One of my good friends is Chris Knudsen. Chris has become one of the better known bloggers in Utah. He teaches Entrepreneurship at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He has earned a lot of entrepreneurship battle scars. Some of those scars were formed right along side of me because Chris helped me co-found my first company, GearTrade. He’s pretty dang smart too boot.

Anyway, Chris posted an entry on his blog a bit back about I own a business so I’m an entrepreneur…right?. I and many others made comments, and in the exchange between my comment to the post and Chris’s reply, he and I realized something: Written communication (email, blogs, comments, letters, message boards, instant messages, text messages, etc.) a lot of times is just plain less efficient at getting communication done. We weren’t on the same page with my understanding of the full meaning of his original thoughts, with his understanding of my desire to add to the conversation through my comments, or with his reply back to my comment. He followed up his post with another about “Listening” to what we read . We had a great PHONE conversation about this very thing the other day, and we talked about how ‘speaking’ and ‘listening’ with written communication is very challenging. So we decided to write a post together expounding what we talked about. Here is what Chris and I came up with:

When was the last time you misunderstood someone? When a conversation you had escalated for no reason? We you found yourself on the giving or receiving end of a good rant and personal attack? We would bet dollars to donuts that odds are it happened because of written communication.

People more and more seem to be shunning face to face communication. It seems so easy to fire off an email, to post some sort of aggressive comment, to jump on a message board as ‘anonymous’ and tell the world what you think. In many ways, you can be a coward and hide behind your keyboard. But you loose so much interaction that is true communication. Body language. Tone of voice. Subtle meanings. Quick back and forth dynamics as the conversation takes on it’s own direction and life.

We’re not saying written communication is completely bad. The time savings provided by it has changed the world. We both blog. We both comment on blogs. We post on message boards. We both send A LOT of emails. We’re just saying that written communication comes with its own set of challenges if you’re going to communicate efficiently. On the flip-side, because of its structure, written communication can serve as a way to focus and hone your thoughts so that when you do engage in face-to-face speaking you can present your thoughts more clearly.

Just remember: when you are going to discuss serious topics via written communication, ’speak’ carefully and clearly as you write. ‘Listen’ to what the writer is saying. It’s a challenge. Everyone can do better at it. And finally, we really think that in a lot of ways, sometimes it just makes more sense to pick up the phone, get in your car, or hop on a airplane and get some serious communicating done face-to-face.

As a side note, it was fun to work with Chris on this, maybe we’ll do it again sometime. We might very well be able to change the world if we collaborate enough.