Sunday, November 11, 2012
Up/Down-ward communication
One
of the concepts that I found interesting was concept of Downward and Upward communication
(p.206-207).
I completely agree that there are some problems with downward
communication, as within communication process itself. Nevertheless, author
shows that there are couple ways to improve accuracy during serial
transmission. There are two key things that help to be more accurate:
redundancy and clarification. I’m familiar with a situation that took place in
one trucking company, when lack of initiative and unwillingness to clarify
information cost a lot to driver. It happened on Friday. Driver gave a call to
his dispatcher and asked till what time receiver point worked. So dispatch
replied “by 6Pm”. There was about 1000 miles between shipper and receiver
points. Next day dispatch got call from the driver, who was very stressed up.
After some clarification dispatch found, that driver interpreted “by 6Pm” as if
he would need to be at receiver point next day by 6Pm. Finally they both
understood what was wrong in this situation. Driver didn’t clarified
information and dispatch wasn’t redundant on informational level. When I heard
this story I caught myself thinking that I could’ve done the same. That is why
one of the main task for my life is constant improving in communication
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You know, this is pretty huge and people take this concept for granted. This essentially describes miscommunication. This happens so much in the workplace. It might seem annoying to some people to have things repeated frequently but it does reduce error in the end. Clarification is huge! We have learned that language is symbolic and clarification helps reduce the confusion that may come up in conversation. With all of the slang we have in our culture- it might be a reason we would potentially see words and phrases differently then others. So I do agree with you that clarification and redundancy reduce miscommunication.
ReplyDelete