In a 2006 article titled ‘The Curse of Knowledge’ in Harvard Business Review , authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath described this experiment: "In 1990, a Stanford University graduate student in psychology, Elizabeth Newton, ran a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: ‘tapper’ or ‘listener’. Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as Happy Birthday , and tap out the rhythm. The listener’s job was to guess the song.
Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5 per cent. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted a 50 per cent success rate. Tappers got their message across one time in 40, but they thought they would get it across one time in two. Why?"
This has come to be called the ‘Tappers and Listeners phenomenon’. I’ve been playing this game with educator-leaders over the past few weeks, and it’s intriguing to see tappers amazed that their listener-partners didn’t get the ‘simple’ tune they had tapped. While the tune is clear to the tapper, the listeners stand bemused at the ‘cacophony’ they hear. Tappers often react by tapping harder and then roll their eyes when there isn’t a positive response.
An interesting game, that is played out every day in homes, classrooms, cubicles, conference calls and meeting rooms across the world. This is a problem that plagues several leaders. They think that when they speak, send an email, issue a memo or hold a town hall, their listeners have ‘got’ it. They get frustrated and angry when the results don’t match their expectations.
How can we minimise or prevent this? Here are three things to watch for:
Context
The listener’s context is both a barrier and a bridge to effective communication. Consider an extreme example: if one was delivering a speech in fluent English to an audience that only understood Chinese, it would fall flat. A variation of that occurs in almost every form of communication. Substitute the Chinese with the culture, the mood, the concerns, the age, the gender, or past experiences of the listener. These form his or her context. To communicate effectively, one must understand this.
There’s a little exercise we use at our workshops, where we show a picture of a piece of cheese and ask the audience how they would choose to talk about the cheese to a mouse. Immediately, there’s a flow of words like ‘great food’, ‘tasty’, ‘eat quickly’, ‘delicious’ and similar words. Then we zoom out of the image to show that the piece of cheese is actually set on a mousetrap. Immediately, the words change to ‘danger’, ‘run away’, ‘don’t eat’. In a few seconds, the content of communication has changed. The difference is the context but whose? The mouse’s, for when its context changed, so did the communication.
More examples are, a joke that seems funny to a male colleague, may be offensive to a female colleague. An explanation that works well for a junior, may turn out to be too long-winded for a senior. Technical jargon that works well in a factory, may fall on deaf ears if used with a customer unfamiliar with those technicalities. A customer who has had a bad experience with a company can’t be given the same standard pitch about a product that one would give to a new prospect.
In each case, one must do their homework before a conversation to ask the context questions about a listener or listeners, and accordingly modify their message so that it is better understood and more effective.
Noise
One of the problems in being sensitive to the context is noise. Apart from the literal external noise that may disrupt a conversation, the more challenging noise to deal with is the internal noise. This could be one’s own assumptions about the listener, her background, her intelligence, her understanding or lack of it or any other assumption that comes in the way of a genuine and authentic conversation.
This often subconsciously shows itself in preconceived notions. A new team member joins from a different part of the country and when one is given the task of being his or her buddy, they let their assumptions kick in: “Bound to be a miser; better be careful if we’re going to have lunch together” or “English must be pretty bad — wonder whether they’ll understand half of what I’m telling them”. These kinds of assumptions create a barrier to genuine and effective communication. One must be aware of these rising walls and quickly break them down.
In some cases, fatigue causes the noise — and this is especially true of repetitive jobs. For example, a call centre executive making his or her first few calls for the day may be better able to tune out the noise and ask the right questions to discover their listener’s context and interests. As they plough on, they get tired, and are less focused on context, so the message strays off-course.
Playback
Playback is a simple technique for a person to check if they are getting through to a listener or not. The first principle of playback is: the onus of communication is always on the communicator and not the listener. I remember, my father would urge my brothers and I to avoid using “Did you understand?” when speaking to someone and instead use “Was I clear in my communication?”.
The second question puts the responsibility of ‘getting across the message’ squarely on the communicator’s shoulders, which is where it belongs. Playback allows us to double check with our listeners whether they have received our message in the way we intended: “Could you summarise what you have understood from what I just said?”, “Could you help me check if I got my message across right?” or “Please let me know what you think I said.”
Situations may vary: a simple instruction to an assistant to organise a meeting; a more complicated instruction to a team leader or colleague about a quality process to be followed; an email to the team about a change in HR policy; or even the response to an interviewer’s question. In all these cases, playback helps avoid miscommunication, misunderstanding and the unintended consequences of either.
Remember, the fruit of communication is not on one’s lips but in the listener’s ears. It is there that a message becomes effective or ineffective, powerful or impotent. So, in preparing to communicate, one should not only spend time on the content, but also understand the listeners, their context and the noise in their head.