THE HUMAN ERROR COMMUNICATION LACK OF By Gordon Dupont, System Safety Services
This study revealed that 55 percent of a message is transmitted by body language, 38 percent by tone of voice, and an unbelievable seven percent verbally. I have a problem with seven percent, seeing as we are technically-oriented professionals. Verbal has to be more than seven percent. Still, if we keep in mind that we are not nearly as eff ective at communicating the message as we believe, more eff ective communication is possible. Let’s look at a model of a pilot and a mechanic having a
conversation. Filters can be one of the reasons the mental picture
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ack of communication is one of the big four of the Dirty Dozen. The other three will be along in time if you decide to keep reading these articles. It’s hard to tell if anyone is reading them. There’s a lack of
communication from the readership — as in from you (the reader) to me, the writer who hopes that someone out there fi nds these articles useful. Are we as maintenance personnel good communicators?
The previous paragraph gives you a hint. The results of a confi dential aviation Safety reporting program administered by the Canadian Transportation Safety Board say it all. Out of 232 received Safety concerns, 120 (more than half) were from the complaining pilots. Passengers even sent in 15 while maintenance was the very lowest of all with fi ve. Remember the last article where Giselle said that when things aren’t right, pilots bitch while mechanics sulk? Let’s face it — there’s a lot of room for improvement. We will concentrate on verbal communication in this session. Lack of communication, verbal or written, is simply a failure to ensure that the “mental pictures” match. For example, I have a mental picture of what I hope to convey to you. If you have the same mental picture at the end of our conversation, then good communication has occurred and there has been a complete exchange of information. Sadly, this doesn’t occur often. They say that communication is only about 30 percent effi cient even though our expectation is that, because we have spoken, it will be 100 percent. One can only wish. Albert Mehrabian did a study on how a message is transmitted and received in average conversation.
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doesn’t match. The fi lters are represented by the double lines and they prevent the full message from getting through. These fi lters can be class distinctive (I am the boss and you are a lowly employee), ethnic, religious or even one’s mood for the day. An extreme example of an ethnic fi lter involved one of my uncles who had fought in the Pacifi c theater against the Japanese. As a young lad I can remember him talking about “Jap crap” for anything built in Japan and he would not ride in a Japanese-built car. If a traffi c control person of Eskimo decent, who looked like he might be Japanese, were to stop my uncle in his American-built car and tell him to hold his speed to less than 20 mph for the next half mile, my uncle would do at least 40 mph even if it destroyed his American-built car.
If you want to see fi lters, listen to a conversation between a teenager and a parent about coming home on time. They exist between boss and employee, husband and wife, democrat and republican and (all too often) between pilots and maintenance. Hopefully the fi lters are thin but one has to be aware of them. They act to prevent the message from
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