A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Business Communication Models

There is an innocuous simplicity and brevity to Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper ‘Mathematical Theory of Communication’ that makes it destined to become a landmark in not just the history of engineering but also of human thought, in general. As a befuddled upstart in the business school universe, beholding in a wondrous spirit, the beginning of a textbook on business communication, it was pleasant to encounter the iconic schematic that unites the sender and the receiver despite the presence of noise. Having spoken to engineers who get starry-eyed at the mention of Shannon’s theory, my reaction was: Ah! Another cult that worships the same idol!

As I ventured forth into a curriculum that takes it upon itself the gargantuan burden of containing the infinite complexity of human communication and distilling them into crisp sermons, I saw Shannon-Weaver fade away and anonymous voices run through the best tips for holding a meeting, managing a conflict, writing a report and so forth. Shannon-Weaver’s theory was irrelevant to the rest of the course. It was like an idol left alone after a customary obeisance. A cursory survey revealed a surprising ignorance of the essence of the engineering context of King Claude’s original mathematical theory. The lonely idol felt like an orphaned one as well.

Disciplines are religions that either discourage the heresy of the inquisitive or gerrymander their boundaries to be evasive. Let us, if we insist, conveniently say this ‘knowledge heavy discussion is not the mandate of a ‘skill-oriented MBA curriculum. Then I will slyly push the buttons of pragmatism that business school creatures often wear on their sleeves to talk of the ‘skill of application of knowledge’. Speaking of idols, let us pay our twisted homage to Ouroboros rather than Shannon. Let us subject the Shannon-Weaver theory of business communication to Shannon’s theory itself. After all, what is a good theory but a message that encodes information about the instantiations of the subject of the said theory! For pedagogical purposes, the Shannon-Weaver model is deaf to the rich noise of the complexities of business communication.

Scientists have an implicit understanding of this perspective. They know Newton’s theories cannot deal with the noise introduced by phenomena happening at the speed of light. The holy grail, the Theory of Everything, is a goal that energizes whole communities into fervent debates and disagreements. If Shannon-Weaver is a Toe for all business communication, it fails to inspire. There couldn’t have been a better model that could plunge itself into the oceans of new contexts and vibrantly change with every dip. That is not the impression one gets while reading business communication textbooks.

Perhaps SW is not a model of actual communication, but a mantra for how communication should be. But we should not be dishonest by using the word ‘model’ when we mean something like a role model. Shannon, in his paper, is much more transparent about the goal of efficient and cheap communication that his model is meant to serve. Such is the can of worms that is opened when we unpack a borrowed model that, at best, is a popular metaphor.

The diffusion of a scientific metaphor into popular imagination is a curious process. Think about the influence Newton’s laws of gravity or Coulomb’s laws have had. They turn so many of us into folk psychologists of love who speak of ‘opposites attracting’ and what not. However, if we do not retain the playfulness of folk academic activity within the hard brick walls of real academia, a scientific theory will transmogrify into a dogma that is too sacred to reject but too redundant to preserve. Idols can become burdens.

So, the question stands planted: Are members of the business-school community folk communication theorists? Do they get starry-eyed speaking of Shannon and Weaver? Do they passionately believe that humans should communicate like machines? What notion of machines do they presume in the first place? Can they do better than simply reproduce Shannon-Weaver?

I believe some answers can be had by peeping at how other disciplines have introduced their noise into the message of Shannon’s theory. Within the discipline of literature, the Russian Formalist, Roman Jakobson, indulges in a rather dramatic re-reading of Shannon when he de-emphasizes the task of functional communication to show how poetic communication may, contra Shannon, celebrate redundancy and repetition. Other theorists are unwilling to even frame communication as senders and receivers. For Jakobson’s fellow Russian, Mikhail Bakhtin, information exchange is fundamentally so dialogic that it would be sacrilege to think, even for a moment, that one of them is a sender and the other the mute receiver. Even the cybernetician Norbert Wiener’s introduction of the feedback would be a token and ad hoc way of empowering the receiver with a greater agency. Maybe, for all the hackneyed emphasis on “being a good listener” in business communication, the curriculum deserves an adoption of Bakhtin rather than the bastardization of Shannon. That possibility requires us to acknowledge the noise in a theory about avoiding noise.

 

Mr. Ravi Chakraborty
Teaching & Research Associate
Department of Language & Literature