I was flipping through Nancy Duarte’s Resonate which is a fantastic resource for crafting strong stories. Anyway, one of the infographics in the book illustrates factors that can hamper clear communication. She was primarily talking about communication issues affecting the speaker-audience relationship, but it struck me that the ideas could be generalized to describe many communication scenarios.

I dug a little deeper and discovered that Duarte’s graphic references the Shannon-Weaver model (first published in 1948) – apparently, we’ve been having communication issues for decades. There are many models of communication and many theories of information transmission, but the fact remains we’re still not very skilled when it comes to sending and receiving information.

I created the Miscommunication Map to diagnose why a particular communication event went poorly. The worksheet is fun way to reflect on the variety of factors that contributed to the screw-up. If you want a real challenge, give this worksheet to both the sender and the receiver after a message goes sideways and compare their responses!

If we’re honest with ourselves we miscommunicate constantly, the trick is to figure out what we’re going to do about it. The last three reflection questions can help.

In case I’m not being clear: Download the Miscommunication Map and start diagnosing your latest mishap.

Miscommunication Map (1.1 MB)

Copyright, Use and Distribution

This worksheet is part of our Worksheet Wednesdays experiment. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to copy and redistribute this worksheet. You can remix it or adapt it to your purposes, providing you share your revised version too. If you use this worksheet, please attribute Thirdway Think and link to thirdwaythink.com

Source of Inspiration

Duarte, N. (2010). Resonate. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley