Communication is hard.
Despite our best efforts, people sometimes just don’t get what we are trying to say. This can be frustrating. You sometimes end up feeling “I’ve said what I wanted to say - whether they understand or not is up to them. It’s not my problem.”
Well, it kind of is!
If the objective of communication is to transmit an idea from your brain into other peoples’ brains, communication isn’t complete until people understand you.
A popular game in communication training is some version of Chinese Whispers. What the game illustrates is the extent to which a message can change when it is sequentially communicated across a chain of people.
While that is fascinating (or shocking) the root cause is the inherent imperfection in the human communication process.
This can be best understood by looking at this simple model.
Ideally, we want communication to work this way :
what I wish to convey = what you understand
In reality, there is a significant gap, which can be understood as follows:
what I wish to convey <gap> what i put in words <gap> what i actually say <gap> what the other person hears <gap> what they understand
Without going into the details, the gaps at each of the stages might arise from a combination of personal factors (such as quality of thinking, language skills, clarity of speech, listening skills, quality of attention etc) as well as environmental factors (distractions, noise, activity etc)
What this means is, for communication to be effective, you have to focus not just on the message you intend to convey, but also on how you convey it effectively, so people understand it as you intended.
Part of addressing these gaps is purely internal - how you think, how you structure your thoughts into words, how you speak. This is where your thinking, communication and planning skills can be used effectively to reduce the gap to the extent possible.
Other parts are internal to the receiver of the communication (paying attention, listening skills, making sense). It might appear that you have no influence on any of these. However, there is a shared platform for addressing these gaps - the interaction.
Effective communicators collaboratively increase the likelihood of the right message being received.
The key things you can do in the interaction to increase the effectiveness of communication are
- Infer - sometimes the other person will respond - by asking questions or by verbalising their understanding. This can give you clues as to whether the message is landing as you intended.
- Observe - look for non-verbal signals that indicate attention, understanding and also the meaning they make. For example if you see an indication of anger, and you do not expect that from the content of your message, it is likely that they are making sense of it in a different way than you intended or anticipated.
- Ask - ask questions to check they have heard what you said and also to test their understanding.
Effective communicators also make the invisible visible. They make their thinking transparent, and encourage and support others to share their thought process as well. They do this by balancing advocacy and inquiry, while also using frameworks like the ladder of inference to make explicit the data, assumptions, evaluations, and beliefs that both parties are using to make sense of the message.
A significant part of communicating effectively is ensuring your message is understood by others as you intended. While there are a number of factors that influence this, and not all are within your control, effective communicators maximize the likelihood of their message being understood by planning ahead, by paying attention to others as they listen, and by collaborating to create shared understanding.