Page 31 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Understanding Communication | 19

The Action View: The Bull’s-Eye Theory
The information theory perspective shares the view that communication
consists of a one-way act like shooting an arrow into a target. You hit the
bull’s eye, you either get close or you miss. The whole activity of communica-
tion is centred on the one-way action of doing something to someone. How
good you are depends mostly on how well you shoot the arrow, or how well
you make your point. The emphasis is on the sender and his/her encoding
skills. This means that how you construct a message, organize it, or deliver
it, is just as crucial as sharpening your arrow, testing its feathers, flexing your
bow, and shooting straight.
Another important aspect of this concept is that words actually have
meanings. Therefore, if the sender knows the meaning of the words, the same
meaning would be sent directly to the receivers—like a pipeline. In the sim-
plistic view, misunderstandings would occur only if people did not know what
words ‘meant’. Further, if misunderstandings did occur, you would look to the
way the speaker spoke/communicated to find the error. This view pays more
attention to tools and skills than to the more potentially important aspects of
communicating. It does not spend much time analyzing the reasons except that
somewhere along the line you used the ‘wrong’ words, did not organize your
message well enough, did not possess a good voice, did not possess enough
credibility (as though credibility were a quality that a speaker could own);
in essence you did not shoot straight at your target and therefore missed a
little. This view is still quite widely believed, especially by those who sell their
expertise to people on ‘speaking success’ which promises to make one an over-
night success in the filed of communication if one follows a few simple rules
of delivery.

The Interaction View: The Ping-Pong Theory
Another favourite way of looking at communication is to compare it with
taking turns in a table tennis match: you say something, I answer; you say
more, I reply; I serve, you respond. We take turns at being the sender and
the receiver. This view accounts for more complexities of human communi-
cation than the bull’s-eye theory. It does include the receiver by adding the
concept of linear feedback, which permits the sender to exert more control
over his or her communication. Yet, the communication process is still over-
simplified by being treated as a process of linear cause and effect sequence:
I speak, you answer.
The weakness in this view is that communication is not divided into
ping and pong, stimulus and response, shot and return, action and reaction.
Senders and receivers do not simply alternate in sending and receiving,
and the simple linear model of cause and effect is inadequate to explain the

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