Stephen Billing’s Blog

In my last post I described the sender receiver model of communication and said that thinking this way about communication was a reason why we have communication breakdowns, and why, when they occur, they are so hard to repair. I said that when you see communication as a sender and a receiver in this way, a misunderstanding can only be resolved by identifying which party made a mistake, or which parties made which mistakes. Admission of mistakes like this is hard for people to do, which means it is hard to resolve breakdowns in communication.

What is the alternative?

Ralph Stacey introduced me to the thinking of George Herbert Mead, who, early in the twentieth century pointed out what I have found to be a very useful alternative to seeing communication as a message transmitted between sender and receiver. Mead talks about meaning in interaction as being co-created through a process of gesture and response. Gesture means words, actions, facial expressions and so on, and the response to the gesture creates the meaning of that gesture, at the same time as it is being generated by the gesture.

How is this different from sender / receiver? Well, one difference is that the message has no intrinsic meaning of itself.

If I yell at you, you could take it as a warning that a car is coming and thank me, or as an insult and yell back at me. There is no intrinsic meaning held in the yell itself, and neither of us knows the meaning of it until you respond. Of course, I have intention in yelling, but the meaning we make of it together is not known until the response is given. And of course the response itself is also a gesture calling forth its own response. So, communication can be seen as a continuing process of making meaning through these gestures and responses.

Rather than transmitting meaning from one person to another we are jointly communicating meaning. The response gives the gesture meaning – there is no inherent meaning in the gesture alone.

In this way of thinking, you have to consider both the gesture and the response together as the unit of communication. Thinking this way, your attention is drawn to the meaning made of the gesture/response together, not how the sender’s intention differed from the message decoded by the receiver.

Here’s another example.

The statement “the cost is $10,000” is a very familiar occurrence in a range of settings, from financial (e.g. budgeting or financial reporting), to sales (negotiating a price).  A response of “That’s too much” gives a very different meaning to the interaction compared to a response of “Should we accrue that amount?” 

When I was first introduced to Mead’s notion of the conversation of gesture / response, I thought it was an academic concept of not much value. In fact I thought it was quite a difficult concept to grasp of extremely questionable value. I have now changed my tune completely.

So why is this such a useful way of viewing communication?

It is useful because it completely transforms the nature of what you think communication is. Instead of looking at the sender or receiver as being at fault, our attention is drawn to the meaning that we are making together in this situation. Communication becomes a process of joint inquiry in which we are both, together, making meaning of our situation, drawing on your unique background and understanding, and my unique background and understanding.

For leaders, taking this perspective completely eliminates the need to see employees as expressing resistance to change when they question a change initiative. Why? Because when employees ask questions, they are responding to gestures made by the leader, perhaps at a roadshow presentation, perhaps in a company newsletter or any other setting. This does not mean that the leaders have given the message poorly, or that the employees are resistant. The questions from the employees are the responses to the gestures made by the leaders, which lead to further gestures and responses in a never-ending process out of which meaning is constantly emerging.

When you take this perspective, communication is seen as a joint inquiry, in which both parties are accountable to each other for the meaning they are taking from the interaction. Meaning is constantly evolving through the conversation of gestures and responses. Each response is itself a gesture that calls forth a response. In this process the views of both parties can change.

And that is the exciting thing – it helps you avoid getting stuck blaming each other when communication doesn’t seem to be going the way you would like it to.

This view of communication has been very significant for me and others who have explored it. I would be very interested in your response to this gesture. That will enable us to make meaning together.

So please feel free to post questions or comments. 

Illustration by Martin Coates

Shannon and Weaver’s influential formulation in 1949 of the conduit or sender receiver model of communication constitutes the dominant model of communication. The sender encodes a message which is sent to the receiver who decodes the message. If the sender has encoded accurately, and the receiver has decoded accurately, then clear communication is said to have taken place.

Other factors that can be considered include the channel of communication – face to face, telephone, email etc, and also environmental factors which are considered as noise, and can detract from the clarity of transmission of the message. In this way of thinking about communication, the meaning of it is understood to be held in the message, and is to be decoded by the receiver.

It is known as the conduit metaphor because of the focus on the successful transmission of a message, almost like it was going down a pipe.

This way of looking at communication pervades our thinking on the topic in most areas of organisational life, from information technology and its evolution into knowledge management which concentrates on how these messages can be stored, accessed and decoded at a later date, to cybernetic and computer based models of how humans store, access and extract meaning from these messages.

The goal of communication is understood to be the transfer of meaning from the sender to the receiver with minimum spillage  in the process, to use Eisenberg’s term from his 2007 book Strategic Ambiguities.

The problems of communication are understood to be accurate coding and decoding by the sender and receiver respectively, limitations in the channel of communication, and problems with noise from the environment contaminating the communication. In practical terms, this means that when something goes wrong with face to face communication then we have no alternative but to consider either the sender as having erred in the encoding or else the receiver to have misunderstood the message. Either way one party is at fault.

I believe that this is one of the reasons that breakdowns in communication are so difficult to resolve. For there to be resolution, then one party or the other has to admit that they did something wrong, and this is hard to do.

The sender receiver model of communication is pervasive throughout the western business world. It seems to make logical sense. It fits with our view of ourselves as autonomous individuals making rational choices to bring about our intentions – if we can communicate our intentions clearly as senders, then we will be better leaders and get what we want in the world.

I have come to the belief that one of the reasons communication breakdowns occur is because of our faulty way of seeing communication as the transmission of meaning. And the sender receiver model is also a large part of the reason that we find it hard to repair communication breakdowns. In other words, our very way of thinking about communication in terms of sender and receiver is responsible for miscommunication and the difficulty in resolving miscommunication.

But what is the alternative? For years there seemed to me to be no satisfactory alternative, until Ralph Stacey introduced me to the work of George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher writing in the early twentieth century.

More about this in the next post.

If managers are attempting to facilitate change they must be thinking about who is talking to whom and paying attention to what is new in the conversation during the session. Often members of the group in facilitated workshops do not talk to each other, but rather to the facilitator or to the flipchart – this can also be a problem in therapy groups as well; Yalom points out that the members should “freely interact rather than direct all their comments to or through the therapist.” 

Watch out for facilitators who set up the activities of the group so that they have no choice but to think of ideas to write on a flipchart or to answer the facilitator’s questions, addressing the facilitator and the group but not taking up each other’s ideas. 

What do I mean? Consider the activity of breaking a large group up into small groups, a tactic often used by facilitators in organisational settings. These smaller groupings may be determined in advance by the manager and facilitator, based on who they want to have work together. I’ve seen these groupings indicated in advance on charts with coloured symbols. Alternatively, the groupings could be self-selected on the day. 

The small groups are usually given some form of activity to perform such as answering a series of questions, generating ideas or solving a problem. The results of the small group activity are often recorded on flipchart paper. It is common for the facilitator to get the small groups to present their flipchart ideas back to the larger group.  This is an example of what I mean by talking to the flipchart.

Why? Because group members end up telling the large group what is on their flipchart. The presentation may be relatively interesting or rather dull, depending on the skills of the presenter and the nature of the content. But either way, it is not a lively conversation amongst the participants of the group, it is a one way presentation from the presenter. There is no dialogue going on. 

Here’s the problem. The intention of this activity is to summarise the main points of the small group conversation, which was a conversation between a specific small group of people in a specific situation. The underlying taken-for-granted assumption is that the meaning of the small group conversation can be transferred to the large group through the use of these summaries. 

This is classic sender / receiver model communication where the large group conversation involves the transmission of messages from the small groups. But I think the large group discussion is actually a new conversation and a new situation with a different, specific, although larger group of people in a new situation. The new situation is the big group discussion. The experience of the past conversation in the small group is part of the history that led to the large group conversation but cannot be replayed. 

Recognising that the meaning of the small group exchanges cannot be extracted and summarised for the larger group changes the facilitator’s intentions. It also changes the intentions of the manager hiring the facilitator. To what? 

Managers must consider how their workshop will seed new conversations amongst the group. This means the facilitator could note that participants can read the flipchart for themselves, and ask what the small group talked about. It is noticeable when facilitators do this how often the group say that the important part of their discussion was not recorded on the flipchart at all. 

Recognising the ‘messy’ and repetitive nature of conversation the facilitator can also encourage responses in the large group conversation rather than waiting for questions at the end. This sort of debrief is much easier in a circle or around a table where participants can all see each other rather than in theatre style or other seating arrangements where people cannot see each other. 

Managers facing times of change should not worry about what participants say to the flipchart, but what they say to each other. 

What do you think? 

Yalom I, 2005, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy 5th Edition, Cambridge, MA: Basic Books. Page 124.