Experiences of ineffective communication are wide and range from having conversations with friends, family members, classmate, and even roommates. Such situations demonstrate the need to enhance communication among people with effective feedback and solutions. A recent incident involving ineffective communication with a friend happened to me one time.
1. Describe the situation
The situation happened when were watching a soccer match pitting two of the most famous soccer teams in the world. While I projected to the friend that one of the teams was effective in its offensive attack and has been doing well, my friend interpreted it to imply that I was against his team as having no strategy in winning the match. As such, we could not understand each other because his perception and the kind of information that he considered as having come from me was different. Consequently, he opined that the statistics and information that I was providing did not have credibility.
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2. Why was your communication ineffective in this incident?
Ineffective communication can be attributed to many reasons. For instance, too much noise can prevent the message from effective processing. Further, perceptions or biases may also lead to ineffective communication. In addition, communication becomes ineffective if one common understanding is not attained. Therefore, I believe that a host of issues may have made communication ineffective in this scenario. Firstly, we were watching the match from a local restaurant where other patrons were also having their activities. Therefore, noise was one ultimate reason why the communication was not effective. Secondly, the communication was ineffective because I believe that my friend had formed perceptions or biases towards what I was saying because we supported different teams during the discussion. Thirdly, ineffective communication occurred because of failure to get a consensus on our discussion.
3. What stages of the communication process were particularly problematic and why?
Effective communication occurs in two phases. The first phase is the transmission phase where information is shared between two or more people. The second phase occurs when a common understanding is attained during the process. Imperatively, I would say that the most problematic stage was sharing the information because if he could have understood the information that I was sharing, we would have attained a common understanding based on the issue that we were discussing.
4. Describe any filtering or information distortion that occurred.
Filtering affects communication because it is a barrier. Filtering occurs when one withholds part of the information because of thinking mistakenly that a receiver does not require it or will not accept it. Further, distortion of information happens when a message changes its meaning due to different senders and receivers. However, in this case, no filtering or distortion occurred since the discussion was open and did not involve a third party relaying requisite information. As such, I would state that filtering of information happened when I failed to establish the source of my position.
5. How could you have handled this situation differently so that communication would have been more effective?
Effective communication entails ensuring that I create effective perceptions of people. Accurate perception leads to effective communication. Therefore, I believe that I could have handled the situation differently by ensuring that I select the most suitable medium and place as the restaurant was noisy. Mistakes in encoding and decoding should be avoided in the future so that I relay the message in the most effective manner. the implication is that effective communication requires better understanding of all existing factors and situations; particularly the perception of both sender and receiver.
