Originally published on Medium on July 27, 2018.
I’m going to start and end with a caveat: what follows is tactical advice regarding evaluating how things we say might be perceived.
Communicating effectively is hard. Even with the best of intentions and the most careful of phrasings, some conversations get mired in misunderstanding.
Sometimes, what we thought was a perfectly reasonable — or even obvious — statement becomes a point of contention. A particularly fraught source of misunderstanding is statements about members of a group. How can we avoid saying things that might be perceived as unfair generalizations? To some degree, we can’t. If someone is looking to be offended, they will find ways to be offended (and this is true regardless of their or your particular beliefs).
Still, we can look for things that are likely to be interpreted negatively. One technique is that every time a group is referred to, even if there are modifiers limiting the scope of the statement, you can mentally substitute another group, preferably one that you are more acutely aware of when you are on the receiving end of the communication. For example, if a statement about white men would feel like stereotyping if it were about black women (regardless of the inaccuracy of the post-substitution statement), then it is likely to be perceived as potentially problematic. If, on the other hand, it would sound inoffensive no matter what group it is about, then it is probably fine.
When possible, I try to avoid using group labels and instead focus on behavior patterns. Whether or not that works depends, to some degree, on the topic under discussion. Even when a group is directly the topic of discussion, focusing on behavior is still useful. It helps to avoid the problem where a group label becomes shorthand for a set of properties that may or may not be what is intended by the writer. “We all know how white men are.” No, no we do not. And even if we could, we would not all know what facet of this bag of properties is relevant to the discussion at hand.
One way to make this more concrete, is to use the Situation-Behavior-Impact model developed by the Center for Creative Leadership and described in this article. In this model, feedback is grounded in a description of a situation where a problem occurs, the behavior that is problematic, and the impact of the behavior. This need not be belabored: “When two people are discussing a topic [situation] and one starts giving an explanation before verifying whether or not it is needed [behavior], then the explainer sets up expectations about a hierarchy of expertise which may not match reality [impact].”
In practice, not every statement you make will be precisely communicated. However, by testing how statements sound when we swap out group labels and by concentrating on behavior over labels, we can avoid some common sources of misunderstanding.
And once again, this is tactical advice regarding evaluating how things we say might be perceived. It is in no way meant to draw equivalences between the different groups we might make statements about.
The title comes from the Robert Burns poem, To A Louse.