Communication, like Beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Our modern society enables a range of mechanisms for communication between people that has never before been seen in human history. We have all the traditional mechanisms, from face to face conversations, to written letters/memos, to signs/posters/etc. on everything from billboards to bulletin boards. In the last century, we have added a host of electronic mechanisms. We have phones and audio (radio, recordings, etc.) and video (television, video tapes, video disks, and so on). Most recently, we added everything that the Internet and the digital revolution has developed. We have email, texting, Facebook updates (not to mention countless other social networks), Tweets, and on and on.

All of this presents a challenge for executives, managers, professionals, or any person who needs to regularly communicate with a wide range of people in forums ranging from individual exchanges to mass delivery of a message. People are people and as such typically have preferences for how they communicate to others and how they receive communications. Urgent emails to someone who by their nature prefers to make and receive phone calls may go unread until well after what ever matter was "urgent" has long past. Disemination of online video training materials may have little impact upon an audience that learns better through interactive face-to-face classroom-style training.

Only in recent years have studies in corporate culture, management, and organization begun to look at the issues of communication mechanisms in businesses. The results so far have typically been the acknowledgement that executives and managers need to develop and retain a greater awareness of the communication preferences of their colleagues, superiors, and subordinates. This objective of greater awareness of communication preferences is often embedded within the larger issue of emotional intelligence or understanding Myers-Briggs personality types. While a Myer-Briggs profile may inform you as to how to construct your communication to an individual, it doesn't explicitly suggest what medium to use for the communication. One could infer that Introverts may prefer indirect mechanisms such as email or texting while Extroverts may prefer face-to-face or a phone call, but that is not necessarily the case.

As convergence of digital media continues and more companies move to integrated messaging systems, such systems need to incorporate tools to collect preference information about how individuals prefer to receive communications and empower all users of such systems to use that preference information when composing and sending communications. An urgent email could be synthesized to a voice message and delivered to the phone of someone who prefers to receive messages by phone. There are unified messaging systems already on the market that provide such capabilities. What is still lacking is the institutional recognition of the importance of communication preference in the optimal delivery of information in today's large organizations.

It remains a call to action for Human Resource organizations and executives across today's businesses and institutions to raise awareness of communications as an area of organizational development. IT leaders can aid in profiling the available mechanisms for communications with their organizations and which mechanisms are best suited for which types of communications. Human Resources can ensure that education on communications styles and preferences are a clear part of their existing professional and organizational development programs and incorporate IT guidance on available tools into their materials. Through these and other approaches, enhancing real communication and information exchange, one of the largest unaddressed problems in today's corporate environments, can be addressed, improved, and turned from obstacle into opportunity.