#11 Technological change begins with how we structure communication
Window #11 is about the person who quietly built the structure behind all modern communication.
Window #11 is my tribute to Claude Shannon, who saw communication as a mathematical puzzle, not a philosophical one. He was famously uninterested in the “meaning” of messages, only in the structure and probability of their transmission. That discipline shaped everything he built.
Anyone who has ever studied communication has encountered the so-called linear communication model:
Sender → Encoder → Channel (Noise) → Decoder → Receiver
That model is Shannon’s. His 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication defined information theory and became the foundation for all modern digital communication. It is also the model that quietly structures everything from your text messages to the way a fibre cable handles interference.
What I admire about Shannon is that he designed systems that worked under pressure. His thinking underlies all digital electronics, but it also applies to how teams and organisations coordinate. He reminds us that communication succeeds not when we say more, but when we structure better.
Shannon kept a filing cabinet labelled “Things to think about”. Inside were handwritten problems, paradoxes and ideas he found worth exploring. This was his method: identify the structure, reduce the noise, and build a system robust enough to survive interference.
This approach led to his 1948 masterpiece A Mathematical Theory of Communication, the foundation of information theory. It explained communication as a sender transmitting a message through a channel, where noise interferes, and where the receiver reconstructs whatever survives. The clarity of the model came later, thanks to Warren Weaver, who wrote a preface so that the rest of the world could understand it.
Shannon matters for technological change because he showed us why systems fail. Messages get distorted. Channels introduce noise. Receivers reconstruct fragments. Any technology built on top of that reality inherits the same fragility.
His insight is still the most relevant one we have: complexity requires structure. Without it, information decays. Without it, the system drifts. Without it, the noise wins.
And that is what we need to know for Window #11. Technological change does not begin with innovation or creativity. It begins with the hidden architecture that allows information to survive the journey at all.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon (1948): full text. A Mathematical Theory of Communication (PDF)
The photo is from 2023, of me guiding at the World Heritage Grimeton Radio Station, a place built to send signals across the Atlantic, long before Shannon explained why some signals make it and others disappear into noise.