Tower of Babel of Digital Communication Part III: Taking Satisfactory Action

The last two levels of our digital communication Tower of Babel involve taking action and ensuring that the action taken is satisfactory. Therefore, our last two level specific challenges a message must overcome to finally be effectively communicated are: 5) People understand the message’s meaning but fail to take action and 6) People take action, but that action is unsatisfactory. The previous areas covered Attention and Recognition, as well as Language and Meaning.

People understand the meaning but fail to take action

Often, despite completely understanding a message, people will simply choose to ignore that message and move on. This phenomenon is called “online silence” and it occurs for several different reasons. For example, the individual who received the message may be addressing a more important message. Or, even more frustrating, the recipient may be addressing a less important message that somehow managed to better grab his or her attention. Alternatively, due to the overflow of messaging, the individual may have opened the message but lacked the time to respond.

Solution: Group agreements

The best solution to this problem involves getting the corporation or organization to look within. Employees should meet to discuss the issues surrounding communications and hopefully agree to decrease messaging traffic. For example, people can discuss decreasing the amount of CCs or cautiously considering whether or not an email is absolutely necessary. This type of conversation can present firms with a unique opportunity to take the first step to ameliorate the problem by attacking it at one of its sources while ensuring communications are taken seriously.

People take action but that action is unsatisfactory...[read more]