Communication

In a passage of his message for the World Communications Day, to be marked on 24th May, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the need to maintain personal friendships in a time of eletronic communciations. It is interesting to read that passage, and see how it places electronic communications alongside personal friendship and allows a kind of comparison of them.

A short time ago on this blog, I entered into a debate where my use of print resources led me to argue against a position that was being proposed, and was then defended, on the basis of links to an electronic resource.

And in my professional work this week, I have seen two situations where a message communicated by e-mail demonstrated the opposite of effective communication. If you want all your staff at school to sign a proforma indicating their business interests (required, apparently, by a new Financial Management in Schools Standard), do you best achieve that by sending out a generally worded e-mail to them all? Most school staff are not budget holders and therefore not authorised to incur expenditure against the school budget ... and so will see little relevance in signing the proforma. Predictably, they aren't going to do much about that particular e-mail .... And an e-mail setting up a meeting for several interested parties what just dictates a date and time - with the unstated assumption that, if you can't make it, you have declined to take part in that particular consultation, and we will go ahead anyway - also fails to communicate effectively.

It is sometimes very easy to send the e-mail or do the google search; not a great deal of effort is necessary. However, to achieve a communication that is true and effective - ie to achieve a personal relation in a broad sense of that term - is a different thing. Print sources can often be rather better evaluated than electronic sources, and can be more "personal". And unchaining yourself from the computer to actually go and see someone about something says to them: "Look, I value this so much that I have gone to the trouble to coming to see you about it".

Ah, but that may be the rub. It takes time and trouble ... but you do take time and trouble when you care about someone ...

PS: An ecclesial example of the same! Catholic and Loving It has a series of posts about some leaflets published in their deanery. The most recent post is here, and it contains links to the earlier posts. So, if you are worried about the future of the Church and you want to encourage the participation of your people in Sunday Mass .... write, (or perhaps "adapt" from somewhere else?), a series of leaflets! Brilliant! It is easy and doesn't involve too much effort ..... And your people might even grasp the message being communicated, albeit quite accidentally and without any awareness on your part that such a message is being communicated - this isn't actually important enough for me to devote a whole lot of pastoral effort to it ...

Gap in posting because ...

The last few days, I haven't really been able to think of anything sensible to post on! Instead my mind has been full of:

1. Emptying the office/library into the living room ...

... while I cleaned the shelves etc and decided that I did not need to keep past issues of magazines, cuttings and papers from as long ago as 1978 .... However, a pile of "things to scan before I throw them away" has developed.

2. A couple of pieces of complicated trade union case work.

3. A consultation by my local authority about what in practice is a proposed removal of car allowances for most staff who use their cars in connection with their work. To give you some idea of the level at which these things work - the lead officer on the council side hadn't realised that this would affect some of the teachers who work in the authority, so had forgotten to include teacher unions in the consultation process. In any case, the project timeline seems to have been presented without any union input, or we would have pointed out that it might take more than a month for us to consult our members, come back with suggestions, have them incorporated into any proposals, and then go back to members ... And, to cap it all, the lead officer for the council really could not get it into his head that teachers are not actually at work between the end of July and the first week of September, so we can't consult them now until September (no, I am not making this up).

4. Booking the next holiday - Prague for the October half term. Zero is looking forward to me not being able to understand the local language either (our recent trips have been to French or Italian speaking regions, which I can make some pretence at understanding).