The maturity theme continues.

Todays focus is on humans most critical skill.  Whether living your life to the fullest, striving to be best or just seeking basic satisfaction, communication underlies everything you do.

Communication is simply the providing or recieving of information.  There are a multitude of ways to exchange information (i.e., communicate).  My blog, of course, is an outstanding example of this.

Of course once sent or recieved the information must be processed, always the tricky part.  Whether in an  individual or organizational context, the processing (which includes filtering) is most impacted by both parties maturity levels.

What is Communication Maturity.

One person tells a story to another.  They understand the information they have shared and check with the reciever “Got that”, “Yup” is the affirmative response.

Oh if it were really so simple.  In this example the receiver certainly got information, that was confirmed, but was it what the sender intended.?  Who knows?

Interpretation of information can be influenced by your personal filters, bias and most of all experience.  Maturity is all about experience and when applied as objectively as possible to information exchanges it can increase the likelihood of consensus understanding.

Consensus does not mean agreement rather common understanding.  For mature dialogue that is the goal.  A key attribute of successful  exchanges is understanding not agreement. This is the ultimate goal.

It is far more important that all parties view the base information the same way even if they don’t agree.  Without exception this leads to better outcomes.

Developing conversational maturity takes time (you need experience afterall) but it also take focus and effort. Experience is of little value if not applied.