Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

Action: influencing with our ideas
As well as creating relationships and sharing information, we 
communicate to promote action. And the key to effective action 
is not accurate information but persuasive ideas.
Ideas give meaning to information. Put simply, an idea says 
something about the information. A name is not an idea. These 
phrases are all names but, for our purposes, they aren’t ideas:
Information is unique as a resource because of its 
capacity to generate itself. It’s the solar energy of 
organisation – inexhaustible, with new progeny 
emerging every time information meets up with itself.
(Margaret J Wheatley, 
Leadership and the New Science
, 
Berrett-Kohler Publishers Inc, San Francisco, 1st edn, 1992)
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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18 Improve your Communication Skills
• Profit analysis;
• Asian market;
• Operations Director.
To turn them into ideas, we have to create statements about 
them:
• Profit analysis shows an upturn in sales of consumables 
over the last year.
• The Asian market has become unstable.
• Bill Freeman is now Operations Director.
These sentences create meaning by saying something about the 
names. What we have done is very simple: we have created 
sentences.
Ideas are the currency of communication. We are paid for
our ideas. When we communicate, we trade ideas. Like currency, 
ideas come in larger or smaller denominations: there are
big ideas, and little ideas. We can assemble the little ones into 
larger units, by summarising them. Like currencies, ideas have a 
value and that value can change: some ideas become more 
valuable as others lose their value. We judge the quality of an idea 
by how 
meaningful
it is.
The most effective communication makes ideas explicit. We 
may take one idea and pit it against another. We may seek the 
evidence behind an idea or the consequences pursuing it. We 
might enrich an idea with our feelings about it. Whatever 
strategy we adopt, our purpose in communicating is to create and 
share ideas.