Why business communication gets jumbled

At last: a posting that's not about iPods or Zunes.

Jared Sandberg today has a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal noting the how messages get distorted and misinterpreted within businesses. Think that doesn't happen at your firm? Check out the way Sandberg starts his column:

The childhood diversion known as the Telephone Game, in which the details of a sentence or phrase deteriorate with each retelling of it, is played the world over. Sometimes called Whisper Down the Lane and Pass It Down, it's also played, inadvertently, in almost every corporation on the planet.

George Franks, who runs a Bethesda, Md., management-consulting group, witnessed it, appropriately enough, when he worked at a telephone company. Years ago, when the company brought in an Italian executive to improve a division, the executive suggested that the business become more international. "Before long, staff and line managers were wearing double breasted continental suits and using cigarette holders -- to emulate the executive and be more 'international,' " he says.

The reason behind this is simple:

Research suggests that "when we listen, we drop information because we can't remember every word that someone has said," says Mark Redmond, associate professor of communications studies at Iowa State University. "When we retell it, we put information back in, adding elements that may completely change the meaning of the original message."
There's a double-whammy. Not only might you recall it incorrectly, but the added stuff reflects your own ideas, he says.

Much of Blackfriars' communications methodology focuses on the fact that no matter how educated and wise we all are, we can only easily remember three to five unrelated messages or ideas from an interaction, be it an article we read, a discussion with a person, or a speech we hear. Give people more information than that, and they start throwing away ideas and concepts. Worse, they start getting confused and don't necessarily remember much of what you are trying to get across at all.

So how can you tackle this problem? We have three simple solutions:

1. Distill down any important message to three to five key ideas and focus on those.


2. Repeat these ideas at the beginning and end of your communication.


3. Don't overload the listener with extraneous information that doesn't support those ideas.

Blackfriars trains corporations on how to communicate clearly and effectively with training courses such as "Making Messages Work" and "Creating Strategic Statements" as well as consulting. We also license a piece of software that helps companies create good messages with a consistent process. If your company is lost in your own games of telephone, use your telephone to give us a call.

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