ISSUE 176 : Jul/Aug - 2008 - Australian Defence Force Journal

And the other thing is, you read into words – and this is a thing about communication – when
you write things … you’ve got to be clear and concise, but being concise, you can … actually
take away from the meaning … I’m not saying you do, but you can. But the other thing is, if
you’re not clear and there’s ambiguity in there, by reading it, I might develop an opinion that
is not necessarily along the lines of your clear instructions. You can have that anyway, but in a
face-to-face … if you’re unclear, it can be cleared up.
And another:
The Army’s mechanisms are sort of very hierarchical, you know, you tell this person and they tell
the next person down the chain ‘til … the end of the line, the poor soldier at the end gets some
kind of Chinese whisper that may or may not have something to do with what was originally
said. Whereas, I think, the Navy plan is much more inclusive and, you know, a Navy CO can talk
to the most junior seaman any time he wants to, and does. So I think some of the hierarchies
were difficult.
The process of making sense of what another person says is fraught with opportunities for
misinterpretation. When misinterpretations go unnoticed at the time of communication,
and the sender and receiver believe they have the same understanding, it is referred to as
‘bypassing’ (Haney 1973). The phenomenon discussed in the above interview excerpt, whereby
bypassing occurs on a serial basis along a network of several people, is referred to as the ‘Serial
Transmission Effect’ (Redding 1972, p. 105). The Serial Transmission Effect (STE) is the ninth of
ten fundamental principles of communicating within organisations, postulated by Redding, and
it is defined as the changes that messages often undergo as they are communicated serially
from person to person (Redding 1972, p. 105).
There is general consensus in the field of organisational and interpersonal communication that
it is unrealistic to expect perfect fidelity between individuals (see for instance, Axley 1984,
p. 434; Redding 1972, p. 105; Tompkins & Wanca-Thibault 2001, p. xix; Burtis & Turman 2006,
p. 95). According to Redding, the loss in fidelity can be predicted, because it is multiplied in
direct proportion to the number of links in the human communication chain. Bedeian (1986
in Harris, pp. 230–231) categorised STE into three types: condensation (when the relayer of the
message deems some aspects of it irrelevant or redundant and condenses it but doesn’t realise
that vital information may have been lost); closure (when a relayer’s low tolerance for ambiguity
causes him or her to fill in the missing information as they repeat it); and expectation (when
a relayer adds meaning to the message based on his or her own expectations). Harris (2002,
pp. 230–231) explains that these three types of STE occur, not as a result of wilful distortion,
but as an attempt to make sense of a message as it is passed along.
There is also general consensus in the field of organisational and interpersonal communication
that the way to reduce the impact of STE is to expect that differences between sent and
received meanings will occur, and to expend effort to minimise them (see for instance, Axley
1984; Falcione 1984; Jablin & Putnam 2001). 4
It is pertinent to note that the above theorists, in discussing STE, were talking about a non-
NCW environment. The interview data discussed in this article indicates that the occurrence
of STE is exacerbated in the NCW environment.
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