Words Are Everything
In a Covid world, words now matter more than ever. They are essential tools that can make the world a better place, says communicator and broadcaster Anton Savage
On January 28th 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded above Florida, killing all seven astronauts on board. 19 years later its sister shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry from orbit. No-one survived.
Both shuttles had mechanical problems; Challenger was due to be launched when freezing temperatures made the rubber rings in its rocket-boosters brittle. Columbia faced the blast-furnace of the earth’s atmosphere with its heat-shielding ruined from a mishap on take-off.
But it took communications failures to turn those problems into catastrophes.
Dr. Edward Tufte, Professor of Computer Science, Statistics and Information Systems Design at Yale studied the disasters in detail, and he revealed that in both instances management was told the technical problems were critical. But they were told in such a way that they didn’t get it. The words were delivered, but the message wasn’t. So they decided to undertake launch for Challenger and re-entry for Columbia, with devastating consequences.
History is laden with similar examples of communications costing lives. This very year began with one; five people dead following riots at the US Capitol. According to the US Congress, those riots were caused by words uttered by President Donald J. Trump. Words. Leading to deaths. Thankfully, history is equally full of instances where good communication saved lives. Florence Nightingale, the world’s most famous nurse, is prime amongst them. The Lady With The Lamp’s reputation is now that of a kindly figure walking among injured British soldiers in the Crimean war, dabbing brows and whispering kindly re-assurances. That grossly underestimates and mischaracterises her achievement.
Nightingale observed infection killing more soldiers than the enemy’s bullets and cannonballs. Though she was probably not unique in making the observation she was unique in having the communications ability to make people do something about it.
A brilliant mathematician and statistician, (she was a founder of the British Royal Statistical Society) she set about coming up with a way to clearly and simply demonstrate the problem. What she invented was the pie-chart. We take it for granted now, but that clearest of graphic representations was born in one nurse’s attempt to save lives. She used it as part of a pitch so clear and persuasive that the politicians and Military leaders who heard it made wholesale changes to the management of hygiene in war hospitals, saving thousands of lives.
Her genius wasn’t in identifying a problem; it was in communicating it.
By comparison, a few decades before the Crimean war, an Austrian doctor named Ignaz Simmelweis came to a similar realisation about women dying in childbirth. He reviewed mortality rates in two maternity clinics in the Vienna General Hospital, one run exclusively by doctors, one by midwives. He discovered twice as many women died of puerperal (child-bed) fever in the doctors’ clinic as in the midwives’.
Simmelweis concluded the cause was the doctors’ habit of dissecting corpses, then happily marching upstairs to deliver babies. He set about convincing the medics to change their ways, primarily by calling them murderers and shouting at them (I exaggerate slightly, but not much). The end result was no change in medical practice, and Simmelweis confined to a psychiatric institution, where he ultimately died from a severe beating at the hands of the guards.
Ironically, Semmelweis might not have had to do anything if the work of a man named Robert Collins, Master of the Rotunda Maternity Hospital in Dublin, had itself been communicated more widely and effectively.
When Collins became Master of the Rotunda at 26 years of age, one in seven women in crowded Maternity hospitals caught puerperal fever and one in three of them died. The situation in the Rotunda was so bad, the closure of the hospital was considered. Collins instituted a rigorous (and unusual) regime of hygiene so successful that by his last four years as Master, not one woman died of childbed fever in the Rotunda.
Not one.
But he either didn’t try to, or didn’t succeed in, influencing his profession to follow his approach. And for decades more, women continued to die needlessly. Not because the solution wasn’t available; but because it wasn’t communicated effectively.
These problems are timeless and universal. Just as nurses and doctors in the 1800’s knew lives could be saved if they could persuade others of what they knew, so doctors in 2021 face the exact same thing. How many tens of thousands of people have died from ignoring Covid-19? How many more will die from resisting the vaccine? Those people die not because there isn’t the knowledge to prevent it, they die because they are un-persuaded.
In fact, persuasion and communication matters more now than ever. People consume more words, written and spoken, now than in any point in human history. Western society sits under a waterfall of words; the challenge for us all is crafting the ones that get noticed, make an impact, change a mind. And it makes no difference if it’s Sophocles putting pencil to papyrus or Trump tapping on twitter. The technology doesn’t matter. The words do.
As Ed Murrow, one of the most influential broadcasters in history put it; “The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it…”