This is not even communication 101, this is communication 100.

No matter what you are doing, you are communicating. Even when you are not talking! In fact, most of our communication is done non-verbally, with our body language. A large part also depends on our tone, and the smallest part is what we are actually saying.

Therefore we can visualise communication like this:

This model doesn’t apply only to a one-on-one setting, but is easier to understand if we assume that there are only two people. The sender has information to transmit to the receiver – say you want to tell a friend that you found a great restaurant. The information you want to send has to be encoded in a way that the receiver will understand, so in this case it’s verbally. The receiver has to decrypt your information and in the case of a verbal message, your tone of voice, your choice of words and your body language will say a lot. If you say “yeah this restaurant is good you should try it” while sounding sad, distant, or unsure of yourself, then your friend will wonder if that restaurant is actually worth going to. On the other hand, if you are beaming with joy and smiling as you remember how good it was to go to that the restaurant, they will assume it’s a great place that creates great memories.

The feedback loop means that basically, your receiver will then apply the model to their response (and I would say we can even mention dialectics here lol). They will respond to your message once they’ve decrypted it, and if they say “sure I’ll check it out” but sound distant or bored, you will probably assume they don’t really care about what you’re saying.

Understanding how communication happens allows you to better get the outcome you want, provides clarity and reduces confusion. What you want is for the receiver to decrypt what you wanted to transmit.

This model can of course be applied at a bigger scale. If you print flyers to share in the streets, you are also encoding the information you want to transmit (say a march against nazis happening: you want to transmit the date, time, place). Then people who receive your flyer will decrypt the information and may or may not send a feedback – they will certainly have one (even if it’s them throwing the flyer in the trash! That is still feedback). If you distributed 500 flyers and you have 250 people show up (and for the sake of the model say this was your only means of communicating about this event), then you can say you had great feedback, 1 people out of 2 came.