Understanding Communication

Sarfaraz K Niazi (e-mail niazi@niazi.com)

Scores of successful consumer books on the reasons and the art of communication crowd the long bookshelves of Borders and Barnes & Nobles; many of them runaway best sellers of their time. Commercial returns aside, most of these books add little to our understanding about what is communication? Not to overburden the cliches already in place comparing computers to humans, I must offer an analogy of how computers "communicate" with each other. Devoid of the cacophony of vocal sounds, they must rely on electronic signals sent either as sharp pitched tones or burst of light (fiber optic); however, the machines at the two ends must understand what is being communicated and for that the industry has developed what they call a protocol (they should have used the word language instead). Without flaw the two machines at the ends of a long wire, thousands of mile away get the same "message."

Now coming back to humans, we find that our method of communicating is no different from what we have constructed for computers; the flaw starts in not being able to judge what "protocol" the other person understands and also what is the ability of the other person to absorb the communication bits (no pun intended here). Clouding the matter further is our inability to first communicate with ourselves as to what is it that we are trying to communicate. In fact, I will put the second aspect more pivotal in causing lack of communication. Not understanding what we want to communicate, is partly a result of us not understanding and partly not being sure of what we want to say. Communication has to have a purpose, a goal to be achieved at the end of a communication exercise, an end point, if you will. When we tell others to do something, we are not sharing with them our goals, we are telling them our objectives; it is quite easy for others not to see our goals at all and thus receive instructions to follow objectives quite differently. The best way to assure that a message gets communicated is to first get the person receiving the message understand why you are communicating—the goal. The objective can then be given later.

The goal of this writing is to make you realize that the total responsibility of not being able to communicate rests with the person initiating communication; the objective of this exercise is to practice talking to ourselves as to what is that we want to communicate.