The FILTER

Understanding the Communication Process

Communication breakdowns - misunderstandings - withdrawal.

We have all experienced these in our own conversations or in discussions between others. But why do they occur? When people genuinely try to communicate well, how does it all go wrong? Or when we try to listen to, understand, and learn from someone, why do we sometimes feel disconnection and lose interest?

In trying to answer these questions, I started to develop this concept of what I have called the FILTER - Factors Influencing Life, Thoughts, Experiences, and Responses. The FILTER is the decoding/encoding we apply to everything going on around us including communication with others. The image below shows the primary aspects or factors of ourselves that make up the FILTER. This is not an earth-shattering discovery - rather it is putting a name to something we are all probably aware of at some level.

How the FILTER Impacts Communication

To better understand how the FILTER comes into play, we can look at communication with others as a feedback loop:

Sender > Encode > Channel > Decode >Recipient

Recipient > Encode > Channel > Decode > Sender

We can recognize the channel impacts this loop. Those of us who regularly email others may have had an experience where our email did not adequately convey our true meaning. An in-person channel allows us the ability to overcome the limitations of email.

The FILTER’s impact may not be as obvious as it is embedded in the Encode / Decode of this loop. When the sender wants to say something, the message is impacted by all those factors in the FILTER. If they are aware of the other person’s FILTER, they may encode the message differently than they would for a recipient with a different factor hoping it is decoded as they intend.

A simple work-related example of this would be a transportation engineer talking to a colleague. They may use industry terms and acronyms such as IDS, AADT, ADA. They may not include foundational explanations as they accept both have a basic understanding of the concepts. Would this work if the engineer is speaking to a non-engineer? Probably not. If the engineer has to convey some of these design concepts to the public, they will alter the message because of their perception of the recipient’s FILTER.

Using the FILTER to Better Communicate

To best leverage this concept to improve communication, it is important to understand our own FILTER. When we write or speak, we can explore how factors in our FILTER play into the final message.

We can also recognize factors in other people’s FILTERS and encode our message to ensure a better delivery to the recipient. This is probably why we do personality testing with coworkers.

Something else that really drove this home for me were experiences I regularly had as a city engineer in a small town. Almost always when I met someone for the first time, they would spend the first few minutes asking me more personal questions - about my family, where I lived, where I went to college. It always seemed like random questions I had to get through to find out what they really wanted to talk to me about. Especially if this line of questioning revealed a commonality between us, they noted it and stopped the questioning at that point. Looking back, it seems it was more of a way to best understand my FILTER so our conversation would be more successful. And the identification of something in common was key: people who find common ground are usually more successful at finding common solutions.

The FILTER can also help if you have to research historical documents, ideas, and actions. People in the past may have had much different FILTERs than we do today. We may miss intent and meaning if we try to impose our FILTER onto theirs. This can also impact our understanding of how and why something was built and how to repair it if necessary today. I had an experience with this when the top of a brick, circular sewer in my city failed. Initially I tried to think of solutions within the context of my own FILTER. No solution seemed great. Instead when another engineer on my team put himself in the shoes of the engineer who built this, he realized how that engineer probably installed it and then knew how to fix it.

The idea of a FILTER gives us a lot more to explore along our path to better communication. How has the FILTER impacted your communication?