BUS605: Strategic Project Management

Now with a basic overview of the communication process under our belts, troubleshooting miscommunication becomes a matter of locating where in the cyclical exchange of messages lies the problem: with the sender and the message they put together, the receiver and their feedback message, or the channel in the context of the environment between them. Identifying the culprit can help avoid one of the most costly errors in any business. According to Susan Washburn, communication problems can lead to:

• Conflict, damaged relationships, and animosity within an office and lost business with clients
• Productivity lost and resources wasted fixing problems that could have been avoided with proper communication
• Inefficiency in taking much longer to do tasks easily completed with better communication, leading to delays and missed deadlines
• Missed opportunities
• Unmet objectives due to unclear or shifting requirements or expectations

Let's examine some of these in the real and imagined scenarios below:
If the receiver of the above "I'm hungry" message responded with something like "Yes, and I'm Romania," to the sender the receiver would appear for a moment to have misunderstood the message as it was intended, though indeed the receiver did but chose to respond in a way that plays with the unintended possible misinterpretation of "hungry" as the homophone (a word that sounds the same as another completely different word) "Hungary," a European country next to Romania. Part of the beauty and fun of language is that words - especially spoken ones - can have multiple meanings, which means that senders must be careful to anticipate potential misinterpretations of their messages due to carelessness towards ambiguities. In any case, once the joke is understood, the first sender can rest assured that the feedback message still confirms that the first message was understood, which is the end goal of communication.

Most jokes toy with communication breakdowns in harmless ways, but when breakdowns happen unintentionally in professional situations where opportunities, money, and reputations are on the line, their serious costs make them no laughing matter. Take, for instance, the misplaced comma that cost Rogers Communications $1 million in a contract dispute over New Brunswick telephone poles or the absence of an Oxford comma that cost Oakhurst Dairy $10 million in a Maine labour dispute. In both cases, everyone involved would have preferred to continue with business as usual rather than sink time and resources into protracted legal and labour disputes all stemming from a mere misplaced or missing comma. To avoid costly miscommunication in any business or organization, senders and receivers must be diligent in fulfilling their communication responsibilities and be wary of potential misunderstandings throughout the communication cycle outlined above.

Source: Jordan Smith, https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/communicationatwork/chapter/1-4-troubleshooting-miscommunication/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.