Why Communication is Everything

If you’re a knowledge worker, the quality of your output depends on three skills: learning, thinking and communicating. As I argue in Lean Communication, communication is the most important of the three. That’s because it’s possible to learn and think well and not be a good communicator, but you can’t communicate well without also being good at the first two.

You don’t have to take my word for it; I’ve got backup for this argument from an unexpected source. In reading David Murray’s excellent new book, An Effort to Understand, I came across this quote from Isocrates, one of my long-ago predecessors in the presentations training business:

“…for the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding, and discourse which is true and lawful and just is the outward image of a good and faithful soul….[W]e shall find that none of the things that are done with intelligence takes place without the help of speech.”

The idea that intelligence requires the help of speech still rings true today. We’ve all had the feeling of having a brilliant thought that revealed its flaws the first time we tried to articulate it, and which forced us to rethink more clearly.

Learning and thinking create good ideas, but it takes communication to bring them to life through others. Think of all that brilliance in your head as potential energy, which can only be transformed into kinetic energy through effective communication.