Innovation, communication, and the Errors Tour

It was great to be back on the Missouri S&T campus earlier this week to give the keynote talk for the university’s first Innovative Communication Conference. (Huge thanks to Dr. Jossalyn M. Gale, director of S&T’s Writing and Communication Center, for inviting me to speak.)

In my talk, I wanted to expand on the idea of the conference theme — “Innovation Requires Communication” — to emphasize the importance or storytelling in communication and innovation. I also wanted to impress on students the importance of embracing failure, and I needed a catchy title, something that would resonate with the mainly Gen Z audience, so I decided to borrow from 2023’s biggest pop culture event, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and call my presentation “The Errors Tour (Andy’s Version).”

Reactions to my cover slide were mixed. The older folks in the audience (read: faculty and staff) appreciated the wordplay. The students either smiled politely or remained expressionless. It seems they were over 2023 and all things Swift.

But …

… my misstep with the title helped reinforce the point that errors happen. That sometimes our efforts to connect with an audience fall flat. Beyond the cringe title slide, I made the point by sharing some real-world examples of communication mistakes (“Doctor Testifies in Horse Suit” and other headline bloopers from Richard Lederer’s book Anguished English), a quote often attributed to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”), and the principles of Osmo A. Wiio’s law of communication:

• If communication can fail, it will.
• If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
• There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
• The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

Failure and the writer

Who better than a writer to talk about failure? Writing and failure go hand in hand.

We writers work obsessively on revision after revision of our works, be they poetry or prose. We polish these jewels to the highest possible sheen and then send them out into the world, where more often than not, they are rejected. (Just this morning, I received a kind rejection note from a literary journal of a piece of flash fiction I’ve labored over, off and on, for several years.) Or we discover a typo or error after our perfect piece is sent out into the world. That was the case with my latest short story, Hypnotist, in which I’d misspelled the name of the grunge scene’s most famous, most tragic figure, Kurt Cobain, but did not notice until after it had been published.

The point is, errors happen. Whether we write for love or for money — or if we’re lucky, for both — we are bound to encounter failure and rejection. But if we place any value in our work, if we believe in it and ourselves, we must shake it off (as Taylor Swift advises) and continue to create. Because the errors will continue.

Photo: the author’s proud selfie moment before embarking on “The Errors Tour (Andy’s Version), April 30, 2024.