Poor Communication

I navigated the hustle and bustle of medium to large organizations over a 20+ year period, working internationally teaching leadership, project management and conducting human behaviour-based workshops.

During this period “poor communication” was constantly raised. Statements such as “What’s wrong with people, why can’t they just do as I ask” or, “… they couldn’t see what’s in front of them, it was so obvious…”, or “They just had to follow simple steps, but…”, and many other similar examples.

The main challenges lie in the delivery, the interpretation, and the mental, physical and emotional state of the parties as they communicate.

This is a conundrum that plagues every company that hires people.

Poor communication is hidden, ‘silent’ and a significant problem; it hampers the unsuspecting, creates discord, consumes time, costs money, creates rework, can destroy trust and can ruin reputations and it happens every working day.

The foundations underlying poor communication lay in being human and the complex interrelationships of the systems that make up our body and how we interact.

The Human Being:

We have been gifted with uncanny resources called Senses (Hearing, Seeing, Smelling, Touching-Feeling and Tasting) plus the capacity to imagine, contemplate and think about the information the senses present. We then use that information to physically create something or communicate our understanding of it.

The trouble is we cannot always trust our senses to work perfectly, as we go about our daily routines. In addition, our emotions and feelings (particularly in front of those in authority) can get in the way and prevent us from expressing what we are experiencing, closing the door for important information to be shared and evaluated.

All our senses are important however I wish to just look at 2 in particular that are utilised for the majority of work communication that takes place, and these are:

Seeing:

Our eyesight can’t be trusted when we are tired, stressed or anxious and considering eye-sight takes up about 83% of sensory input, it is an important factor.

We have two ways of seeing.

1)??? By using our eyes and looking at something.

2)??? By seeing images in our mind without using our eyes.

Unfortunately, the images in our minds can often take priority and blur or make opaque what we are trying to look at, especially if there are intense emotions behind the visual imagery. E.g. If there is something else happening in your life, or there are serious consequences of getting something wrong.

So, reading plans, designs, technical specifications, legal documents, reading important dials or meters, or operating equipment can be difficult and so have their risks.

Hearing:

Our hearing doesn’t seem to work too well either when we are focusing and concentrating on a task or aspect of work. We sometimes are oblivious to someone talking to us or other sounds in the environment.

Hearing represents about 11% of sensory input.

Have you ever had a colleague or a manager say or read to you something important yet you cannot recall it? (Apparently, men seem to have this problem a lot in personal relationships).

So combined, seeing and hearing represent about 94% of sensory information being received.

There is another important aspect of the brain to consider when information is being presented; to conserve energy the brain filters out information considered unimportant for processing, given what you are doing.

We all do it, no one escapes. It’s all part of being human. It also depends upon how good a mental and physical condition your health is and the levels of pressures and emotions you experience.

It’s estimated that the unconscious processing abilities of the human brain are approximately 11 million pieces of information per second. The Conscious mind is estimated at 40 - 50 pieces per second. There is good reason for such a difference in processing power.

Therefore, is it any wonder there is poor communication at work when you have 50, 100, or 200 or more people interacting with each other and very often across distances?

Often it can be the simple obvious things that are missed during our visual, written and oral communication.

I know I have mentioned this before but NASA’s famous Mars Climate orbiter crashed into Mars and was lost at an overall cost of approximately $327 Million. This was due primarily to the fact that two teams while collaborating internationally, failed to recognise one used metres,?centimetres and kilograms while the other used feet, inches and pounds.

Another unfortunate example was the Challenger, which exploded causing the deaths of the 7 astronauts on board. Concerns raised regarding the potential of colder temperatures affecting critical ‘O’ Rings failed to reach management, who had the authority to abort the mission.

It’s unfortunate but to err is human. Poor communication is a part of life and it is here to stay, it will always happen as there are too many variables. However, it’s often the small things that create the biggest problems.

Diligently focusing on validating the obvious, as part of quality assurance no matter how simple the query or question, is critical and ensuring any voiced concerns are not downplayed.

It can take an enormous amount of time, effort and energy to establish what went wrong after an event when a relatively small amount of time added to communication quality could prove very beneficial.

Until the next time

Des