Now with a basic overview of the communication process (see §1.3 above) under our belts, troubleshooting miscommunication becomes a matter of locating where in the cyclical exchange of messages lies the problem. Is it with the sender and their original message, the receiver and their feedback message, or the channel in the context of the environment between them and any potential noise that can interrupt or interfere with the message? Might it be a combination? Identifying the culprit or culprits can help avoid one of the most costly errors in any business. According to Susan Washburn (2008), 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

All of these can and do affect the bottom line in any organization. By examining some of the above consequences in the real and imaged scenarios below, you can appreciate how miscommunication is funny at best, usually annoying, and expensive at worst.

First, if the receiver of the “I’m hungry” message from §1.3 above 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. In all likelihood, the receiver understood the sentence but, joking around, chose to respond in a way that demonstrates a willful misinterpretation of “hungry” as the homophone (a word that sounds the same as another completely different word) “Hungary,” a European nation 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, however annoying the response may be, especially if the sender was actually hangry (hungry + angry).

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 $5 million in a Maine labour dispute (“The Commas That Cost Companies Millions,” 2018, paras. 4-8, 36-41). In both cases, everyone involved would have preferred to continue with business as usual rather than sink time and resources into years-long legal and labour disputes all stemming from a single 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 in §1.3 above.

• 1.4.1: Sender-related Miscommunication
• 1.4.2: Channel-related Miscommunication
• 1.4.3: Receiver-related Miscommunication

(Ted-Ed, 2016)

1.4.1: Sender-related Miscommunication

The responsibility of the sender of a message is to make understanding the intended meaning as easy as possible. If work must be done to get your point across, it is on you as the sender to do all you can to achieve that goal. Mind you, the receiver also has responsibilities that we’ll examine below, but listening and reading are not necessarily as labour-intensive as composing a message in either speech or writing. This is why grammar, punctuation, and even document design in written materials, as well as excellent conversational and presentation skills in person, are so important: sender errors in these aspects of communication are noise (to use the Osgood-Schramm terminology from §1.3 above) that lead to readers’ and audiences’ confusion and frustration. Yes, noise can originate not just from the environment between a sender and receiver, but from within a sender or receiver themselves. Noise that originates from within you as a sender just gets in the way of receivers understanding the meaning you intended. If you as the sender of messages fails to anticipate your receivers’ needs and misses the target of writing or saying the right thing in the right way to get your messages across, you bear the responsibility for miscommunication and would benefit from paying close attention to the lessons throughout this textbook to help get back on target.

If you as a sender have any doubt that your message is being understood, it’s also your responsibility to check in to make sure. If you are giving a presentation, for instance, you can employ several techniques to help ensure that your audience stays with you:

• Ensure that they can properly hear you by projecting your voice so that even the people in the back row can hear you properly; check that they can by asking if they can hear you just fine.
• Get them involved and engaged by asking for a show of hands on a topical question.
• Ask them to ask questions if they don’t understand anything; make them feel at ease to ask questions by saying that there are no stupid questions and that if a question occurs to any one of them, others may have the same question.
• Flag important points and, several minutes later, ask your audience to summarize them back to you when you are relating them to another major point.
• Read the room: if you see telltale signs of confusion in your audience’s faces such as furrowed brows and squinting eyes, explain your point again in simpler terms. If you see telltale signs of boredom such as your audience’s eyes glazing over or switching attention to their mobile devices, make what you’re saying more interesting by spicing up what you say and how you say it.

1.4.2: Channel-related Miscommunication

Errors can also be blamed on noise in the medium of the message such as the technology that conveys it and the environment—some of which can slide back to choices the sender makes, but others are out of anyone’s control. If you need to work out the terms of a sale with a supplier a few towns over before you draw up the invoice and time is of the essence, sending an email and expecting a quick response would be foolish when (a) you have no idea if anyone’s there to respond right away, and (b) you would potentially need to go back and forth over the terms; this exchange could potentially take days, but you only have an hour. The smart move is instead to phone the supplier so that you can have a quick back-and-forth. If you need to, you could also text the supplier to say that you’re calling to hammer out the details before writing it up. Of course, you wouldn’t call using a cellphone from inside a parking garage because blame for problems with the reception (or interference) would slide back on you for not positioning yourself appropriately given the available environments. If phone lines and the internet are down due to equipment malfunction (despite paying your bills and buying trustworthy equipment), however rare that might be, the problem is obviously out of your hands and lies in the environment at large. Otherwise, it’s entirely up to you to use the right channels the correct way in the environments best suited to clear communication to get the job done.

1.4.3: Receiver-related Miscommunication

Though the word “receiver” makes their role sound like it is a passive recipient of messages, the receiver must do almost as much work as the sender in achieving the goal of shared understanding. First, the receiver’s job is to be receptive to a message, which means not only putting themselves in a position to receive messages but eliminating any noise that comes from within themselves that might obscure a perfectly clear message coming in. From there, it’s ultimately the receiver’s responsibility to actively read or listen to not only the message itself but also to understand the nuances of that message in context.

Say you are a relatively recent hire at a company and are vying for a promotion for the excellent work you’ve been doing lately. It’s 11:45am, you just crossed paths with your manager in the hallway, and she’s the one saying “I’m hungry” (to use the example from above). That statement is the primary message, which simply describes how the speaker feels. However, if she says it in a manner that, with nonverbals as secondary messages such as eyebrows raised signalling interest in your response and a nod of her head towards the exit, implies an invitation to join her for lunch, you would be foolish not to add these cues and the context together to determine the correct course of action. This could well be a professional opportunity worth pursuing! If you respond instead with “Well, enjoy your lunch!” and proceed to have lunch alone at your desk, scrolling on your phone as you usually do, your manager would probably question your social intelligence. She would have good reason to wonder whether you would be able to capitalize on opportunities with clients when cues similarly line up for business opportunities that would benefit your company. However, if you reply, “I’m starving, too. May I join you for lunch? I’d like to try that place around the corner,” you would correctly interpret auxiliary messages such as your manager’s intention to assess your professionalism outside of the traditional office environment.

Say you arrive at the lunch spot with your manager and sit down to eat, but it’s too noisy to hear each other clearly. Though this is an environmental problem like those described above in §1.4.2, you would be equally foolish to use this noise as an excuse not to talk and instead just default to whipping out your phone and scrolling social media in front of her. In this case, you would share blame with the environment for a disappointing communication breakdown. You could instead accommodate her need to hear you by raising your voice, but the optics of you shouting at your manager also looks bad. Rather, if you cite the competing noise as a reason to move to a quieter spot where you can converse with her in a way that displays the polish of your manners and ultimately positions you nicely for the promotion, she would understand that you have the social intelligence to control the environmental conditions in ways that prioritize effective communication.

Of course, so much more noise can come from within the receiver. In general, they may lack the knowledge to understand your message; if this is because you fail to accommodate their situation or level of knowledge—perhaps because you use formal language and big, fancy words they don’t understand because they are relatively early in the EAL (English as an additional language) learning process—then the blame shifts back to you because you can do something about it. You could instead use more plain, easy-to-understand language. If your audience is a co-worker who should know what you’re talking about when you use the jargon and acronyms of your profession, but they don’t because they’re in the wrong position and out of their depth, the problem is with the receiver (and perhaps the hiring process for onboarding someone who is underqualified for the job).

(Viva La Dirt League, 2020)

Another source of noise coming from the receiver may have to do with attitude. Consider a student who believes they don’t really need to take a class in Communications because they’ve been speaking English for 19 years, thinks their high school English classes were a complete joke, and figures they’ll do just fine working out how to communicate in the workplace on their own. The problem with this receiver is overconfidence in a fixed mindset that prevents them from committing to the growth mindset necessary to learn and take direction (Farnham Street, 2015; Dweck, 2008). Carried into the workplace, such arrogance could prevent them from actively listening to customers and managers, and they would most likely fail until they develop the right mindset and necessary active listening skills to succeed, as explained in the next section (§1.5). Employers appreciate employees who can solve problems on their own, but not those who are unable to take direction.

The picture emerging here is one in which many factors must come together to achieve the successful communication of intended meaning. The responsibility of reaching the goal of shared understanding in the communication process requires the full cooperation of both the sender and receiver of a message to make the right choices, do the work, and avoid all the perils—personal and situational—that lead to costly miscommunication. Understanding the communication process helps you diagnose the causes of miscommunication, which in turn helps you prescribe the right solutions.