Part Of
Reduced By Practices
- Analysis: Facilitates clear communication of requirements and expectations among stakeholders.
- Approvals: Provides formal communication of acceptance and readiness.
- Demo: Facilitates clear communication of the product's features and benefits to stakeholders.
- Documentation: Provides clear guidelines and information, reducing misunderstandings.
- Issue Management: Facilitates communication about issues and their status among team members.
- Marketing: Facilitates communication of the product's value proposition to the target audience.
- Meeting: Facilitates clear and direct communication among team members.
- Prototyping: Facilitates clear communication of concepts and requirements.
- Refactoring: Well-factored code should be easier to understand.
- Sales: Facilitates direct communication with potential customers to understand their needs.
- Stakeholder Management: Facilitates clear and consistent communication between stakeholders.
- Standardisation: Improves communication by using a common language and standardized terms.
- User Acceptance Testing: Facilitates feedback from end users, improving the final product.
Attendant To Practices
- Delegation: Requires clear communication to ensure tasks are understood and executed properly.
- Outsourcing: May introduce communication challenges with external teams.
- Stakeholder Management: Misaligned communication strategies can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts.
Communication Risk
If we all had identical knowledge, there would be no need to do any communicating at all, and therefore no Communication Risk.
But people are not all-knowing oracles. We rely on our senses to improve our Internal Models of the world. There is Communication Risk here - we might overlook something vital (like an on-coming truck) or mistake something someone says (like "Don't cut the green wire").
So, we are going to go on a journey discovering Communication Risk, covering:
- A look at the four different stages of communication and examples of each in the world of computing.
- Breaking down Communication Risk as it affects each stage, discussing the types of risks present for each one.
- The many problems faced in product marketing.
- The concept of abstraction and it's associated Invisibility Risk.
A Model Of Communication
In 1948, Claude Shannon proposed this definition of communication:
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point, either exactly or approximately, a message selected at another point." - A Mathematical Theory Of Communication, Claude Shannon
And from this same paper we get the diagram above: we move from top-left ("I want to send a message to someone"), clockwise to bottom left where we hope the message has been understood and believed. (I've added this last box, reconciliation to Shannon's original diagram.)
One of the chief concerns in Shannon's paper is the risk of error between Transmission and Reception. He creates a theory of information (measured in bits), sets the upper-bounds of information that can be communicated over a channel, and describes ways in which Communication Risk between these processes can be mitigated by clever Encoding and Decoding steps.
But it's not just transmission. Communication Risk exists at each of these steps. Let's imagine a human example, where someone, Alice is trying to send a simple message to Bob.
| Step | Potential Risk |
|---|---|
| Motivation | Alice might be motivated to send a message to tell Bob something, only to find out that he already knew it. |
| Composition | Alice might mess up the intent of the message: instead of "Please buy chips" she might say, "Please buy chops". |
| Encoding | Alice might not speak clearly enough to be understood. |
| Transmission | Alice might not say it loudly enough for Bob to hear. |
| Reception | Bob doesn't hear the message clearly (maybe there is background noise). |
| Decoding | Bob might not decode what was said into a meaningful sentence. |
| Interpretation | Assuming Bob has heard, will he correctly interpret which type of chips (or chops) Alice was talking about? |
| Reconciliation | Does Bob believe the message? Will he reconcile the information into his Internal Model and act on it? Perhaps not, if Bob forgets, or thinks that there are chips at home already. |
Approach To Communication Risk
To get inside Communication Risk, we need to understand Communication itself, whether between machines, people or products: although these seem very different, the process involved (and the risks) are the same for each.
There is a symmetry about the steps going on in Shannon's model and we're going to exploit this in order to break down Communication Risk into four basic stages, as shown in the diagram above:
- Channels: the medium via which the communication is happening.
- Protocols: the systems of rules that allow two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information.
- Messages: the information we want to convey.
- Internal Models: the sources and destinations for the messages. Updating internal models (whether in our heads or machines) is the reason why we're communicating.
As we look at these four stages we'll consider the risks of each.