The Fallout of Poor Communication Ability
Is communication really a problem?
Consider this case, where an elderly man underwent surgery at a highly renowned medical institution in the United States, to treat subdural hematoma – a condition where bleeding occurs in the brain due to trauma.
The nurse assisting the operating neurosurgeon didn’t record which side of the man’s brain required surgery. When another nurse pointed out the missing information, the operating neurosurgeon refused to listen, and allegedly relied on his memory and began operating. Soon enough, the surgeon came upon the shocking realisation that he had operated on the wrong side of the patient’s head.
In another case, the resident hospital surgeon started brain surgery in the wrong place, and the accompanying nurse who knew of the error in progress didn’t speak up to stop him. Sadly, the long term-prognosis of these errors is not known.
In the first case, the neurosurgeon refused to listen to a nurse who tried to point out the error, and in the second case, the accompanying nurse said nothing despite knowing an error was being made.
The cost of poor communication – both psychological and financial – as we can see from these cases can often be astronomical.
Quantifying the cost of poor communication
David Grossman, an award-winning author, reported in an article titled “The Cost of Poor Communications” that a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each cited an average loss per company of $62.4 million per year because of inadequate communication to and between employees.
Debra Hamilton, author and communication expert, asserts that miscommunication costs even smaller companies of 100 employees an average of $420,000 per year.
The critical problem is that although worldwide surveys continue to confirm the importance of good communication, these same surveys consistently report that prospective and current employees are doing poorly enough to be labeled ‘deficient’ in their communication skills.
Tackling poor communication
No one really aspires to be a terrible communicator. Everyone understands that communicating well is important.
It’s just that incidents of poor communication are generally dismissed as unfortunate setbacks – a freak one-off incident. We fail to see that it is a lack of evolved communication ability that led to these setbacks in the first place. Most of us ‘get by’ with our limited communication ability. But, getting by is no longer enough.
Resolving the Communication Paradox
Poor communication is not the result of a lack of articulateness as much as it is the lack of a system to truly improve communication – be it in the workplace or elsewhere.
And that is what this course aims to provide – systems to improve communication in workplace contexts – consistently and effectively.
Remember those wrong-side surgeries? Well, after a few incidents, the medical governance bodies took notice. In 2003, the medical Joint Commission put in place a three-step process called the “Universal Protocol” that all surgeons are supposed to follow mandatorily.
1. They consult a pre-operation checklist.
2. They write on the patient’s body with a marker — to note where they will operate.
3. And they call a brief time-out just before starting. In a time-out, the doctor might verbalise something like: “This is Mrs. Smith. She’s here for a left brain tumor. We’re doing a left-sided craniotomy.”
If everybody’s in agreement, then and only then will the scalpel get handed to the surgeon. And nurses are now empowered to stop the operation. Errors of the kind that we saw at the start of this lesson have since reduced.
We would do well to learn about communication systems, too.
In Conclusion
One can significantly mitigate the chances of poor communication by adopting simple systems.
The lessons in this course will cover details of communication essentials, and simple models and procedures you can adopt to improve your own communication.
Worth a try, don’t you think? After all, you do appreciate the impact of poor communication now, don’t you?
Please click on the Mark Complete button below and proceed to improving your own communication quotient.
Happy Learning!
