Page 32 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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complexities of communication. This is an ineffective model of c ommunication
from the academic point of view.

The Transaction View: The Spiral Theory
‘Transactional communication’ signifies that there is more than a simple
interaction between senders and receivers. A transaction implies inter-
dependency and mutual reciprocal causality among the parts of a system.
Human communication, like any dynamic process, is best understood as
a system where senders and receivers simultaneously change their roles.
Communication is not the static picture like view of still photography. It
resembles more of a continuous flow of motion pictures. Communication
viewed as a process is characterized less by the actions of a sender and the
subsequent reactions of a receiver than by the simultaneity of their recipro-
cal responses. Who starts the process is an irrelevant question, since pro-
cesses have no specific beginning or end. Any communicative behaviour
that we want to isolate for the purpose of analysis has a history and a future.
They have lived in many places; they have said many things before, possibly
to each other. In a transactional view of communication you are the cause
and effect, stimulus and response, sender and receiver. Not only are you
the product of your previous communicative behaviours; but also—equally
importantly—what you see yourself to be is in a large measure affected by
how you perceive others to behave towards you, that is, how you perceive
others’ communication. Your perception of other people’s responses is itself
the product of previous perceptions of previous responses, a lifetime of pre-
vious communication.
To view communication as a transaction does more justice to the
c omplexities of the process than any other conceptualization we know.

THE PROCESS OF COMMUNICATION

It is abundantly clear that communication is the lifeblood of any institute,
organization, or a social structure. It includes the structure through which
messages pass and the way information is presented, as well as the actual
content of the message themselves. Whether you are speaking or writing,
listening or reading, communication is more than a single act. It’s a dynamic,
transactional (two-way) process that can be broken into six phases:
1. The sender has an idea: You conceive an idea and want to share it.
A teacher has been given the task of explaining a concept. He first
reads the concept and then understands it. This is the first phase of
the process of communication.

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