The Pew Research Center reported that 90% of US adults believe that communication skills are the most important for children to get ahead in the world today. Meanwhile, 57.9% of employers believe that communication is the most sought- after soft skill among job hunters.
Even without these statistics, communication skill is evidently vital in business and life. Yet, many people and even some business leaders struggle with communication.
Root Causes of Ineffective Communication Performance
High-performing communicators process information rapidly, analyze information efficiently, and are able to handle multiple cognitive inputs simultaneously. They are able to integrate creative and analytical thinking and multitasking abilities making their speeches sensible and effective in describing vivid pictures up to every ounce of detail. This is efficiently combined left brain and right brain output.
Insufficient capability development in a certain part of their brain is the most common reason why some people face challenges in communication effectiveness. Creatively-oriented professionals find it hard to grasp the logical half of the communication process while those who are logical are able to dig into the facts but lack the ability to structure compelling communication narratives.
Developers spend their days thinking of patterns, algorithms, refactoring and optimization. They are very creative and show the abilities on the drawing board. Rarely tapping into your logical or creative side puts your brain on a sort of underutilized cognitive capacity, where your other side’s ability is still existent but highly challenging to trigger and reduced cognitive responsiveness and as efficient as something that is utilized every day.
Applying Bredogenerator as a Communication Development Framework
From the Russian term “bred” meaning nonsense and “generator”, Bredogenerator means generating unstructured communication scenarios. It is an structured cognitive and communication exercise that is performed by continuous verbal articulation about diverse subject areas based on one’s experience, individual perspectives and viewpoints or points of view, or environmental and contextual inputs.
Around 14 years ago, my interest in NLP and psychology led to meeting a number of people who wanted to enhance communication capabilities. Some of them faced challenges in verbal communication and other interpersonal communication challenges. I have worked with them on the different aspects of the cognitive processes and behavioral patterns that could be used accordingly.
How Bredogenerator Improves Your Communication Skills
There are various ways that bredogenerator can help improve your skills in communication. Here are some of them:
1. Balancing Analytical and Creative Thinking Capabilities
Bredogenerator training encourages the use of your analytical and creative thinking capabilities. It entices you to consider details on things and occurrences and structure compelling communication narratives around them. Your cognitive capabilities require continuous development and when both sides are exercised regularly, its performance also improves over time and this can easily be seen in your communication skills.
There are different bredogenerator exercises that promote the equal training of both brain parts. Exercises like “Solve Problems” require both logical and creative parts of the brain. This is performed in a group where one is appointed a leader and the others as followers.
The leader will provide details of a very difficult situation in life, while the other servants will offer alternative solutions. Each solution must be provided with details and steps and how such solution will eventually solve the difficult situation. It sounds easy, but here is the trick:
- The first solution must involve an unreal object or creature from another galaxy.
- The second solution must involve an act that is impossible to perform or one that is highly inappropriate.
- The third solution must make use of the first condition but every action must be described by non-existent adjectives but still makes sense as they sound.
The part that provides the solution to the problem through a step by step process strengthens your logical side of the brain. It trains you to apply structured and sequential thinking.
On the other hand, the inclusions of things like creatures, unreal objects, non-existent adjectives and suggesting impossible actions enhance creative ideation capabilities and power to come up with things that are not readily given.
2. Enhancing Imagination for High-Impact Communication
A strong and advanced creative cognition is very helpful especially when it comes to public speaking. It helps in making speeches more engaging and high-impact communication delivery. Doing bredogeneration trains your brain to generate hypothetical scenarios and stories.
One common bredogenerator exercise is called “Bring an Item to Life”. To do this, choose any item around you – a hat, a pen, or a glass – then, apply perspective-based narrative techniques. Switch your skin with the glass and start describing your environment. It may sound tough since glass is simply a glass on the table. But your challenge is articulating from an alternative perspective of that glass for 5 minutes, without taking a pause for a second or more.
3. Leveraging Past Knowledge for Structured Communication
In describing things and even in bringing things to life, you exercise your ability to retrieve and utilize prior knowledge from your past. In a bredogenerator exercise called “Take it from There” where a group of people continues one another’s story, a person can use his historical knowledge and experience to create and structure cohesive communication narratives.
This exercise is similar to “Bring Me to Life”, but every participant speaks for one minute; then, the next person collaboratively extend communication flows. The task is to take a small puzzle piece and expand into structured narratives.
When you get used to this, you can add challenges to it – adapting communication tone and context or locations (as in a sitcom), playing dialogues, and creating a sense of action – a story that runs through time.
4. Strengthening Analytical Observation and Context Awareness
Exercises that animate objects require structured observation and assessment and enhance environmental analysis capabilities. Keeping an eye to related things in the environment is needed to ensure communication credibility and coherence and realistic.
Another exercise is the reverse “nemesis” version of a person, place, or thing. An example is speaking about a gun for a couple of minutes while portraying it as an equivalent of a bottle of water.
People in 3rd world countries are lining up for guns due to the limited access to water while a shower cabin is equipped with three automated weapons right above your shampoo. Water, on the other hand, maybe lava and ships have not been invented for obvious reasons.
Those virtual realities are a good exercise for your non-linear and innovative thinking, develop your creativity and pump up your associative thinking accordingly.
The question “Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?” is a famous puzzle by Lewis Carroll, to which he did not provide any question and have prompted many to speculate and try to provide the answer. This was then developed as a bredogenerator. The purpose of the exercise is to develop analogies and try to identify patterns and correlations between two unrelated concepts or variables.
This is played by 3 people. The first one suggests a living thing (raven) and the second one suggests a non-living thing (writing desk), the third person will connect both through descriptions like “A raven is like a writing desk because they are both black and they have parts that are foldable like drawers and wings”. After each answer, the players will change roles.
5. Developing Abstract Thinking and Generalization Capabilities
Bredogenerator as an exercise helps you analyze concepts from multiple perspectives, make generalization, identify relationships and dependencies, and develop conceptual analogies in your head. This will be then communicated to the people around you in an effective way.
Exercise like Pyramid Linguistics helps develop these cognitive processing capabilities. The exercise starts with an identification of a thing around you, like a glass. However, for this exercise, it will just be a cup, nothing more. Yet, the glass can also be determined in the higher class – dishes. This is the Class 1.
It can also be associated with other things, this is Class 2- glass that represents as a cup is related to tea, coffee, one liter, porcelain, aluminum and different subsets of glasses. The object which is the glass can be repeated for different glass subsets.
By creating analogies and finding connections between ordinary objects and their different types and subclasses, your thinking becomes wider. Your brain is trained to find connections between things no matter how trivial these connections may be. Through this, you will be able to broaden cognitive scope when speaking and will allow for a more structured and coherent communication flow during a public speech.
6. Enabling Adaptive Communication Across Diverse Topics
Some bredogenerator exercises also help you initiate communication across topics from every point on each topic. The exercise “Flow of Consciousness” is the best way to demonstrate and develop this skill.
This exercise can be done by you alone, in front of a mirror. You just need to generate spontaneous discussion inputs then initiate verbal communication flow after 3 seconds of just about unstructured thought streams. Do this for 10 minutes and after that, you will notice how improved communication fluency something turns out to be.
Effectiveness of Bredogenerator in Communication and Cognitive Development
A bredogenerator exercise demonstrates measurable effectiveness in enhancing cognitive processing and communication capabilities because:
- a bredogenerator exericse activates cognitive functions
- It is a communication development framework you can applicable in individual or group settings
- the exercise can be highly engaging and interactive
- It has highly scalable with minimal constraints
In addition to these, it modulates emotional states, history, reframes perspectives in different ways, adapting viewpoints in the opposite direction, etc.
These skills are highly applicable in practical scenarios, including:
- Business idea generation
- Product applications and development
- Public speaking
- Mentoring and training People
- Rapid decision-making and cognitive response and strategizing during sales and negotiation scenarios
Several studies have concluded that during multitasking, the brain struggles to switch contexts, restart and focus on other things in the short span of time. On the other hand, people tend to do this frequently like when talking to the phone and then writing a number, on the other, changing conversations with a colleague while writing something, or working while listening to music.
Bredogenerator trains your whole brain and extends the perspective of both its logical and creative parts by quickly switching contexts, applying non-linear thinking approaches, and generating multiple solution pathways, while limiting any form of social prejudice.
Consistency and Repetition in Communication Skill Development
The key success factor bredogenerator exercise is when you do it more than once. Similar to other skill development processes, its measurable improvements occur when it is applied consistently over time. Your brain and communication skills does not yield immediate results as it requires continuous capability development and exercise. Always allocate dedicated time to do bredogenerator when you are within peer groups or even when you are alone.
It is also best to find someone or a group of friends who also want to improve their communication skills to regularly execute the exercise with. This will help you set a regular training schedule and accelerate performance improvement over time.
I have created a guide on how you can market yourself as a public speaker. Let me know what you think!
