One-way communication

- A few years ago, pirates captured an Italian cargo ship, called the Montecristo. The crew was shuffled to the bottom of the ship. When the pirates weren't looking, they wrote the ship's location in a bottle and tossed it overboard. The NATO ships retrieved the bottle, they read the note, and knew that the crew was safe. The pirates gave up, and no one was hurt. One-way communication saved the day. Your project won't have pirates, but you'll certainly run into one-way communication. In fact, almost all of your communication will be one-way. One-way communication is a type of asynchronous communication. You're sending a message to someone, but they won't read and respond instantly. It's often push or pull from someone else. A good example of one-way communication is email. It's a message that's pushed from someone into your inbox. It's often used as an announcement. Project managers are working in the golden age of one-way communication. Think of all the email, reports, and memos you receive every day. It might seem like you spend all of your time reading one-way communication. But many project managers forget the disadvantages to one-way communication. You should think of email as not that much different from throwing a bottle into the sea. This type of communication lacks facial expressions and the speakers tone of voice. There's no real-time interaction. That makes one-way communication pretty limited. So be sure to think of one-way communication as notice, your notifying people that something happened. Email's perfect for a notification like, functional review board meeting canceled. It would be risky to write an email with the subject, your job performance. The difference is the content of the message. The first message is straightforward, true notification, it's unlikely to be misinterpreted. The other is about a topic that could be sensitive and will likely need some clarification. You should only use one-way communication for low emotion messages. Think about the last time you read an email, and it seemed sad or angry, then you later talked to the person and they said they were just fine. Behavior scientists tell us that we think we understand emotions in text, but in reality most of us depend on tone and facial expressions to help us interpret meaning. More often, we're adding emotion to other people's messages without even realizing it. We're also not very good at writing emotion. Most of the emotion we want to communicate is lost in email, reports, and memos. If you sense that there's some emotional noise, it's often misunderstood. As a project manager you should always follow up any questions from a one-way message with a two-way conversation. If there's a question it usually means that your message wasn't really a notification and is likely to be misunderstood. If you want to send a one-way message, be sure to understand what works best. If your message is sensitive, then you use two-way communication. For a simple notice, then just use an email message or report.