People are usually placated and open to suggestions after an apology. For example, knowing he would be testifying before a hostile congressional committee, John Mack, chair and CEO of Morgan Stanley, included a measured apology.
Be on the lookout for communication barriers. These are the kinds of things that can make reaching a goal more challenging or, in some cases, impossible. The idea behind identifying obstacles is to get rid of them or decrease their effects so you may more successfully communicate with your target audience.
Psychologists have shown that humans are profoundly biased in their thinking. Bias can lead to distorted views of a situation, tension between the communicator and the audience, and misunderstandings. As a communicator, you face bias in two ways: your own biases that influence your message and the biases of your audience.
By considering a bigger group of data, you can avoid the bias of erroneous generalisation as a communicator. To support their decision-making, you can provide your audience with extra information and what you believe to be a more correct conclusion.
Anchoring bias (or simply anchoring) is excessive reliance on one or a few values, particularly when judging, deciding, or acting. It occurs in financial markets when a stock price falls precipitously and investors buy at the new, lower price, believing that the stock is now undervalued.
Presenting a conclusion that is rooted in an assumption that contradicts an audience anchor can be problematic if you aren’t aware of the anchor. To fend off anchoring bias, examine your content for reference points or benchmarks that you assume are accurate. Assess the anchors that your audience may have.
Bias is the tendency to make decisions based on the ease with which we can recall information. Often recency plays a major role as it’s easier to recall an event that just happened than one that happened a few days ago. A common example of availability bias is the fear people have of flying after a plane crash versus the comfort they have with driving to the airport.
You can avoid availability bias by building your arguments on base rates – the probability of something being determined by rational means, such as statistics. For audience members who have availability bias, you need to prove that their view isn’t derived from the base rate and then argue for a more accurate view.
The abundance of choices helps connect everyone in an organisation over great distances. It opens up possibilities for information to spread quickly and for engaging in collaborative, innovative, and mentoring activities. When choosing a channel for high-value communication, it pays to pause and consider your options.
Businesses that operate on the basis of irrational thinking will eventually fail. People in business have a motivation to use logic. The American car industry rebuilt itself and created cutting-edge, high-quality vehicles using logic. Reason is used by biotechnology and pharmaceutical corporations to market treatments for diseases that were once incurable.
Communicators owe it to their audiences to select information on the principle of need to know, not nice to know. Too frequently communicators don’t recognize our cognitive limits. Unstructured information can be communicated, and audience members may even understand it, but they won’t remember it.
