Question
When a failure to communicate happens, when is it the sender's fault, and when is it the receiver's fault?
Answer
My theory of communication is based on Wiio's law: all communication fails, except by accident. As you might expect, I've written a long-winded post about it.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/0...
I don't think you can ever really assign blame for communication failures, unless there is clear intent to fail (equivocation, lying, being "economical with the truth" etc.) I don't view these as communication failures, but as intent to not communicate.
Sometimes this can be subconscious. You are trying to communicate thought X but your subconscious hijacks it to carry thought Y instead, and the other person responds to thought Y. Or the subconscious hijack happens on the other end. A simple example is a mom looking at a mess and complaining to her child: you never pick up after yourself, I am tired of it. She may believe she is communicating the thought, please pick up your stuff, with the intention of getting the current mess cleaned up (and dealing with any resistance etc.) but she's actually whining to communicate the thought, I am a martyr, you don't appreciate how much I do for you. The kid may respond to either, neither, or both signals (I'll do it this afternoon, well you don't complain about Dad making a mess, maybe you should stop worrying so much about the mess and just take an afternoon at the spa, mom...)
Such "crossed" transactions are the subject of transactional analysis (TA) -- the famous Eric Berne Games People Play stuff. You can't really blame either side for this kind of failure. Somebody has to grow up and acquire sufficient psychological sophistication to break the game. I explore this "game break" concept a little in the link above, but I find it fundamentally uninteresting. It's a basically a sort of tedious transcript analysis of individual conversations. It's like bug-fixing.
But... continuing, I still don't think of that as genuine failure. That's just psychological software bugs that can be sorted out if it truly matters. Some bugs will be deep, requiring serious refactoring etc., while others will be shallow and fixable, at least temporarily, with a band-aid.
Genuine failure is where you want to get X across, are not in denial about whether you really want to get X across, have expressed X as clearly as you can without thought Y hijacking the words subconsciously, and have taken into account as much as you can about the other person's likely mental model about X (example, adult talking to a child taking care to talk at child's level).
If you still fail in such a case the fault can be partitioned across 3 things.
A trivial example is the juvenile joke about a guy named Hu:
You: "Who's up next at bat?"
Friend: "That's right"
You: "Huh?"
Friend: "Hu."
You: "What?"
Friend: "Hu's up at bat"
You: "That's what I said"
.... and so on.
Until one of them makes the fundamental leap (the new insight that Hu and Who sound the same, and the relevance of that fact to the conversation) there will be no progress.
You can actually generalize this. In complex negotiations, there is a better chance of a positive outcome if both sides walk in with the expectation that new knowledge will be created, instead of the expectation that knowledge will merely be traded in a poker game. Axelrod studied this in SALT II treaty negotiation transcripts in 1979 or something. I don't know if more work has been done on this.
In other words, this is the failure case, "what are we BOTH missing here?" It is sometimes useful to ask that question explicitly when you get deeply stuck. Or even to assume it: "I can't put my finger on it, but I think we're missing some critical piece here, let's table this and think about it for a while."
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/0...
I don't think you can ever really assign blame for communication failures, unless there is clear intent to fail (equivocation, lying, being "economical with the truth" etc.) I don't view these as communication failures, but as intent to not communicate.
Sometimes this can be subconscious. You are trying to communicate thought X but your subconscious hijacks it to carry thought Y instead, and the other person responds to thought Y. Or the subconscious hijack happens on the other end. A simple example is a mom looking at a mess and complaining to her child: you never pick up after yourself, I am tired of it. She may believe she is communicating the thought, please pick up your stuff, with the intention of getting the current mess cleaned up (and dealing with any resistance etc.) but she's actually whining to communicate the thought, I am a martyr, you don't appreciate how much I do for you. The kid may respond to either, neither, or both signals (I'll do it this afternoon, well you don't complain about Dad making a mess, maybe you should stop worrying so much about the mess and just take an afternoon at the spa, mom...)
Such "crossed" transactions are the subject of transactional analysis (TA) -- the famous Eric Berne Games People Play stuff. You can't really blame either side for this kind of failure. Somebody has to grow up and acquire sufficient psychological sophistication to break the game. I explore this "game break" concept a little in the link above, but I find it fundamentally uninteresting. It's a basically a sort of tedious transcript analysis of individual conversations. It's like bug-fixing.
But... continuing, I still don't think of that as genuine failure. That's just psychological software bugs that can be sorted out if it truly matters. Some bugs will be deep, requiring serious refactoring etc., while others will be shallow and fixable, at least temporarily, with a band-aid.
Genuine failure is where you want to get X across, are not in denial about whether you really want to get X across, have expressed X as clearly as you can without thought Y hijacking the words subconsciously, and have taken into account as much as you can about the other person's likely mental model about X (example, adult talking to a child taking care to talk at child's level).
If you still fail in such a case the fault can be partitioned across 3 things.
- You not taking the other's mental models into account properly (usually when this happens people are not 3-5% off, they are wildly off -- assumed-frame errors basically).
- The other simply lacking mental models capable of absorbing X (example, trying to explain differentiation/integration to somebody who hasn't yet dealt with limit-point concepts)
- A third "mystery" category -- something to do with the content of X that neither of you understands and therefore cannot accommodate. This requires new knowledge to fix.
A trivial example is the juvenile joke about a guy named Hu:
You: "Who's up next at bat?"
Friend: "That's right"
You: "Huh?"
Friend: "Hu."
You: "What?"
Friend: "Hu's up at bat"
You: "That's what I said"
.... and so on.
Until one of them makes the fundamental leap (the new insight that Hu and Who sound the same, and the relevance of that fact to the conversation) there will be no progress.
You can actually generalize this. In complex negotiations, there is a better chance of a positive outcome if both sides walk in with the expectation that new knowledge will be created, instead of the expectation that knowledge will merely be traded in a poker game. Axelrod studied this in SALT II treaty negotiation transcripts in 1979 or something. I don't know if more work has been done on this.
In other words, this is the failure case, "what are we BOTH missing here?" It is sometimes useful to ask that question explicitly when you get deeply stuck. Or even to assume it: "I can't put my finger on it, but I think we're missing some critical piece here, let's table this and think about it for a while."