11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process

Communication is the largest single element of most change managers' work, and CM3 starts with the underlying model.

Why a structured approach

A well-thought-out and structured approach to change communication and stakeholder engagement ensures that:

• The right level of interaction occurs
• With the right people
• At the right time
• In an efficient way, to achieve successful change

All four are constraints, and all four are routinely violated. Too much interaction with the wrong people at the wrong time is as much a failure as too little. "The right level of interaction" also acknowledges that not every stakeholder needs deep engagement — which is what segmentation and mapping are for.

The basics of communication theory

The model has four components:

Encoding: the sender's problem

The sender must translate thoughts into words, symbols or diagrams. This translation is lossy. What is obvious inside the sender's head — the context, the reasoning, the qualifications — does not automatically survive into the words chosen.

This is why change communication written by people who have lived with the change for months so often baffles its audience. The sender encodes using shared understanding the receiver does not have. Terms like "target operating model", "phase two" or "the new ways of working" carry precise meaning for the change team and almost none for anyone else.

Decoding: the receiver's construction

The receiver decodes the message to give it their own interpretation in a way they can relate to it and make meaning of it. This is the single most important idea in the model: meaning is constructed by the receiver, not transmitted by the sender.

The consequences for change work are direct:

• Two people can receive an identical message and take opposite meanings from it, and both are decoding correctly according to their own context
• A message that has been sent has not thereby been communicated
• The only way to know what was received is to check — which is why feedback matters

The decoding is shaped by the receiver's context: their position on the change curve, their history of change, their WIIFM, their cognitive biases, and what else they have heard.

Noise

Noise is anything that interferes with the message between sending and receiving. CM3 gives technical examples: with a landline telephone this could be crackling heard during a call, or with a mobile phone a call cutting out due to a weak signal. It notes that it was this sort of interference, at a technical level, which was Shannon and Weaver's main concern at the time of their research.

In change work, the useful extension is that noise is rarely technical. The interference is:

The change manager's job with noise is not to eliminate it, which is impossible, but to account for it: repeat the message, use multiple channels, time it to avoid known peaks, and make sure the non-verbal signals do not contradict the verbal ones.

Using the model deliberately

A practical checklist derived from the four components, applied to any significant change communication:

1. Encoding — is this written in the receiver's language, or in ours? Would someone outside the change team understand every term?
2. Channel — is this channel appropriate for the content? Bad news and complex content need richer channels than a bulletin
3. Decoding — what will this group most plausibly take from this, given where they are and what they fear? What is the worst reasonable interpretation?
4. Noise — what else is competing for attention right now, and does anything in the organisation's behaviour contradict this message?

Question 3 is the one that most improves communication quality, because it forces the sender to read their own message from the position of someone who does not already agree with it.