Communication cycle expresses the cyclic nature of communication. You just don’t send information and assume that communication has taken place.
Communication can be simplified as a process of passing information from one person to another, basically a sender and a receiver, with an aim of creating understanding.
This is why feedback in communication is important, for it is the one way of being assured that your message was understood, or not!
Why is communication cycle important?
What normally happens in communication is that you say what you want to say and the other party says what they think about what you have said, or they just ignore what you have said and tell you what they wanted to say. You then respond and the communication cycle continues.
The problem with this is that you end up in a loop where both parties are busy “communicating” without truly communicating with each other. In short you are just talking at each other.
This is why it is important to know what communication is and how you can make the cycle more effective.
The cyclic nature of communication
Here is how communication cycle occurs;
Turn idea into a message
The idea behind communication is getting a thought out of your mind and into the mind of the other person. In business, for instance you just want to convince investors to accept your business plan, so how do you pitch the business plan? It comes down to encoding the information into a message.
Encoding is the conversion of an idea into a meaningful message.
If you want to tell the person that you saw a white car. You could just say “I saw a white car,” but what if you want to emphasize the color. This is where metaphors and similes come in.
“The car was as white as snow”
Notice, this is not how the idea was in your mind, all you had was a mental image of a white car but now you have encoded that message in such a way that makes it easy for the other person to visualize it. Of course, the assumption is they know the car type and have an idea of how white snow can be. Otherwise, its wastage of analogy.
Selecting the right communication media
Do you want to write the message, do you prefer to say it, how about doing both?
The next decision is which communication media will prove most suitable for the communication and so the sender has to decide.
The sender is the source of the communication and this is a decision he/she makes based on;
- The purpose of the communication
- The intended audience
- The style of communication
- And the structure of the communication
Deciding on mechanism through which to relay the message
The channel the sender chooses to relay the message will depend on the media used.
If you wrote the message, you can send it via email or text. But you also have to take in the needs of the receiver of the message.
You don’t want to send an email if a phone call would have been more effective. By the same standards, a sender should not do a phone call if an actual visit would have sufficed.
The message is then sent to the receiver
The receiver getting the message
The receiver is the destination of the message.
What one has to realize is that the massage is encoded which means the receiver has to decode the message.
Decoding means deriving meaning out of the message.
This is what the receiver does.
Feedback
Feedback is the receiver’s reaction to the message.
This is what the sender will rely on to know if the message was understood or not. The key thing here is to pay attention to how they are saying what they are saying and not just what they are saying.
Understanding is never guaranteed
Finally, understanding is never guaranteed in communication. This is why every step in the communication cycle calls for care in what is being done so that it doesn’t turn out to be a barrier.
You can have a good message but say it in the wrong channel and that destroys the whole point of communication.
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