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Ethics and Responsibility in Communication

© Emily Thrush

I once had a boss who loved to send out really long, rambling memos in which he would discuss a number of topics, most of interest to only a few of the recipients. One of these memos announced a department meeting - at the end of the second page. The day of the meeting, only two of us showed up. We had to explain to the boss that no one else had read the entire memo. He was crushed!
Fortunately, there were no dire consequences from this situation. However, in other cases, crises, and even tragedies have resulted from the failure of a message to reach its receiver. Who's responsible in these cases? Let's look at a few notable examples.
Three Mile Island
The nuclear power plant in Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, had a critical incident in 1978. This was the closest a nuclear power plant in the U.S. has ever come to an accident that could have endangered thousands of people's lives. After the incident, there was a government investigation into the causes, and why preventative measures hadn't been taken. One of the documents that surfaced during the hearings was a report written by an engineer who had witnessed a similar, though less serious, problem at a plant in South Carolina. His report had been written up as a standard trip report: "I arrived on such-and-such a date, and this is what I did and what I observed." On the third page, in the middle of the page, he finally mentioned that the circumstances causing the problem in S.C. could also happen at Three Mile Island. He made a strong plea for steps to remedy the underlying problem. But nobody ever read that part of his report. On the witness stand, the recipients of the report said "It looked like a standard trip report to me, and I don't really read those; I just file them."
Moral of the story: If you have a message you want people to get, put it up front, in big letters and highlight it in red!
Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster
While many factors were involved in the launch of the disastrous Challenger that exploded in mid-air, killing several astronauts and a civilian schoolteacher -Christa McAuliffe, communication lapses definitely entered into the equation. One problem was that the engineers who tested the O-rings that eventually failed reported the results of the test in standard lab report form. They did not interpret the results for the readers, some of whom were the managers responsible for making the launch decision. At the investigation into the incident, it became clear that the critical temperature reported in these lab reports was interpreted by some readers to refer to the temperature of the fuel (which wouldn't change much in response to the external temperature) while it actually referred to the air temperature. It was a chilly morning in Florida on the day of the launch, and the temperature was found to be a cause of the failure of the O-rings.