„‚ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

❚❘
THE FOUR-COMMUNICATION-STYLES
APPROACH
Tom Carney
Communication at cross purposes is all too unhappily common in everyday life. Mary
tries to persuade Bill to adopt a certain way of doing things, arguing logically for the
efficiency of her way. Bill responds with counterarguments about its human costs. Mary
reacts with a more-telling cost-benefit analysis. Bill counters with examples of likely
inconveniences for specific clients. By now the metamessages have taken over: Each
person is bent on defending her or his approach, and emotional misperceptions of the
other person distort all further communication.
One frequent cause of crossed communication is the common tendency to favor one
particular style of communication, often at the cost of being insensitive to other styles—
in others as well as in oneself. Ideally, one should be:
■ Conscious of one’s own stylistic preferences and dislikes;
■ Able quickly to detect such preferences and dislikes in another person; and
■ Able to adjust one’s own style to that of another person.
If one attempts to achieve this ideal, a surprising number of payoffs result, both in
personal insights and in interpersonal skills.
COMMONLY PREFERRED STYLES OF COMMUNICATION
Jung (see Jacobi, 1968) identified two major dimensions in our modes of relating to
events: a thinking-feeling polarity and, at right angles to it, a sensing-intuiting one.
These polarities are familiar in everyday life:
■ Thinking: the logical, rational, sequential analysis that has been associated with
left-brain hemisphere (Ornstein, 1978) dominance—or with “convergent” or
“vertical” thinking (DeBono, 1970; Hudson, 1970). If this is one’s preferred
mode of relating to “reality,” one will probably use a precise, analytical form of
communication.
■ Intuiting: the making of associations; having insights that yield a novel “big
picture” of a situation; the free flow of creative ideas. Currently associated with
Originally published in The 1980 Annual Handbook for Group Facilitators by J. William Pfeiffer and John E. Jones (Eds.), San Diego,
CA: Pfeffer & Company. Credit for originating this approach should go to P.P. Mok of Drake Beam Associates. Jay Nisberg further developed
the approach, along with his associates Ed Reimer and Brian Trump.
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 6, 2nd Edition. Copyright © 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer ❚❘ 81