External Noise

Communication theory shows us that receiving messages from the external environment is made difficult by the multitude of signals that we receive. The theory says that less than 1/3 of communication comes from what someone says (the words), and over 2/3 comes from how it is said. We hear someone say words to us. We hear and see how they say it. We see how they are dressed. We are distracted by other objects that come into and out of our field of vision and other sounds that we attempt to filter or not.

From all of these cues that we receive in a given message at a given time, we have to choose what to recognize and process. What seems to us, at the time, to be the most important information to take in and process? This decision is the realm of the psychologist, as it deals with a greater internal purpose, what is it that I want? Further, how many cues can I process at one time? Experience substantiates the theory that we cannot remember more than 7 ± 2 numbers at a time (Miller) and that we are bounded rationally (Simon).

With written communication we have to deal with trying to understand what the author was trying to convey through their writing. However, a further difficulty with receiving information from the external world is that of all the "information" per se that exists, very little of it is written down. Some suggest that less than 5% of the information is written down, the rest of it resides in the heads of people. How do we access the information in people’s heads efficiently? This is the $1,000,000 question.

The point is we have to choose what information we receive from the great multitude of possible sources at any given moment.

Internal Noise

Professor Chris Argyris explains that people do not always do what they say they will do (their espoused theories), but that they do always do what they think, according to their mental models (their theories-in-use). The interesting problem here is that many times we actually think we believe something that we don’t actually believe, and our actions prove it. These mental models strongly affect how we perceive the world and therefore what we see. As Einstein said, "our theories determine what we measure."

The point is that understanding the world and how we are interfacing with it depends on our perception of the world or our mental models. To improve our ability to make better decisions and coordinate those decisions with others, we need to surface and examine our mental models. Systems thinking provides a systematic approach to do this.

Click here to see what we do at the Institute for Strategic Clarity to intervene in this same decision making process to strengthen the decision makers ability to understand and make decisions within complex environments.