ll put a note on my calendar to email you as soon as I’m back!” said Terry.

Before Terry’s phone call, I think we’d all agree that Sarah had a certain story to tell about this situation. With the new information about Terry’s father, that story needed revision. We’re used to seeing and talking about the stories and meanings people produce. But there’s another, not-so-obvious aspect to communication that’s hidden in this example and far less developed in common understandings about communication.

The Trifecta of Communication

One of the best frameworks for understanding what communication is and how it works comes from the practical ideas in the “coordinated management of meaning” (or CMM, for short). CMM has been referred to as “a kind of multi-tool (like a Swiss Army knife) that is useful in any situation” (91).

CMM helps you see what’s happening in communication, a bit like a tennis coach showing you what’s going on with your backhand and how to fix it. In addition to working with CMM in decades of research and teaching, I’m proud to serve on the board of stewards for the CMM Institute dedicated to advancing CMM’s theory and applications for both personal and social development.

I think about CMM in terms of three key ideas. If communication is the molecule, you can think of these as the atoms. One is that we tell stories and create meanings with one another, or what’s called coherence. We human beings don’t like vacuums of meaning. So, we spend a good part of our lives trying to make sense of experience, or make it “cohere” in ways that are satisfying.

At the same time, we continually invite others to take on these meanings and live into them. Sarah’s original story about why Terry wasn’t calling her back was an invitation to “see the world in my way.” We know how powerful stories can be in shaping the events of our lives and the world, so coherence is the part that’s most familiar in common understandings of communication.

The second idea involves mystery. I’ll save a fuller analysis of this concept for another post, but mystery simply gets at the idea that beyond whatever meanings we create, there’s an infinity of unknowns going on in any situation. Sarah’s original story overstated what was known about Terry, the situation he was in, and more. The discovery that there could be a different meaning to “not getting called back” more than proved that there’s always more going on than we can possibly see.

When we create meanings and stories, we often forget to look outside the small net of words cast for evidence of what’s outside them. From a CMM viewpoint, it’s therefore unhelpful to use a phrase like, “that’s all the facts.” A more honest phrasing would be “here’s some facts,” because there’s always more to be known beyond the terms we’ve selected (and they’re always selective) as relevant to any situation. Mystery isn’t that hard to understand, even if we often forget to look for it. Saying “it’s more complicated than that” provides one way to operationalize mystery in our communication.

Source: microgen, via Canva

Now for the most difficult (but rewarding) aspect of communication to understand: coordination. Everything we know comes from a back-and-forth of communication with others. Before we could read or write, the very language that we speak only came into being through reciprocal speaking with others.

Those messages could involve a one-to-one conversation, an email chain with a lot of reply-alls, or even reading a book or watching a movie (although a book or movie mostly involves one-way communication, it still invites participation in communication created by someone else). This is why all human endeavors begin in the relational space between people. Our social realities reside in connections.

Seeing the role that coordination plays in communication gets a helping hand from quantum science, where “the dynamic interdependence of everything” highlights how “one must look to change the interactions to change ‘things’” (par. 14). Or, in Pearce’s words, looking at coordination “foreground[s] the process by which the events and objects of our social worlds are made rather than to treat too seriously any specific product of that process. As a result, those who use CMM always look at persons, families, or organizations systemically, as having histories, futures, and networks of relationships” (1).

In this respect, all of life involves acts of communication that are “turns” and become our patterns of communication with one another. These turns and patterns take on a life of their own, independent of how skilled we might be individually with various acts of communication. If you visit a country that uses a language that you don’t speak, for instance, you’re forced to put on some goggles that help you see turns and pattern development play out in slow motion.

My wife and I once visited an area of Japan where there wasn’t a single sign or person who spoke English. As we tried to figure out how to procure a train ticket or ask what an item on a food menu meant, we had to use gestures and pay attention to each turn back-and-forth with our interlocuters to achieve any kind of meaning. We couldn’t rely on whatever might have been eloquent in the English language or have expected those we interacted with to cohere with social skills that might serve us well in many U.S. situations.

Going a Step Further with Rules, Moral Force, and Critical Moments

The meanings that Sarah created about Terry couldn’t hold when the next turn of the phone call took place. What complicates coordinating with others is that we each also show up with our own rules and resources in social situations—and we don’t know the expected rules or resources that other people have and use.

Imagine trying to make a one-minute phone call with someone who expects a good conversation to last at least 10 minutes. That rule will affect the conversation. Now imagine that the person who wants the call to one last minute only uses an old flip phone with a limited number of minutes on it each month (before they get charged exorbitant overage fees), while the other person is using the latest iPhone with unlimited minutes. Among many other considerations, each has different resources they are bringing to the call that will also impact the interaction. This is why it’s important to look at and not simply through communication.

Let’s suppose Terry’s father hadn’t taken a fall. If Sarah had a rule in her head that one must be blunt and direct with people who don’t call back within one day, and Terry had a rule in his head that it’s best to be indirect with people and wait a few days until calling back (among many other rules that might play out), as you can imagine efforts to coordinate with one another would be difficult.

In terms of resources, let’s go further. What if Sarah has a low salary and an annual bonus that will be tied to her new program, while Terry works at an executive pay level and doesn’t even think about such considerations. Each is operating from entirely different standpoints going into any conversation and effort to coordinate. This is where mystery shows up, since we can’t mindread. At the very least, people don’t come with labels on their heads that tell us the rules and resources they are pulling from.

At one end of a spectrum is people skillfully creating meanings and coordinating with each other well. Think of a work meeting where a manager uses a process for coordinating well that makes everyone feel included and engaged. On the other end of the spectrum are “unwanted repetitive patterns” that squeeze the joy out of life. Using an example of a couple in a long-term relationship, Jesse Sostrin shares how, “Based upon their deeply held attitudes about money, each time things get tight with the family budget, the couple participates in nearly the exact same conversation. Each person performs the same role, with nearly the same words and behaviors. Despite the fact that this repetitive pattern causes hurt and is not really helping them to address their issues, it continues to repeat itself” (par. 3).

In CMM, coordination focuses on the power of each turn—rather than the individuals themselves—bringing into view what’s called “moral force.” Some turns make us feel that we must respond in a certain way. If someone gets angry at us, there might be a strong moral (and physiological) force that presents itself to respond with anger back. Other ways of responding could be possible, so mindfulness about the power of certain turns and patterns becomes critical.

In that mindfulness we can search for “critical moments” in which we reflect on the power of a turn and what could be said or done differently. We open choices beyond whatever story or meanings we/they have created to that point. And we learn the skill of meta-communicating toward different outcomes.

Research has uncovered that our coordination skills are far more important than variables such as interpersonal liking and emotional positivity. Sally Blount and colleagues found that “interpersonal coordination” is the essential ingredient for airline pilots taking passengers safety to and from their destinations. It “plays a critical role for all kinds of teams, particularly those that perform complex or time-sensitive tasks. It can facilitate workflow in the office, for example, helping coworkers keep up with each other’s pace and stay on top of deadlines. Or it could support the coordination of emergency medical teams working together to save a patient’s life. . . . [especially with] ‘Being in sync behaviorally, in both body and verbal language, and aligning on work pace … a really important part of team culture and performance.'”

There’s more. Much, much more. For now, start trying to see the basics of coordination in action. This requires a willingness to start seeing the world from a new standpoint. I think you’ll find that skilled coordination works individually and collectively to engage mysteries and shape new stories—the types of stories our world urgently needs.