Merry Christmas everyone! We hope you’re reading this on your brand-new iPad/laptop/mobile phone and you’re having a great crimbo! Continuing our journey through our top hits of 2012, here’s an interview that clocked up over 7000 views…
Bruno Kahne has worked for the last 15 years as an auditor, trainer and consultant for companies in fields as varied as the nuclear, food and construction industries.
He currently works for AirBusiness Academy, the international training centre of Airbus. Bruno is Belgian, lives in France, and delivers courses all over the world, where, unusually, he teaches hearing people the benefits of communicating more like deaf people.
I first became aware of his ideas when I read an article online four years ago, and was very close to meeting him in France to interview him and cover his work, before editorial budgets and other commitments got in the way. I was very pleased to make contact with him again recently and ask him about how he views deafness and communication.
Could you explain why you think Deaf people are better at communication?
Hearing people can see Deaf people in two different ways. Either as people who have lost something – their hearing – or as people who have gained something – the ability to communicate without sound.
In the first case, Hearing people will express at best compassion towards Deaf people, which will be perceived by them as offensive. In the second case, pity will be replaced by curiosity, respect of the difference, and desire to learn skills which are not found in the Hearing world. Here are a few examples of those skills:
- Deaf people talk one at a time, in a very sequential manner. Hearing people talk all at the same time, and often interrupt one another.
- Deaf people are able to be simple and precise at the same time. Hearing people are either simple and vague, or precise and complex.
- Deaf people stay focused on the interaction. Hearing people disconnect regularly.
- Deaf people constantly reformulate and check understanding, saying when they don’t understand. Hearing people never ask others to repeat, and never say when they don’t understand something.
How can hearing people learn to communicate in a ‘Deaf’ way?
Our children show us on a daily basis that to learn, three conditions are required:
1. To have a role model. Someone better than us who can be observed and mimicked
2. The opportunity to imagine in our minds and our bodies the behavior we have observed
3. A secure and positive environment, protected from any form of criticism or mockery
The best courses on the market apply the two last conditions using simulations and exercises to help trainees experiment with new behaviors in the protected environment of the training room.
However, this training can only fail because they don’t meet the first requirement, the most important of the three. Who are the trainees supposed to copy? A theory written on a paper board, or a trainer who can only pretend to be better than the trainees?
As Deaf people have developed specific behaviors which help them to communicate faster than Hearing people, and with much more precision, and as they are present in the training room, the trainees, through highly interactive exercises, simply have to copy their behaviors, consequently adopting a more precise and rapid form of communication.
How did you discover the phenomenon of Deaf communication?
It was 5 years ago. It would take me too long to explain how it happened (for those interested, the full story is recorded in the introduction of my book). Let me just say that it is the story of a Hearing trainee who listened to his inner voice and wrote a name and a phone number on a small piece of paper, because he was convinced that something incredible could come out of a meeting between two people. And he was right.
What do your trainees think of the course?
Being strong in emotional content, this training not only pushes people towards change, but also remains in people’s minds for a long time. Here is a quote from an e-mail I received six months after a course, from a Vice President of a High Tech company: “Working with Deaf trainers helped me understand that I was not as good a communicator as I thought I was. I understood that I should change, that I could change, but most of all, I understood how to change. The emotions that I felt during the course forced me to challenge many of my strongest beliefs. This course gave me the desire to become better. Thank you for this beautiful lesson of humility.”
Tell me what your book is about?
At the beginning, I didn’t think about writing a book. I’m a trainer, not a writer. I just wrote an article on the course I had developed (read it at: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/li00076?pg=all) and immediately received lots of e-mails from all over the world: the USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe, India.
I received an e-mail from a Deaf person who told me that after reading my article, for the first time of his life, he understood who he was. This e-mail profoundly touched me. But the e-mails that pushed me to write a book were those from people who after reading this article, were telling me that they couldn’t find my book on Amazon. Of course they couldn’t. There was no book. So I decided to write it.
I first did some research and was surprised to find out that thousands of books and papers had been written on all the sufferings and misfortunes of deafness, and on all the things that Deaf people should learn from the Hearing world, but nothing on what the Deaf world could bring to the Hearing one. I was stunned.
The book I have written (which hopefully will be published later this year) goes against the tide. Here, the teachers are Deaf people, and Hearing people are the students. The content is based on the accumulation of 5 years of research which gives a first book containing 10 lessons from the Deaf world to help Hearing people improve their communication skills.
The second, which is nearly finished, touches more on personal development: how Hearing people can adopt Deaf behaviors such as being more comfortable with their body, or being more happy and humble like Deaf people, two behaviors which are less and less common in the Hearing world. Both books are full of quotes from Deaf autobiographies, and transcriptions from face to face interviews of Deaf people, to avoid the mistake of having a Hearing person talk for the Deaf world.
Interview by Charlie Swinbourne
Linda Richards
December 26, 2012
Happy Christmas Charlie…..I must thank you aka The Limping Chicken for reproducing this. An excellent article that I missed (how?!) when it was first printed. I hope the book Bruno refers to is in it’s finishing stages and that we will see a review of it here. For the moment, pretty much every deaf organisation in the UK from CEO downwards would do well to read this insight into our world of communication… Indeed, any hearing person who works with Deaf people or wishes to, would do well to take time out and really think about our communication which is more than just learning sign language (often via very artificial means) and understand the premise by which we function, we’d have far better communication all round. The notion that deaf people’s intelligence is less due to the need to have things repeated is immediately turned on its head by the angle that it is in fact hearing people who have the incapacity to state they don’t understand. Harlan Lane wrote of the many negative labels and adjectives ascribed to Deaf people and that academic exercise is beautifully complemented by the above. 2013 is looking good for those who want to take up that approach in their training and see a change in mindset and working patterns from those who work with Deaf people. Thanks again… Good start to the day! Lmr
Andy
December 26, 2012
One thing that hearing people do not understand is that deaf people are expert at communicating in noisy environments. A hearing person in Deaf company would be as out of place as a Deaf person might be in hearing company. It’s not a case of never the twain shall meet. In fact we have plenty to contribute.
I would point out that the signs used in hearing football were in fact copied from the referees in Deaf football matches. In the large football stadia the noise from the crowd is so great that all footballers are effectively deaf. That is why the ref uses those signs. Deaf people are also good at communicating over long distances. I’m sure we have all seen signers having a chat across the width of a football pitch.
It would probably be possible to give BSL a terrific boost by persuading Champions League players to use it on pitch. The fans would all rush off and learn BSL to find out what they were saying. Maybe not such a good idea since football vocabulary seems to be mostly filed under the letter F.
I worked in the heavy construction industry for a few years. Unfortunately the Government of the day spent all the money and I got laid off. The thing about construction is that it is seriously noisy. There are always machines running, sometimes many at once and speech is frequently impossible. Hearing people lean over and bellow in each other’s ear, this is normal.
It obviously doesn’t work when you are a deaf person. I used to make them stand back and let me lipread them. I would sometimes speak to someone at a quiet opportunity and explain that I can lipread them easily but I can’t understand at all if they shout in my ear. Some people just can’t take that idea on board, they get all hot and embarrassed. That’s their problem! But I had to deal with it, as we all do.
Noisy environments such as this and later on I worked in an engineering factory, would be no problem at all for lipreading and signing deaf people. It would never be too noisy for them even though hearing people would find it impossible to communicate at all.
There’s just one thing…. you can’t talk and work at the same time. Your attention is taken away from the job, especially if you speak with your hands!
Yvonne
December 27, 2012
It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d without a doubt donate to this outstanding blog! I guess for now i’ll settle
for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account.
I look forward to brand new updates and will talk about this site with my Facebook group.
Chat soon!
Emma
December 28, 2012
Great article – I also missed it the first time around.
I work in the NHS at a fairly senior level – but the continued ignorance astounds me – from our so-called caring profession.
I shall be sending the link to this article to as many people as I can on my return to work.