This is not the article I was planning to write. But a remarkable story landed in my inbox, and I wanted to share it with you. What follows is a summary of a piece published by the Washington Post.

It was a cold January morning. A man arrived at a metro station in Washington DC, unpacked his violin and started to play. More than a thousand people passed through the station while the musician was playing, most of them on their way to work.
After three minutes, a middle-aged man noticed the violinist. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds before speeding up again.

A minute later, the violinist received his first tip: a woman threw him a dollar—without stopping.

A few minutes after that, a man leaned against a wall to listen, but then looked at his watch and started walking again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid most attention was a small boy. His mother tried to drag him away, but the child stopped to look at the violinist. Finally, his mother lost patience, literally pulling him away. This behaviour was repeated by several other children, but their parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only six people stopped to listen. About twenty gave him money, but without breaking their stride. He collected a grand total of $32. No one noticed when he stopped playing.

The musician in the subway was Joshua Bell, perhaps the world’s most celebrated violinist. During his performance, he played six compositions by Bach—known in the world of classical music for their complexity—on a Stradivarius violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days earlier, Joshua Bell had played to a sold out concert hall in Boston, where the average ticket price was $100.

Joshua Bell’s incognito concert was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment regarding perception, taste and how we prioritize.

For communication professionals, this story raises a number of fascinating issues. I’ll settle for one. We should never assume our audience is interested in what we have to say, no matter how riveting we think it is. Just as Joshua Bell’s performance was unsolicited, our audience has not asked to receive our message.

Communication all too often involves interrupting people while they’re going about their daily lives. Perhaps once in a while we could try and ask their permission.

This is the second article in a series on perception. You’ll find the first one here.