What is Communication? More than just Senders and Receivers

 

My biggest objection to the current theory of project management communication is that it is still based on a model from 1949. In the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, messages are encoded by a sender, sent through a communication channel, and then decoded by the receiver. There may be some noise in the channel that obscures part of the message and feedback (which is essentially another message trip back through the communication channel). It is a linear process which doesn’t capture the observed richness of communication.

When describing the Shannon-Weaver model to students, I use the analogy of a chess game. A player moves a chess piece on a chessboard that is observed by the opposing player. If you consider the move to be the message, you can see how player encodes their strategic intentions in the message of moving a chess piece to a particular part of the board. The opposing player answers that message with a message of their own. It is a very constrained turn-by-turn environment much like emailing and texting can be. You can communicate a great deal of meaning through email and text. However, sometimes, you need a richer way to communicate.

This is because we cannot not communicate. Even when we are not communicating, we are communicating meaning by withholding communication. As communication scholars like Philip Salem and W. Barnett Pearce have argued, people communicate to co-create meaning.

“To investigate the complexity of human communication is to examine the development of self instead of self, storytelling rather than stories¸ the emergence of trusting relationships instead of trust, and the transformational potential of conflict rather than managing conflict.” (Salem, P. (2009). The complexity of human communication. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., p. 219)

Communication, to co-create meaning, is like the many online games (such as the World of Warcraft, EVE, or Star Wars: The Old Republic). Many events are simultaneously happening which are interpreted differently by the players as the coordinate their singular personal understandings into a shared communication episode. Yes, that was a complex sentence but think about the last project meeting you had and how complex it was to communicate the project vision so that all of your project team members understood the vision. Much of your success as a project managers rests on how well you coordinate the management of meaning of the project vision.

We will continue to explore the complexity of human communication in future blog postings, but I wanted to give you the reader a foreshadowing of where I am going with my exploration of project management communication.