The play of communication
Monday, July 13, 2009 at 9:41AM 
Every now and again I come across an idea that I just can’t shake off.
For a long time I have believed that effective communications is all about conversation and, as such, is rooted in basic human ways of being such as storytelling, listening and trust.
I have also long been intrigued by the notion of play or ‘playfulness’ as a related component of effective communication.
But now, I am thinking, I did not go far enough along this line of inquiry and that there are connections to be made here that, previously, I had not seen.
The stimulus for this ‘idea’ is Alan Kelly, CEO and Founder of The Playmaker’s Standard, a consulting and software services company, based in Maryland, which specializes in competitive strategy.
Kelly is a communications specialist, but begins by looking over the fence, almost longingly, at other disciplines. Scientists have their periodic tables, linguists have their grammatical lexicons, yet he argues communications professionals have no lexicon, no table of elements, no lingua franca with which we can organize or systematize the ‘conversations’ we are having out there.
Rather than simply mourning what we don’t have, Kelly goes on to ask a fundamental question:
Can we break all our communications down into a series of essential, irreducible elements?
If so, he argues, we will discover a new degree of simplicity in all this complexity; finally having a lexicon by which we can talk about, strategize, organize and predict the impact of everything we communicate.
He calls these elements ‘plays’. These are the fundamental strategies that capture everything we do to influence opinion, communicate ideas or build brands.
In essence, for Kelly at least, communication is akin to a game of chess; a game with rules, strategies and predictable outcomes.
So when was the last time you ran a ‘ping’ (an oblique reference or suggestion), floated a ‘trial balloon’ (preview of a tentative idea) or were bold enough to launch a ‘Crazy Ivan’ (altering the course of an attack by inviting or initiating the attack)?
To people like me, brought up in the 70s when it was cool for education systems to avoid all reference to grammar and syntax, this does not come natural. Neither do I want to go along a path that turns communication into a pseudo-scientific activity.
And yet, it seems to me, Kelly is clearly on to something here. Communication is playful. And like all great games, we had better understand the rules before we jump in! Too many times, I find myself talking, speaking or publishing, without any clear reflection on what I doing, what I am responding to and what might happen next. Am I alone here?
And if Kelly is right, I can’t help but thinking that there might exist other models for different kinds of human activity: education, for example, or psychodynamic counseling. Can all forms of human interaction be tabled into irreducible units?
Food for thought.
Meanwhile, I will continue to reflect on whether this blog post is a ‘Red Herring’, ‘Bait’ or ‘Bear Hug’.
Reader Comments (2)
Can we break all our communications down into a series of essential, irreducible elements?
yes we can! everytime we just want to read signs that are not there and we play with words to take our idea for granted...first we convice ourselves then others
Kelly's theory belongs more to the technologies of reflection rather than to strategy or communications' planning. Certainly it is possible to analyse any communications, divide its into elements and find out which of them have most affected result: our formulations, expressions, presence "power groups" or just a working conditioner indoors. It is really helpful in future, because it will help us to create a matrix of the significant elements allowing successfully manipulate people opinion. But to imagine that it is possible to find any universal designer for future communications, with fixed and predictable results, seems to me fantastical.