I disagree with your conclusion that the fault or failure of effective communication lies with the listener.
Then I miscommunicated, because my premise and conclusion were that communication failure is the fault of the communicator; not the listener.
If I ask my daughter to give me the blue pencil and she is unable to do so, it's not her fault for not remembering I'm color-blind and she needs to figure out which one must look blue to me. It's my fault for having incorrectly called it blue. Effective communication didn't take place and I have to try a different approach.
To bring it around to stock discussions, if I go to the YYZ board and say "Short this pig. It's going down!" and I'm met with disbelief, I didn't communicate effectively.
So I'll say "Short this pig because 3 months from now, the price is going to be in the toilet", I might have a few more people understanding me, but not many.
If I then say "Look, the cash burn rate is why it's going down. It's going to crash after the next Q comes out.", then I might've finally communicated effectively to a number of people. But some don't know what a burn rate is, or maybe even what a "Q" is.
"If you look at the cash on the books for each of the last 8 quarters, which is $x,xxx,xxx for Q1/01, $xxx,xxx for Q2/01, etc., you'll see that the cash they showed remaining at the end of the last quarter won't last them more than half of this quarter.", then you've seriously and effectively communicated. Then you'll likely get a reply that says "Oh, they're running out of money! I'm going to short this pig! It's going down!"
However, even the person I'm trying to convey a thought to is also a communicator in the process. If I'm getting a blank stare, I need to take that as a cue that I'm not communicating; I'm just talking. If they're nodding knowingly, then they may be miscommunicating that they understand (happens all the time in business) but if their other feedback tells me they missed the point, I didn't communicate. If they're not really listening because they're busy trying to claw their nose off their face, my breath may be so offensive that they can't process anything they're hearing. If I say "We ran out of database extents" and I get no replies, or the replies are like "Okay, but why was the site down all weekend", I need to say something like "The cumulative size of our messages reached a threshhold our system wasn't prepared to deal with."
I taught certain courses at a local community college for a while. I'd taught some of the classes for so long, I didn't even need to bring the lesson plan with me for certain days. I had it memorized.
One such day was always the first day of Lotus (then later Excel).
On each of those days, I'd spend the majority of the first several minutes with my back to the class (a big, but sometimes necessary no-no) while I drew a spreadsheet on the board, identified columns and rows and cells, and how we'd refer to each cell by its column then row, then could make formulas based on those addresses.
Without fail, by the time I'd gotten my boardwork done and turned to continue my lecture face-to-face, the faces looking back at me all contained blank stares. My next sentence was always the same "Nod your heads up and down like this so I'll think you understood what I just said so I can continue, and I promise you'll understand in a minute." That always relieved the shell-shock.
Understanding for some would happen when I wrote "2" in A1, "3" in A2, then "=A1+A2" in A3 and explain that it'd display a "5". Understanding would happen for more of them when they typed that themselves and saw their formula replaced with the number. Understanding was nearly always complete once I had them change a value in one of the first two cells and the 3rd cell changed accordingly.
I could've hastened communication by just having them type the numbers and formulas first thing, but it was important to have the column/row/cell thing on the board and discussed from the get-go because that was the basis of the language we'd be speaking for the next 3 months.
Of course, when you're first learning about spreadsheets, it's tough to remember that a cell is named by its column and row, in that order. So I have you remember that C comes before R. And if you can't remember which is columns and which is rows, I change the subject for a moment and say "Lots of fancy buildings have these things in the front holding up the edge of the roof. What're those called?" "Roof-holder-uppers?" "C.....", and someone would inevitably say "Columns" and I'd tell them to just remember those. On a building in a good state of repair, those go up and down, just like the columns in spreadsheets, which come first in the cell name because C comes before R.
If that didn't work, I'd just grab my chair and start waving it around menacingly. <g>
And veering even further off-course, while fondly remembering my teaching days, this was while Beavis and Butthead were on the air and very popular. I'd always end up with the funny ones (always in the back of the room for reasons I'm sure I remembered when I sat in the back in high school) doing the BnB laughs. I'd gotten pretty good at the voice of the hippy teacher from that show (whose name escapes me), so throwing out the next line in his voice would usually get the attention of the distractors. And I'd use that voice occasionally to relieve information overload, which'd result in the BnB guys doing their laughing, which'd get all of us going.
I could do Beavis a lot better than that teacher, though, and really can do an uncanny Mr. Mackey from South Park. Like this:
"You're not communicating because you're stoned out of your sick little monkey mind. Drugs are bad, m'kay."
Good, eh? Really wish that show were on when I was teaching. <g>
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