What Causes Miscommunication and How to Avoid It

Miscommunication is a common occurrence in day to day life. You might have experienced it when discussing plans, past events or opinions. Or even when receiving instructions, but even though it may be common, miscommunication can cause some major issues. So what is miscommunication really? And how do we minimize it?

By definition miscommunication is a “failure to communicate adequately” or the loss and/or misinterpretation of information. In other words, its information understood differently than originally intended.

Every person interprets information differently based on their gender, beliefs, experiences, personality and age. When communicating with each other this information will also be interpreted based on the relationship of the communicators. A simple example of this is if someone said to a friend “What are you doing?” and it was interpreted negatively even if its original intention was to simply gather information.

Communication is generally very complex. It’s not simply giving someone a message. When we communicate our conversation follows a path based on the reactions of each recipient of information. Conversations don’t often go the way intended by the person enacting them. So we have to be adaptive and understand the other person when conversing.

We do this by gathering information from previous encounters, even if this act is unconscious it can help us communicate, but if we really want to make a message clear we have to be concise. You can’t leave much room for personal interpretation. To do this you need to pay proper attention to how the person you want to communicate with has interpreted things in the past. You can adjust the way you speak to them according to the way they are reacting at the time and how you expect them to react. This skill can be valuable in a workplace setting or when relaying your personal needs.

An example of the consequences of miscommunication is the fate of the Mars Climate Orbiter. There were great hopes for the orbiter; it was meant to go on its own two year mission then serve as a communications device for future Mars missions but this unfortunately did not work out. There was a major navigational error causing my miscalculations sent for earth to the orbiter. After an investigation it was quickly realized that there was a failure to convert English units (pound-second) to the metric standard (Newton-seconds). Due to this failure to communicate between teams an invaluable piece of equipment was lost.

There probably won’t be such consequences when you miscommunicate, but it’s good to learn and practice these skills early so they can become ingrained in our brains and help us avoid mistakes and conflict in the future.