Communication may seem simple, but it is one of the most complicated things that we do. The meanings of anything we say or do are not in the words or gestures that we use—those words and gestures are only symbols. Let me explain. If I use the word, “chair,” you may have something in your mind that has four legs, a back, and is used for sitting because we have agreed that is what the word “chair” means. But if I sit on the table at the front of my classroom everyday, it would not be a stretch for me to call that my chair. My class would only know what I was talking about if we had agreed upon that meaning. Although these types of agreement often go unspoken, they are critically important. The process of translating a concept that is in your mind into symbols such as words or gestures that you can share is called encoding. The process of taking those symbols that you share with me and translating them into concepts in my mind is called decoding. The process happens in an instant but is often much more complicated than we imagine and can be filled with imprecision.
“Chair” is a relatively benign example. What about “hierarchy?” Or “supervision?” Or what about the mission statement or vision statement of your workplace? When problems occur in the encoding/decoding processes, for example, when the concepts that I decode are not the same as the concepts you encoded, miscommunications occur. I think one of the most common sources of miscommunication is when I think a word means one thing and you think it means something else. Neither is “correct”—the meaning is in the people not the words, but we act as if the meaning is in the words.
Filed under: Miscommunications | Tagged: business communication, decoding, encoding, Miscommunication, symbols, workplace communication
