Welcome to February.
By now, the term has picked up and deliverables are flying by as we struggle to balance our time. If you are struggling, try taking some of my advice about scheduling from the January 18th Issue of The Iron Warrior. This production weekend ran close to being on schedule. Most copy editing was completed by Saturday afternoon, the layout was mostly done by the end of Sunday afternoon, and a draft was sent out at a reasonable time on Sunday evening. Unfortunately, due to space constraints, some articles had to be postponed to a later issue.
As living beings, communication is very important. In the basic sense, most creatures communicate in some way or another. Wolves communicate socially with body language and audible noises to establish social dynamics. It is well established that dolphins communicate vocally and physically. Even bees communicate through dance and odour to recruit other worker bees to collect nutrients.
Communication has always been extremely important to humans. Humans start communicating as babies by crying when they need something and smiling when they are happy. The ability to speak is considered a great milestone and a memorable moment in the development of a child. Humans spend a large amount of their lives developing communication skills. The number of languages and quality of communication is considered a sign of intelligence. The ability to communicate effectively for the purposes of relationship-forming is considered a desirable social trait by the majority. Furthermore, the ability to communicate diplomatically has always been important for survival.
Human communication is becoming increasingly important in modern society. The current era is considered the information era. Since information must be communicated, communications skills are required for career success. As the average person increases their communication abilities, it also makes communication more important than ever for societal success. Communication has become so important to humans that a large amount of resources is spent developing ways to help those who have impairments that hinder their ability to communicate. It is no longer acceptable in human society for a person or group to avoid communication with others.
The ability for professionals to communicate technically accurate information is imperative. Many accidents happen every year due to failures in communication. Several space vehicles have failed to land on mars due to either a specification inconsistency or a failure to correctly convey units of measurement among people. Plane crashes can be caused by communication failures between pilots and ground control or between different maintenance personnel. Failure to correctly communicate building instructions has resulted in structural failures and near misses.
There are several reasons why communication failures occur. One reason is due to technical misunderstanding. If information is presented to somebody in a technical manner beyond their understanding, that person may misinterpret the information. For example, a student may write down an algorithm to solve a problem but not understand the limit to the set of problems that algorithm works on. To solve this, the communicator should explicitly indicate the target audience, and the person receiving the information should ensure they are within that target audience. Similarly, an inability to understand how to communicate a certain thought can result in a person to simply ignore communicating it. The person transmitting should work with the receiver in order to gain feedback and refine their communication until it can be accurately understood by the receiver. A person should not give up in communicating or receiving information. They should, simply, work to be receive and communicate effectively.
Now to the point. Willingness to communicate or receive information is one of the most difficult barriers to communication. The unwillingness to receive is primarily due to the information being communicated conflicting with the information the receiver already believes to be true. A person should not believe all information presented to them. However, a person should take the time to consider all the information presented to them. Unless this person can prove that the information they know is more accurate than the information that is being distributed to them, this person should consider accepting the information until they can prove it is incorrect. Politics and personal beliefs are acceptable reasons to personally believe something, but should never be used as a component of professional reasoning. Is ignoring reasoning for personal and political beliefs a good decision? (Send your opinions as a letter to the editor.)
Willingness to communicate is also a large barrier in communication. A person often believes that they should not communicate their thoughts because the receiver already knows more than them. A person may avoid communicating important information because they don’t want to offend the person they are communicating with. A person may also not want to communicate unimportant information because of time constraints to deal with the problem or financial constraints in dealing with fixing it.
Questioning information you are uncertain about is important. You may be unsure because the person communicating it to you made an error. If it is important to your work and you don’t understand it, you should ask questions to improve your understanding. Providing input of any sort into a discussion will, if nothing else, stimulate other people who are thinking of new ideas.
If one is worried that questioning or providing information to another person may result in tension, there are ways to reduce this. Part of good communication skills is knowing when and how to communicate. When is easy. Communication should occur at the next natural break in the incoming information stream (eg. when the person pauses). If there is no break within a short period of time, motion that you have information to present. This can be done by putting up your hand or just asking if you can make a comment. If this is a large room, make sure you ask if you can make a comment before actually doing so. This will give the person presenting information a sense of control, whereas blurting out a comment will make the presenter feel like s/he is losing control of the audience. This is part of the how. Remember that communicating the information is more important than telling the other person that they are wrong. By doing this, and letting the other person feel like they are in control, they will often be more open to listening.
A good method of conveying concern about a certain item is by doing so indirectly. Ask the person who is responsible for the information if they can explain it to you. This will often bring them to discovering their own mistakes. If they still don’t see their mistake, a person should narrow down the scope of what you are asking them to explain. For example: A person should ask a math professor how he gets from line two to three instead of how he gets the solution.
The final tool to use when questioning a person’s information is to use sentences that start with ‘I’. An example of a sentences that doesn’t start with ‘I’ is, “you missed a ‘2’ in that step.” A good example is more like, “I think there might be another ‘2’ in step three.” Make sure to notice the complete lack of the word ‘you’ in that example. A sentence like, “I think you missed a ‘2’ in step 3,” is not nearly as good of an option. For best results, one should avoid ‘you’ whenever practicable. By wording sentences like this, one shows interest in collaborating toward a solution and not placing blame for any mistakes along the way. Sentences worded like this are also a good tool to solving personal arguments.
By using these communication strategies in real life, a person can reduce conflicts and improve their contributions.
Best of luck to those starting midterms this week.
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