The power of miscommunication

Zillions of books have been written about the effects of good communication and ways to improve a person's communication skills. But then, there are still so many people who have their age-old naive ways of conveying their ideas to others. Ever felt the pangs of frustration pop up when peole dont just seem to understand what you are trying to explain them? Its so simple and well planned in your head..why cant they just take a peek in it?Well apparently things are not that simple as they seem to be! Just imagine how you would have reacted in a situation if someone just walked up to you and said.."So dear, what was the result of the discussion that happened that day?". Irritated? Hell yes! Although he or she would have the entire discussion in his or her head in the utmost clarity..how the hell does it matter? You would not get the context by simply "peeking into their head"!

Few days back, my friend showed me a book titled "Eats, Shoots and Leaves". The context of this book was about a Panda who enters a restraunt, orders some food, eats it greedily and once he is done, gets up, takes out a loaded gun and shoots every one in sight. Just as he is leaving, somebody asks him from behind as to why he did all this.
"I am a Panda".
"So?"
"Look it up in the dictionary".
When the meaning of Panda was searched in the dictionary, this was the meaning people found "A Panda is an animal with four feet, and is black and white in colour. It eats, shoots and leaves."
Well it seems hilarious at first..but come to think of it, one wrongly punctuated sentence changes it all.

One single miscommunication can change the entire course of events. We have a very prominent example in history about the mass execution carried out by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the leader of Cheka( the military arm of Bolshevik communist government). In an operation to eliminate non-communists, Felix took a list of these non-communist prisoners Vladimir Lenin, who simply put a 'X' mark on the list and returned it to Felix. Taking this as an approval for mass execution, Felix killed 2000 people in one night. As it turns out, this was a case of sheer miscommunication - Lenin had a habit of putting an 'X' mark on all the documents which he had read to keep a track of read ones from unread ones; he neveractually approved of that massive killing by Felix!

All said and done, I really feel that it is more important to realize the power and misgivings that can occur due to one's miscommunication rather that just concentrating on the power of effective communication. Try to think what you actually want to convey to the person in question and if possible analyze it from a neural perspective. It really helps a lot. This should be brought into practice by even those who have a flawless communication, beacuse a single misunderstood event can make you regret for a lifetime.