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Communication Complex

Although great advances were made in the 20th century in scientific theory and research, many theories and much research are still based upon a simple approach to communication grounded in a basic transmission model. While there are numerous variations, many theories that inform practice still engage a source, message, channel, and receiver metamodel to frame their approach to communication. Communication complex (CC), conceived by John and Susan Parrish-Sprowl, draws on the theory and research derived from three conceptually related efforts to move thinking and practice beyond this simple model. Each takes a more systemic and dynamic approach to the understanding of what communication is and how it works. CC combines the thinking of pragmatics of human communication as explicated by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin, and Don D. Jackson, the coordinated management of meaning (CMM) by W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon E. Cronen, and recent research in neuroscience, especially as articulated by Daniel Siegel in the interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, to create an applied approach to communication. This framework of communication is being used with increasing frequency in international and global health to shape research and practice.

The shift from the more simple-to-understand Newtonian physics to the more complex thinking of quantum mechanics during the early part of the 20th century ushered in applied research that gave rise to a number of products that shape contemporary life, including computers, space travel, and smartphones. It is not that Newtonian physics is wrong or has been disproved, but rather it does not capture the complexity of the physical world as well as quantum mechanics. The evolution of communication theory and research into communication complex echoes the shift from the Newtonian to a quantum perspective. This shift changes the fundamental understanding of communication and consequently how human health and health care delivery is framed. While CC draws a number of concepts from this theory and research, there are three shared, underlying dimensions that frame it: process, patterns, and perturbations.

Process, Patterns, and Perturbations

The term process is often used when discussing communication, but it is more elaborated in communication complex. In CC, communication is always in motion, and at any moment possesses the potential for change. This arises from the realization that the brain, a highly social organ, does not shut down as long as individuals are alive; it is constantly in motion, creating a nonstop communicative process that is simultaneously within the body and between people. Much like quarks, communication can defy the rules of logic. Conversation can range from coordinated to uncoordinated, coherent to incoherent, and can take strange twists and turns, both within a given episode and over time. This continuous, systemic process connects people across time and space, situating individuals in multiple conversations that shape and are shaped by the actions of themselves and others, including both contemporaries and contributors from the past.

Biologically and socially, individuals live in patterns. Research increasingly supports the notion that individuals' brains, like the world around them, function systemically both within the body and between people, with dynamic patterns of neural firing underlying the experience of life as people know it. The connection between the body, the brain stem, the limbic area, and the prefrontal cortex shapes and is shaped by individuals' patterns of interaction with others. Embedded within this dynamic social system are patterns that individuals come to know with labels such as feelings, thoughts, and beliefs that people often think of as aspects of an individual, as well as what are typically seen as more relational patterns such as friendships, enemies, organizations, communities, and cultures. It is within these patterns that individuals engage in interaction that reflexively shape them as individuals, from their patterns of neural firing to the epigenetic level. At a relational level, patterns of interaction construct the qualities of human relationships, from the dyadic to the global level.

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