The Communication Code: Unlock Every Relationship One Conversation at a Time
Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram
Wiley (November 2023)

Clear two-way communication is essential to healthy relationship

According to Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram,  unlocking a relationship “refers to making significant and transformative changes to the dynamics, structure, or nature of a relationship — whether at home or at work.  It involves implementing innovative and groundbreaking approaches to reshape the way individuals interact, communicate, and relate to each other within the relationship and within each conversation.

“To unlock a relationship means to move beyond traditional patterns and expectations and to explore new possibilities for growth, connection, and fulfillment. It often entails challenging or unproductive behaviors, and embracing novel ways of thinking and relating.”

In his classic work Rhetoric (4th century BCE), Aristotle introduces his concept of four levels of discourse. I was reminded of that as I read your book. I think high-impact negotiation makes effective use of each level: EXPOSITION to explain with information, DESCRIPTION to make vivid with compelling details, NARRATION to explain a sequence, and ARGUMENTATION to convince with evidence and/or logic.

In a more recent work, TouchPoints, Douglas Conant and Mette Norgaard explain how and why great leadership is about servant leadership in human relationships, “about being present in the moment and feeling confident that you can deal with whatever happens in a way that is helpful to others.” Think about it. How many times, on average, during your waking hours do you interact with other people? Each interaction is a “TouchPoint,” one that offers an opportunity to make such contact mutually beneficial. ToughPoints can also involve sources of inspiration, knowledge, and cultural enrichment. To those who aspire to leadership, Conant and Norgaard offer an abundance of information, insights, and counsel that can help them to accelerate their development as leaders with a model that is most appropriate for them.

More specifically, they help their reader to prepare for TouchPoints, create situations in which they can occur, and then when they do, ensure that the shared experience has great value to everyone involved. The approach must be crystal clear, the intentions must be honorable, and the competencies must be applied with humility and gratitude as well as with confidence. As Conant and Norgaard observe when concluding their book, “The beauty of TouchPoints is that they are both approachable and aspirational: every moment is an opportunity to aim for mastery, while achieving  mastery will remain an elusive target. That’s because mastery is not a destination – it’s a quest. It is a commitment to developing ever greater clarity and capabilities so that you may become ever more helpful for the moment.”

I share this material from Rhetoric and TouchPoints because, as Kubicek and Cockram erxplaion so well, healthy relationships are established and then strengthened one conversation at a time (i.e. one touchpoint at a time) and the skills needed to do that include Exposition, Description, Narration, and Argumentation.  My own experience suggests that, as my Swedish grandmother constantly reminded me in my childhood, having two eyes and two ears and only one mouth, it’s a good idea to spend at least 80% of our time listening and observing when engaged in a conversation.

Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram are to be congratulated on their major contribution to knowledge leadership in several separate but interelated fields of communication.

While reading The Communication Code, highlight key passages, and, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to the key questions posed within the narrative. These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.