Encoding and decoding messages

- There's an old joke that goes like this, a man named Oscar was driving down a country road. When he went around the corner, he saw a man driving towards him in a red convertible. The man was talking on the phone and zigzagging in and out of his lane. He turned the corner and swerved into his lane. As he passed Oscar, the man yelled, pig. Oscar turned around and yelled, learn to drive. But when he turned around, Oscar ran straight into the pig. At a very basic level, communication is the process of encoding meaning into messages, and decoding messages back into meaning. You can use spoken words, writing, pictures, and gestures. But there's a lot of opportunity for meaning to get lost along the way. So let's go back to our pig. When the man rounded the corner, he yelled out, pig. We can assume his meaning was, there's a pig in the road, watch out. But he didn't have much time, so pig is how it came out. But the word pig in English-speaking countries can have a lot of different meanings. It could mean the animal, but it's also an insult. Think about how Oscar decoded the message, what meaning did he take from pig? Why was he yelling? What was he doing? Does the word have more than one meaning? As a project manager, all of the messages you send and receive have a least some noise. You just need to make sure that the messages aren't drowned out by the noise. When the noise is louder than the message, then you're in real danger of miscommunicating. You could tell if there's a lot of risk for noise by looking at the message content, circumstances, and context. Sometimes the content will have a lot of noise. The content are usually the words. It can also be commonly used gestures, like thumbs up or thumbs down. Sometimes the content already has noise built-in. Here the word pig has more than one meaning. Also the circumstances will add noise to the message. The circumstances are what you're doing when you receive the message. Let's say at the end of a two hour meeting, someone says, well, that was a great use of our time. The circumstances suggest that this is sarcasm. If someone said the same thing at the end of a 30 minute seminar, you might except the message as genuine. Finally, the context will add a lot of noise. The context is where you are when you receive the message. Say you're in a business meeting and a stranger in a suit says, you did a great job. You'd probably react differently than if a stranger says it at a grocery store. The context will give you a lot of background information about what the other person is trying to communicate. The same message in a different context will mean different things. Our pig could have survived if the content, circumstances, or context had had a little bit less noise. Maybe if the content was, watch out for the pig. Or if the person drove a tractor instead of a red convertible, then you'd have a different context. Watch for these when you try to determine how much noise you're getting with your messages. Always assume that the communication has a little noise, then you'll have a better chance of understanding the meaning.