In a typical communication cycle, you will need a sender, medium and a recipient.

Medium being the method used to send the message signal.
It could be in written format, verbal, sign language, email and many more.

Communication cycle is consider completed when the recipient react to the message he received from the sender.

And in most cases, when the sender sends any message to the recipient, the recipient should respond even if it’s a simple head nod. There will be a communication breakage, if the recipient does not respond or ignore your message.

Example, Peter is supposed to organise a gathering event with some friends. Unfortunately, there is no response from his friends on the venue. Peter feels there is a communication lag. The gathering will not be materialised if no one responds to his proposal.

Scenario 2: After working on the requirement, supplier e-mailed the document and seeks for customer’s confirmation for any discrepancies. Once confirmed, the supplier can then quickly build or develop the prototype.

However, the customer has not reply to any of the emails’ confirmation. Thus there is a serious communication breakage.

Many a times in email communication with other party, I will put down a timeline for feedback. If I need to get the respond from recipient urgently, I will normally put down a date for the other party to revert, say this coming Thursday (when today is Monday).

If he chooses to ignore the message, I will follow up with another message the next day informing the recipient that the motion will be approved if there is no feedback. Please revert if there is any query.

I normally will get response once the recipient sees this kind of message(s).

This is a little trick that I use and it works most of the time.
What do you think? Please comment of your method to seek communication response.

If this article / subject interests you, I’ve created several courses about it here: https://journey.thinkific.com.
I hope they help you with incomplete communication.