Tamsen Webster explains Jürgen Habermas's distinction between strategic action, which aims to persuade or manipulate, and communicative action, which seeks mutual understanding. She connects this framework to healthy democracy and solving complex problems, drawing on her work at the Message Design Institute and Teachers College Columbia.
One of the most transformational concepts that I've learned in my first year at Teachers College Columbia is the difference between strategic action and communicative action. These ideas were named by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas back in a book he wrote in 1984. And what he observed was that we use language with two different intents. The strategic intent of language is when you're basically talking at people to get them to do something. In other words, it's all of the coercive, manipulative persuasion and influence influence tactics that generally don't feel good to you or to the people with whom you're doing them. Sometimes they're necessary, but more often than not, while they may drive action, they rarely drive sustainable change. On the flip side is what Habermas calls communicative action, and this is where you're using language to establish mutual understanding with the people that you're talking to, and whatever perspective started out as individual becomes a shared one so that any action that moves forward is one that is collective and collaborative. In other words, It's the opposite of manipulation. It is mutual understanding at its best. Fundamentally, this idea about identifying the intent behind communication as either strategic or communicative, as trying to get someone to do something or working towards mutual understanding, is really key, especially if we're trying to work together in the face of complexity to deal with adaptive problems in order to come up with new ways of thinking. Habermas felt that communicative action was the key to a healthy democracy, even the ability to to really understand from the core what it is that other people are saying, why they're saying it, and whether or not we agree that what they're saying is valid and legitimate. This idea brings me all the way back, not just to the beginning of this series, but fundamentally why I founded the Message Design Institute, why I wrote Say What They Can't Unhear, and why I started this program at Teachers College Columbia in the first place. Because I believe to my core that there is a different way to talk with people, to understand where we're coming from, and to work together to create new solutions to new problems and sometimes very, very old ones. Ultimately, I believe mutual understanding is possible. The research supports it. Theory supports it, but our own expertise supports it. Our own intuition supports it. There are things that we believe and we share with the people next to us. And sometimes all it takes is bringing that together, taking it out into the light so that we can look at it together and decide together where to go next. That's what the Message Design Institute is all about. We are trying to create this movement, this community for people who, like me, maybe like you, want to change the way that we understand each other and communicate with each other so that we can change the way that we work and live together. I hope you'll join me.
