Communication Issues
“So, I stand in front of the class to introduce myself and guess what: nobody knew they were going to have a new teacher! Can you believe it?”
My wife started a new job as an English teacher a few weeks ago. Her onboarding was somewhat bumpy.
“You know, you may have bumped into an interesting phenomenon here,” I said.
“Perhaps you have identified an organization that has communication issues. I’ve heard about those!”
It was a bit of a stretch — I know, but I’m always open to explore crazy ideas.
I decided to do what I always do when encountering something that requires deeper research.
I decided to re-read Harry Potter.
Harry Potter is a fantasy book. In fantasy, authors have a lot of liberty as to what they can make happen. They’re not necessarily restricted to what is realistic. To some degree. The trick is to balance inventing and describing fantastical things, while at the same time keeping the story close enough to reality for it to still resonates with the audience.
Case in point: my childhood story about flupidups that floop in their dodiedoods all the while dumptidumping their flatiflats. This story found a limited audience. Obviously, my parents were very proud, and very encouraging. Nevertheless, I received little response to my book proposals from publishers on the flapidapstic lifes of the flupidups.
Later I realized one can be very imaginative and fantasy-rich, you still need to connect to your audience’s experience a little bit. So you cannot just invent everything, you need to keep sufficient reality in place for it to be somewhat acceptable for readers to buy in.
Hence my turn to Harry Potter.
It didn’t take me very long to find what I was looking for. In chapter 8 of the first Harry Potter book I hit the jackpot.
In this chapter, Dumbledore announced to the kids of Hogwards school of witchcraft and wizardry (eleven years and up) that the third floor is off limits this semester. None of the kids are allowed there under any circumstances unless they want to “suffer an extremely painful death.” Crystal clear, age-appropriate communication work, Dumbledore. No notes.
However, for Percy, one of the school prefects, this announcement comes out of left field completely. While the kids have tons of questions, he can’t answer them. The prefects have had no head’s up about the announcement nor heard reasoning behind this announcement. He’s completely at a loss.
Classic communication break down.
Now let’s consider the implications of this for a minute.
Without attempting to spoil too much about Harry Potter, this series of books describes a world full of magic, trolls, dragons, wizards and witches flying brooms. It’s pushing the limits of what readers may consider believable enough to stay on board, to keep reading.
Nevertheless, the idea that in this magical world the challenge of communication issues would not exist, seemed too much of a stretch for J.K. Rowling. This is where she feared she would lose her audience. Magic? Sure. Dragons? No problem. But no communication issues? Come on now.
And indeed the books are littered with them. Communication break downs. Fake news. Misunderstanding.
Apparently, communication issues are so inherent to what we are that they cannot be omitted. Even in Harry Potter.
Here be dragons.
