Do you remember playing the telephone game when you were a kid? I don’t remember it being called the telephone game, but we used to play it around the camp fire. (It’s also called Chinese Whispers.) You’d start by thinking of a phrase, like “Bobby went to the store to get cheese.” Then you would whisper that into the ear of the person next to you, and they would do the same thing until the message got all the way around the campfire, and the last person whispered the message to you. Without exception, the message you would hear was something like “Mommy don’t want to sneeze!” Then everyone would laugh when you told them the original message, and everyone would remember hearing something slightly different.

Why is that?

Ever feel like a software or website project you’ve worked on is like that?

How about pulling your hair out after delivering a product just to hear your customer say “This is not what I asked for!” When you know you sat in that big conference room with 20 other witnesses that heard that client ask for the very thing you delivered! Outrageous. The nerve of some clients. How dare they describe what they want in a way that could possibly lead to you misinterpreting what they thought they said.

What is the deal?

Why have so many of us gone through the exact same experience?

Some popular answers:
“The requirements must have been terrible.”
“The developers didn’t read the documentation right”
“The client doesn’t know what they want.”

In truth, these all have some merit. However, no matter how much documentation, how good the developers and how articulate the client, we still go through it. I would like to propose that the real culprit is a concept that one of my favorite doctors told me about: the distortion of information. Sounds simple right? It is. This concept is defined by Wiio’s Laws of Communication, which you should check out, they are actually pretty funny. This concept is actually what makes the telephone game I described at the beginning so much fun.

The basic concept at play is that information is bound to get distorted when one person passes it to another person, and it gets exponentially worse the more people that message is passed between. If you want to experience this, play the telephone game, or get paid to experience it and get involved in software development.

What do you do to fix this problem?

There is no absolute fix. It’s a lot like LT on the football field: you can’t stop it, you can only hope to contain it, and if you don’t find a way to contain it, you will lose.