Exploring a Systems Engineering Approach to Modelling Human Communication

Communication is a crucial process for any successful purposeful human activity system as it mediates the information‐based relationships between a system's elements and parts, purpose(s) and boundaries. Human communication is more than just a process; it is a subsystem that interacts with other human activity systems, parts, elements and subsystems. In other words, a human communication system is a holon within a purposeful human activity system. However, the presence of noise can hinder the effectiveness of a human communication system in mediating information transmission. Numerous communication models exist; however, noise is not always considered as part of the model, and when it is, the existing communication models tend to model noise as an input to the system and not as an emergent property. As identified in interpersonal communication studies, there are four types of noise in human communication. Yet, the different types of noise are not explicitly included in the existing communication models. Hence, this research explores whether the different types of noise have a unique impact on human communication, thus necessitating a delineation of the general modelling of noise. Through an exploratory study, we identify the impacts of the four types of noise on information transmission. The exploratory study results show that the different types of noise have unique impacts on a human communication system and emerge from internal and external processes and that purposefully including each type of noise is necessary to enhance our understanding of communication in human activity systems.