[Applause]
show of hands how many of you are
huggers you like to hug everyone okay
how many of you our anti huggers if
somebody tried to hug me right now I
might punch him in the nose okay you go
hug her just kidding but as kids we’re
all taught the golden rule do unto
others as you’d have them do unto you if
that’s the case huggers should hug
everyone clearly something’s missing
consider instead what I call the
Platinum rule doing the others the way
they want to be done unto so we hug the
huggers we don’t hug the anti huggers
and nobody gets punched in the nose a
great example of this is the front of an
ambulance on the front of an ambulance
it says ambulance but it says it
backwards so when they come up behind
you you can read it in your rear view
mirror and get out of the way you’d
think the lights and sirens would help
but they want to communicate with you
quickly and effectively literally life
and death can hang on this communication
yet we don’t use this same theory when
we talk to one another instead we revert
back to the golden rule and communicate
with everyone else the way that we
personally find best according to the
10,000 our theory we should be expert
communicators by the age of 10 I’ve done
the math 15 seconds or less recap the
average person speaks 20 2500 words per
day at a rate of 110 words per minute
that’s 204 minutes per day speaking or
roughly 3.4 hours per day 10,000 hours /
3.4 hours per day comes to just over
eight years the average person begins
speaking between one and two two years
old plus eight years brings me to the
age of 10
the reason I have a career in conflict
resolution is that people get into a lot
of conflict most often because of poor
communication I can tell you we are not
expert communicators by the age of 10
some of us never that’s why many lawyers
judges marriage counselors have jobs and
now we’re in the information age where
we communicate digitally but what is
digital communication digital
communication is just written
communication human beings have been
communicating and writing for more than
5000 years but our written communication
is not very effective consider this
simple five-word sentence depending upon
which of the five words I emphasize the
entire meaning of the sentence changes I
didn’t tell you that I didn’t tell you
that I didn’t tell you that I didn’t
tell you that I didn’t tell you that
five words five different meanings yet
if this is in writing which of those
five are you going to guess that I meant
in a series of studies at a UCLA they
surmised that when we’re trying to
communicate our feelings about a subject
our believability comes from our
nonverbal communication our tone of
voice but also the words we choose to
use 55% of our communication comes from
our nonverbals what we look like where
we are our body language 38% comes from
our tone of voice the words we emphasize
only 7% comes from the words that we
choose to use yet in the information age
in our digital communication this is all
we send so in this age of drastic
technological expansion we continue to
use 5,000 year old technology despite
excluding a huge percentage of our
communication for example I sent my
brother this email
but how did he take it did he have a bad
day at work get into a fight with a
friend or maybe even a car accident or
did he take it in the playful way it was
intended from his big brother so much of
our communication is left unsaid and up
to the receivers perception this is
nicely illustrated in what’s known on
the internet as Poe’s law Poe’s law
states that without some additional
designation as humor it’s impossible to
create a parody that is so outrageous
that someone will not mistake the parody
for the genuine thing check out any
message board or comment section on the
internet and you’re bound to see this
taking place another example of Poe’s
law in action was the work of Stephen
Colbert while on his satire new show The
Colbert Report some people found his
parody believable so believable in fact
that they were shocked when he dropped
the act and started being himself and in
this case we had the benefits of word
choice tone of voice and non-verbal
clues to his satire but the problem of
recognizing satire in written form is
not a new one as early as the 1580s an
English printer suggested that we could
utilize a reversed question mark to
denote satire in written form a more
recent attempt out of the Netherlands
suggested we could utilize this mark to
denote ironic statements in text I’ve
never seen this used anywhere yet
another idea was the creation of a
sarcasm font the idea was rather than
regular font or italics what if we used
reverse italics to denote sarcasm in the
early days of the internet I would have
loved a sarcasm Vantaa the problem with
these is that human beings have more
than one emotion
so one font style one punctuation mark
is never going to account for all of the
possible human emotions if you believe
the movies we have five main emotions
and depending on the relative levels of
those main emotions as they get mixed up
and combined to one another we get more
complex emotions so it’s never going to
work to just use one font style to
denote human beings emotions but in 1982
on a message board at Carnegie Mellon
University professor Scott Fahlman
suggested something new something that
has worked he suggested this now we all
recognize this today but you have to
remember professor Fahlman was first so
he actually had to follow this with read
it sideways in the same post he also
recognized that the opposite could be
used but I’m not going to dwell on the
negative here now we have a way of
communicating emotion within the text
emoticons which is a portmanteau
combining emotion and icon were born and
evolved happy flirty silly kisses and
more as well as sad angry frustrated
crying but even neutral emotions and
even actions there are even specific
emoticons for people like Santa Claus
here some estimates put the number of
emoticons in the thousands emoticons
further evolved into the emoji a single
character to represent the string of
characters in the emoticon this saves
space which becomes important in a
minute and also allows us to convey
additional information that’s been
missing from our written communication
five thousand years perhaps you could
say that emoticons and emojis have
helped us to compensate for something
but what we are compensating for is very
important let’s look back at what we’re
communicating digitally when I send that
email to my brother I’m only sending 7%
of the message by utilizing emoticons
and emojis I can put back at least a
portion of that tone of voice that’s
been missing from our electronic
communication emoticons and emojis have
also stood the test of time some of you
may think I’m jumping the gun here you
might think that this is just a fad for
young people remember emoticons came out
in 1982 that’s three and a half decades
and Counting and this is the information
age fads come and go within a year think
planking or the ice bucket challenge
those were huge and gone in a year
emojis have become so entrenched that
people have started considering them a
language unto themselves consider the
attempt by Fred venison to translate
moby dick into emoji 207,000 words into
93,000 emojis apparently in this case a
picture’s worth 2.2 words in this age of
interconnectedness we communicate a lot
estimates put the total number of phone
calls in the world each day a 10 billion
that’s a lot or is it
compare that with the worldwide text
messages per day a 50 billion emails per
day of two hundred and sixty nine
billion Facebook whatsapp messages of 60
billion Apple iMessages per day a forty
billion and even Telegraph’s of 15
billion that’s the app not the 1840s
and that’s not to mention the myriad of
other apps that are out there in the
heyday of the postal or snail mail
system they never averaged more than 1.5
billion per day we are communicating in
shorter and shorter ways world leaders
are reducing their thoughts into tweets
the Gettysburg Address is revered for
its complexity and brevity coming in at
only 272 words now politicians are
coming in at 140 characters or less if
written out fully Abraham Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address would have needed at
least 11 tweets perhaps this is what
President Lincoln would have done today
as we are trying to say more with less
space making more and more important
announcements in these shortened formats
and even engaging in political discourse
understanding the motivations of the
speaker quickly and effectively become
even more important so that leads us
back to the emoticon I’ve heard the
complaints but they’re not professional
you can’t use these in professional
circumstances other things that we once
considered professional or
unprofessional have changed over time
consider smoking in the workplace or
women wearing pants to work at one point
it was perfectly acceptable to smoke in
the workplace and women wearing pants
nearly unthinkable now the view of each
of these has flipped we’re already
seeing the effects of these changes in
other aspects based on the changing
demographics of the workforce did you
know that Millennials are now the
largest segment of the workforce in just
a few years they will constitute 40% of
the workforce by 2025 Millennials will
be 75% of the workforce these are
business people who grew up with
smartphones in their hand and love to
communicate with emoticons and emojis
we’re already seeing the effects of this
in the perceived professionalism of
social media and businesses using
infographics to display complicated
information in a visual format recently
a study was completed on the utilization
of emoticons in negotiation it’s well
established that the ability to develop
rapport is a key component to a
successful negotiation the negotiating
pairs who utilized emoticons were able
to develop or pour more quickly and were
able to reach a resolution
more quickly than those who did not use
emoticons
so emoticons can be used in a
professional circumstance and may even
be beneficial if used in the right way
so this leads me back to the Platinum
rule as we recognize our own
communication preferences and learn the
profess the Preferences of those around
us we will need to learn and adapt right
now we may need to temper our use of
emoticons at work because those at the
top may not find it appropriate but in
the future it will be different we will
do business primarily with Millennials
we will elect politicians who
communicate with one another and with
the public more in electronic forms of
communication we will negotiate huge
business deals and maybe even peace
treaties over email or text message all
with people who grew up accustomed to
this type of communication change is
inevitable we need to embrace that
change to be better communicators we
cannot fear forward movement in the time
that I have been on this stage there
have been more than 15 million tweets
all that communication is bound to stir
up conflict all conflict begins on an
interpersonal level and sometimes it
grows to a small group large group even
national and international levels some
of you may feel like this right now
that’s okay as we embrace the Platinum
rule we will have better communication
and reduce conflicts this means that in
our personal lives professional dealings
and even in politics we’re going to have
to become more comfortable with
emoticons
but those emoticons just might save the
world thank you
[Applause]
show of hands how many of you are
huggers you like to hug everyone okay
how many of you our anti huggers if
somebody tried to hug me right now I
might punch him in the nose okay you go
hug her just kidding but as kids we’re
all taught the golden rule do unto
others as you’d have them do unto you if
that’s the case huggers should hug
everyone clearly something’s missing
consider instead what I call the
Platinum rule doing the others the way
they want to be done unto so we hug the
huggers we don’t hug the anti huggers
and nobody gets punched in the nose a
great example of this is the front of an
ambulance on the front of an ambulance
it says ambulance but it says it
backwards so when they come up behind
you you can read it in your rear view
mirror and get out of the way you’d
think the lights and sirens would help
but they want to communicate with you
quickly and effectively literally life
and death can hang on this communication
yet we don’t use this same theory when
we talk to one another instead we revert
back to the golden rule and communicate
with everyone else the way that we
personally find best according to the
10,000 our theory we should be expert
communicators by the age of 10 I’ve done
the math 15 seconds or less recap the
average person speaks 20 2500 words per
day at a rate of 110 words per minute
that’s 204 minutes per day speaking or
roughly 3.4 hours per day 10,000 hours /
3.4 hours per day comes to just over
eight years the average person begins
speaking between one and two two years
old plus eight years brings me to the
age of 10
the reason I have a career in conflict
resolution is that people get into a lot
of conflict most often because of poor
communication I can tell you we are not
expert communicators by the age of 10
some of us never that’s why many lawyers
judges marriage counselors have jobs and
now we’re in the information age where
we communicate digitally but what is
digital communication digital
communication is just written
communication human beings have been
communicating and writing for more than
5000 years but our written communication
is not very effective consider this
simple five-word sentence depending upon
which of the five words I emphasize the
entire meaning of the sentence changes I
didn’t tell you that I didn’t tell you
that I didn’t tell you that I didn’t
tell you that I didn’t tell you that
five words five different meanings yet
if this is in writing which of those
five are you going to guess that I meant
in a series of studies at a UCLA they
surmised that when we’re trying to
communicate our feelings about a subject
our believability comes from our
nonverbal communication our tone of
voice but also the words we choose to
use 55% of our communication comes from
our nonverbals what we look like where
we are our body language 38% comes from
our tone of voice the words we emphasize
only 7% comes from the words that we
choose to use yet in the information age
in our digital communication this is all
we send so in this age of drastic
technological expansion we continue to
use 5,000 year old technology despite
excluding a huge percentage of our
communication for example I sent my
brother this email
but how did he take it did he have a bad
day at work get into a fight with a
friend or maybe even a car accident or
did he take it in the playful way it was
intended from his big brother so much of
our communication is left unsaid and up
to the receivers perception this is
nicely illustrated in what’s known on
the internet as Poe’s law Poe’s law
states that without some additional
designation as humor it’s impossible to
create a parody that is so outrageous
that someone will not mistake the parody
for the genuine thing check out any
message board or comment section on the
internet and you’re bound to see this
taking place another example of Poe’s
law in action was the work of Stephen
Colbert while on his satire new show The
Colbert Report some people found his
parody believable so believable in fact
that they were shocked when he dropped
the act and started being himself and in
this case we had the benefits of word
choice tone of voice and non-verbal
clues to his satire but the problem of
recognizing satire in written form is
not a new one as early as the 1580s an
English printer suggested that we could
utilize a reversed question mark to
denote satire in written form a more
recent attempt out of the Netherlands
suggested we could utilize this mark to
denote ironic statements in text I’ve
never seen this used anywhere yet
another idea was the creation of a
sarcasm font the idea was rather than
regular font or italics what if we used
reverse italics to denote sarcasm in the
early days of the internet I would have
loved a sarcasm Vantaa the problem with
these is that human beings have more
than one emotion
so one font style one punctuation mark
is never going to account for all of the
possible human emotions if you believe
the movies we have five main emotions
and depending on the relative levels of
those main emotions as they get mixed up
and combined to one another we get more
complex emotions so it’s never going to
work to just use one font style to
denote human beings emotions but in 1982
on a message board at Carnegie Mellon
University professor Scott Fahlman
suggested something new something that
has worked he suggested this now we all
recognize this today but you have to
remember professor Fahlman was first so
he actually had to follow this with read
it sideways in the same post he also
recognized that the opposite could be
used but I’m not going to dwell on the
negative here now we have a way of
communicating emotion within the text
emoticons which is a portmanteau
combining emotion and icon were born and
evolved happy flirty silly kisses and
more as well as sad angry frustrated
crying but even neutral emotions and
even actions there are even specific
emoticons for people like Santa Claus
here some estimates put the number of
emoticons in the thousands emoticons
further evolved into the emoji a single
character to represent the string of
characters in the emoticon this saves
space which becomes important in a
minute and also allows us to convey
additional information that’s been
missing from our written communication
five thousand years perhaps you could
say that emoticons and emojis have
helped us to compensate for something
but what we are compensating for is very
important let’s look back at what we’re
communicating digitally when I send that
email to my brother I’m only sending 7%
of the message by utilizing emoticons
and emojis I can put back at least a
portion of that tone of voice that’s
been missing from our electronic
communication emoticons and emojis have
also stood the test of time some of you
may think I’m jumping the gun here you
might think that this is just a fad for
young people remember emoticons came out
in 1982 that’s three and a half decades
and Counting and this is the information
age fads come and go within a year think
planking or the ice bucket challenge
those were huge and gone in a year
emojis have become so entrenched that
people have started considering them a
language unto themselves consider the
attempt by Fred venison to translate
moby dick into emoji 207,000 words into
93,000 emojis apparently in this case a
picture’s worth 2.2 words in this age of
interconnectedness we communicate a lot
estimates put the total number of phone
calls in the world each day a 10 billion
that’s a lot or is it
compare that with the worldwide text
messages per day a 50 billion emails per
day of two hundred and sixty nine
billion Facebook whatsapp messages of 60
billion Apple iMessages per day a forty
billion and even Telegraph’s of 15
billion that’s the app not the 1840s
and that’s not to mention the myriad of
other apps that are out there in the
heyday of the postal or snail mail
system they never averaged more than 1.5
billion per day we are communicating in
shorter and shorter ways world leaders
are reducing their thoughts into tweets
the Gettysburg Address is revered for
its complexity and brevity coming in at
only 272 words now politicians are
coming in at 140 characters or less if
written out fully Abraham Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address would have needed at
least 11 tweets perhaps this is what
President Lincoln would have done today
as we are trying to say more with less
space making more and more important
announcements in these shortened formats
and even engaging in political discourse
understanding the motivations of the
speaker quickly and effectively become
even more important so that leads us
back to the emoticon I’ve heard the
complaints but they’re not professional
you can’t use these in professional
circumstances other things that we once
considered professional or
unprofessional have changed over time
consider smoking in the workplace or
women wearing pants to work at one point
it was perfectly acceptable to smoke in
the workplace and women wearing pants
nearly unthinkable now the view of each
of these has flipped we’re already
seeing the effects of these changes in
other aspects based on the changing
demographics of the workforce did you
know that Millennials are now the
largest segment of the workforce in just
a few years they will constitute 40% of
the workforce by 2025 Millennials will
be 75% of the workforce these are
business people who grew up with
smartphones in their hand and love to
communicate with emoticons and emojis
we’re already seeing the effects of this
in the perceived professionalism of
social media and businesses using
infographics to display complicated
information in a visual format recently
a study was completed on the utilization
of emoticons in negotiation it’s well
established that the ability to develop
rapport is a key component to a
successful negotiation the negotiating
pairs who utilized emoticons were able
to develop or pour more quickly and were
able to reach a resolution
more quickly than those who did not use
emoticons
so emoticons can be used in a
professional circumstance and may even
be beneficial if used in the right way
so this leads me back to the Platinum
rule as we recognize our own
communication preferences and learn the
profess the Preferences of those around
us we will need to learn and adapt right
now we may need to temper our use of
emoticons at work because those at the
top may not find it appropriate but in
the future it will be different we will
do business primarily with Millennials
we will elect politicians who
communicate with one another and with
the public more in electronic forms of
communication we will negotiate huge
business deals and maybe even peace
treaties over email or text message all
with people who grew up accustomed to
this type of communication change is
inevitable we need to embrace that
change to be better communicators we
cannot fear forward movement in the time
that I have been on this stage there
have been more than 15 million tweets
all that communication is bound to stir
up conflict all conflict begins on an
interpersonal level and sometimes it
grows to a small group large group even
national and international levels some
of you may feel like this right now
that’s okay as we embrace the Platinum
rule we will have better communication
and reduce conflicts this means that in
our personal lives professional dealings
and even in politics we’re going to have
to become more comfortable with
emoticons
but those emoticons just might save the
world thank you
[Applause]
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