– See All Project Management Key Concepts –
Communication Models in your Project
What are communication models? They represent the communication process, ranging from a basic “sender to receiver” model, to a more interactive model of communication, and we’ll look at both. This is the sort of thing that you will come across in an MBA or a business course, and certainly you will need to know for your project management career.
Basic Communication Example
Here’s a brief example, where we’ve got the sender on one side, and the receiver on the other side, we’re encoding the message and transmitting that message, and there might be some noise in between. The receiver has to decode that message through their current emotional state – through the things that are going on in their lives, their personal biases or assumptions that they might have (which we all have).
Of course when we’re encoding a message we’re putting that into a message as well, and that’s a really good example of the basic sender receiver communication model. It’s a process that consists of two parties, defined as the sender and defined as the receiver. And there are a few things that go on in this basic model. First of all the sender encodes the message – they’re using their words, or they’re using symbols, for example words on a page, or if it was ancient Egypt it would be hieroglyphs.
How are we communicating and sending that message? We’re transmitting the message from me to whoever reads it in the end. Now in between, when it’s being transmitted it can come against noise so in the message. Then lastly the person who receives the message has to decode it, and that’s translated by the receiver back into a form that’s useful to that receiver.
When we look at it that way we can be much more careful about the way we communicate to people so that everybody understands.
Interactive Model Example
Now there is an interactive model as well, and this can help with understanding a message. Basically it’s the same as the basic model – we’ve got two parties, the sender and the receiver, but it recognizes the need to ensure that the message has been understood. So there’s a check here, basically upon receipt of the message the receiver might acknowledge that they received it. You might be nodding your head as you’re talking to someone, or if someone gets an email you might say “Thank you very much I’ve got that email,” and so that that doesn’t necessarily mean an agreement, but it just means that they received it.
Now after that they would provide a feedback or a response to the message, so we’re acknowledging, saying “I understand, and here’s what I think about it,” so they respond with their own thoughts and ideas into that message and then they transmit that message back to the original sender.
Now let me give you a quick example from Procter & Gamble, this is from the book “Playing to Win” by Alan Lafley, a wonderful book. He talks about something called “The Assertive Inquiry,” that they used. This is where in the boardroom they said, “This is the way I see it, and do you see it the same way?” So am I missing anything by doing that? in other words, this is everything that I see, these are my thoughts and views, they’re sending that message out and then they’re asking directly for feedback and a response. So they’re not waiting, someone doesn’t have to have that model already ingrained in their in their system, they’re asking for that feedback – “Do you see it the same way as I see it? What have I missed?” By doing that they were actually able to really improve their communication and get more information from people than they might have been given you know under usual circumstances. That’s the assertive inquiry from Procter & Gamble.
And that is communication models from the PMBOK guide.
– David McLachlan