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Common ground is a communication technique based on mutual knowledge as well as awareness of mutual knowledge. Common ground is negotiated to close the gap between differences in perspective and this in turn would enable different perspectives and knowledge to be shared. Psycholinguist Herbert H. Clark uses the example of a day at the beach with his son. They share their experiences at the beach and are aware of the mutual knowledge. If one were to propose the painting of a room a certain shade of pink, they could describe it by comparing it to a conch shell they saw at the beach. They can make the comparison because of their mutual knowledge of the pink on the shell as well as awareness of the mutual knowledge of the pink. This communication technique is often found in negotiation.

Common Ground in Collaboration
Common ground is often used in collaboration, where a team is out to solve a complex problem. In order to solve a complex problem, the different skills and perspectives of members in a team must be pooled together. To do so, the team must make sure that they are on common ground in terms of knowledge and representation of the problem. Care must be taken to note that to achieve common ground when collaborating, differences are constructively managed, rather than downplayed. This is because collaboration differs from compromise.

Common Ground in Technology
Despite the improvement in telecommunication to overcome distance as an obstacle for collaboration, working in separate locations still increases the odds that people are not on common ground, and are not aware of it. (Catherine Cramton) Common ground, i.e. mutual knowledge, is an important element to successful communication and coordinated activity. Working separately, through technology makes it more difficult to detect and resolve misunderstandings from a lack of common ground.

Failures to communicate and remember information about context
When it comes to distance, the need to communicate and remember differences in context often escapes the collaborators. Collaborators often assume their remote partners are in the same context, or forget that the remote partners are not, and hence fail to remember communicate about an essential contextual information to their remote partners. For instance, there have been many recorded cases of workers going offline because of a public holiday in their country, but forget that the other party they are working with in a different area does not have the same public holiday, and hence fail to communicate about the holiday. This failure to communicate contextual information will inevitably cause a misunderstanding and cause people to jump to conclusions and mistrust each other. Additionally, even if contextual information has been communicated, collaborators may still forget about it. This means that conclusions are again drawn with the lack of essential contextual information, causing misunderstanding. For instance, a team member may communicate to her team that she has an upcoming trip and will not be able to communicate within that time period. However, the team forgot about it and still sent him e-mail requests for immediate action while she was away.

Uneven distribution of information
When digital technology is used to replace face-to-face communication, it is difficult to detect the actual messages that have been both sent and received by a receiver and vise versa. For instance, if partnering workers within an organization have two email addresses, a primary and a secondary one, some messages may be sent by the server to the primary addresses and some the secondary addresses. If both partners only read messages received in the primary addresses, then a lot of information would be lost in transmission and the working partners would be on very different grounds. These working partners would be both wondering why are some messages ignored while others are received and incorrect conclusions would be drawn leading to misunderstandings. Since both partners are unaware of the root cause of their misunderstandings, it would be a long time before this problem is brought to light and by then a lot of tensions and conclusions would have been drawn by then. Errors in the distribution of messages are more common in technology than face-to-face interaction leading, to the lack of common ground.

Differences in what information is salient
When it comes to face-to-face interaction, the speaker may make the importance of a message known through tone of voice, facial expression and bodily gestures. The receiver may acknowledge understanding through exact feedback called “back-channel” communication, such as head nods, brief verbalizations like “yeah” and “okay” or smiles. These methods of emphasis and feedback ensure parties are on common ground. However, these same methods are absent or scarce in most digital means of communication. For example, in an e-mail exchange, it is easy to overlook the important point of the message as intended by the sender. The receiver may interpret the message differently, giving different parts of the message different priority. In the worse case, this may cause lack of action to the salient parts of the message by the receiver’s part. Fully implementing “back-channel” communication is time-consuming. The lack of convenient cues in digital communication makes dispersed collaboration less conducive for the establishment of mutual knowledge.

Differences in speed and timing
Speed and timing of communication is inevitably not as uniformed in digital communication than face-to-face interaction. This is due to the fact that some parties would have more restricted access to communication than others. The differences in relative speed and timing of feedback are aggravated by differences in time zones. In some cases, the problems arising from differences relative speed may be attributed instead to a lack of conscientiousness on the part of the slower partners. In fact, a fluctuating feedback cycle is more destructive than a uniformed feedback cycle of a slower pace.

Uncertainty about the meaning of silence
Messages met with silence can mean a variety of things. For example, silence can be due to technical problems within the technology that mediates the parties involved in communication, or it can be due to the fact that one of the partners is out of town and cannot reply the message. Whatever the reason, silence is a barrier to establishing common ground, firstly because of the ambiguity of silence. Silence is so ambiguous, it can be interpreted by the receiving partner in so many ways. For example, it can be taken to mean agreement, disagreement, and indifference or in the case of dispersed group – the message was undelivered. Secondly, silence blurs the notion of what is known and unknown in the group, signaling the absence of common ground.

Actor-Observer Effect
The difficulties of establishing common ground, especially in technology, can give rise to dispositional rather than situational attribution. This tendency is known as the “actor-observer effect”. What this means is that people often attribute their own behavior to situational causes, while observers attribute the actor’s behavior to the personality or disposition of the actor. For example, an actor’s common reason to be late is due to the situational reason, traffic. Observers’ lack of contextual knowledge about the traffic, i.e. common ground, leads to them attributing the lateness due to ignorance or laziness on the actor’s part. This tendency towards dispositional attribution is especially magnified when the stakes are higher and the situation is more complex. When observers are relatively calm, the tendency towards dispositional attribution is less strong.

Disappointment
Another consequence of a lack of mutual understanding is disappointment. When communicating partners fail to highlight the important points of their message to their partner or know the important points of the partner’s message, then both parties can never satisfy the their partner’s expectations. This lack of common ground damages interpersonal trust, especially when partners do not have the contextual information of why the other party behaves the way they did.

Multiple Ignorances
People base their decisions and contribution based on their own point of view. When there is a lack of common ground in the points of views of individuals within a team, misunderstandings occur. Sometimes these misunderstandings remain undetected which in turn lead to multiple ignorances. The team may not be able to find the right solution because it does not have a correct representation of the problem.

Historical Examples
Common ground in communication has been critical in mitigating misunderstandings and negotiations.

Apollo 11
Common ground can be seen during the first moon landing between Apollo 11 and Mission Control. Mission Control had to provide assistance and instructions to the crew in Apollo 11, while the crew had to be able to provide their situation and context for Mission Control. This was particularly difficulty given the strict conditions their radio system needed to function. The success of the mission was dependent on their ability to provide situation information and instructions clearly. From the transcripts it is seen how often they would check to ensure that the other party had clearly heard what they had to say. They had to provide verbal feedback after listening due to the constraints of their situation.

Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the Cold War ever got to becoming a nuclear war. It was resolved through establishing common ground to reduce misunderstanding. John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev negotiated to move their respective nuclear weapons away from the others. Through common ground they were able to establish that neither party wanted nuclear war and were using their nuclear weaponry for political means rather than military aggression. The arms placed in Cuba were for the means of protecting Cuba, which was deep in American territory, from American invasion rather than a means to attack the United States. Cuba had little value to America, so through common ground they were able to complete their negotiation and prevent nuclear war.