In the course of my MBA studies, professional career, life as a priest, and all the points in between, I have witnessed and participated in conversations gone wrong. “What we have here is a failure to communicate” (Captain, in Cool Hand Luke). I have studied instantiated and uninstantiated communications, message and meta message theory, and a whole host of topics whose names have been lost in the course of time. It seems as though communications is a mathematical stew of thousands of variables and a limited number of equations… translated: there is no one solution. At best you can hope to reach an optimal answer given a particular starting point – it won’t be perfect, but it will hopefully work. Continue reading →