Chinese Whispers

If it's important, you should hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

Chinese Whispers was a fun game my school teachers loved to get us kids to play.

Chinese Whispers or sometimes known as the ‘telephone game’ for those that have never heard or played it before; is a game where you get a group of people to form a line. Then designate which person is the front of the line (and naturally the person on the other end is the end of the line). The person at the front of the line will come up with a message and whisper this message to the next person in the line. This repeats until the message reaches the last person in the line, who will then say the message out loud.

The idea behind this is, by the time the message gets to the end of the line, the message would have been altered to a point that it no longer represents the original message.

Here’s a YouTube video of a variation of the Chinese Whispers game, that highlights this.

You’ll see in the video, the facilitator starts the chain by showing the next person he’s starting a motorbike, then going for a ride on it. But, by the time it reaches the end of the line, it’s become a random dance move.

There are two key ideas shown in this video:

1. A message can survive approximately 3 transfers before it becomes noise.

2. The change in the message is usually not due to intentional sabotage.

If something does not feel right. Or is important, always get the information directly from the source. And at max, no more than 2 nodes away from the source.