The importance of clear communication was reinforced to me the other day as the result of a misunderstanding.  The negative impacts associated with misunderstanding largely fall into two categories.

Work or Re-work

This is a favorite of process engineers when trying to make operations consistent and repeatable.  When things are unclear or misunderstood by any of the stakeholders involved with the process efficiency both time and quality suffer.

Anger/ Frustration and Interpersonal Conflict

One of the most unpleasant outcomes of misunderstandings  is they often involve competing positions and views.  Each party has a perspective and they don’t match.

Often one party feels injured by the outcomes of the misunderstanding and the other party does not get it.  For example think of a time when you complained to a service provider when they misunderstood your instructions ,did not do what you wanted or expected and didn’t understand when you complained.

How to reduce the risk of misunderstandings

One of the most frequent methods used to overcome these potential misunderstandings are written or verbal validations built right into the process steps.  This technique can be applied to things like meetings (post meeting minutes) , product orders (written ackowledgements), action instructions (signed agreements) and so on.

Unfortunately even the validation/ confirmation does not always work and issues still arise.

In these cases it is often most helpful to assume there was no malicious intent .  This works well if applied by all stakeholders to the misunderstanding.  In this way recrimination and bad feelings are avoided.

The impacts are clearly outlined by each party and a collaberative solution developed.