Intent, action and impact

Again I have been triggered by a fascinating question by Rebecca Elvy, pondering upon the connection between the intent that a person has and the impact it has on other people - ending up in the question "I can do something, and it has an impact on somebody else. But they cannot really know my intent. So what happens when the impact is inconsistent with the intent? And who is responsible for the impact?"
And like all good input, it made me think. Back to my education, specialized in process control. And it made me realise that the person that I communicate with as a system (let's call it 'U'), in which the my actions is the input and the impact is the output. My actions themselves are an output of my own system (which we can conveniently call 'I'), into which the intent is input. This system that interprets my intent and acts accordingly ("what should I do to best support my intent?"). Consequently the intent is transformed into impact through 'U' and 'I' as shown in the diagram. If it should have been more precise, there should have been some feedback loops as well - but let's keep it simple.

From this also follows that the more a communicator know about the target system (in this case, the persons she (in accordance with my considerations on gender recently) interacts with), the better she will be able to foresee the output that her input to the system will cause (which impact the actions based on her intent will have on other people). For now, not to complicate things, let's assume that she is able to act in the best possible way to express her intent) Similarly, the less she knows about the people her intent will have impact on, the less she will be able to foresee the impact, and the more cautious she should be when she interacts with such people - she would want to apply an input (an action) to which she is comfortable that the output will be stable, especially if she is not able to gauge the reaction of the people she interacts with in detail: it's easy when communicating face to face - if you communicate in speech, e.g. over the phone, you will lose the indications of the counterpart's facial expression and body language; if you communicate in writing, the tone of voice will be gone as well; and if you communicate by spreading your words via social media, you might not even get any indication of how people respond to your intent.
Once she has grown to know her target group's reaction to her intent, she can slowly start amplifying the input she gives to the people she works with - both because she knows more about how they react, and because they know more about what they can expect from her.
But I do not think that she will ever get in a situation where her intent will have the precise impact she wanted it to. And again - she might not care as much about the impact that her intent has on people outside her target group, if she is pretty certain that it will have the right impact on her target group.
If she has communicated carefully and tried to determine which system she has communicated into, I think that she - even though she is responsible for the impact - can reasonably throw her hands in the air and say "sorry you feel that way, it wasn't my intent!" if someone misinterprets her. Similarly, the less she has done to foresee the impact, the less she can defend to say it - though she is at least trying to better it by saying that she's sorry. (But as I always say to my kids when they have done something, which they could have foreseen that they would ultimately need to say that they were sorry about: "I acknowledge that you are sorry, but I would rather that you had thought before acting - then we could have done without being sorry at all.")
And finally: there will always be people who misinterpret your intent, and people who feign an impact which is not really there, simply because today's means of communication makes it so easy for people to express that they are offended about something they do not even care wholeheartedly about.
When I express myself, I hope that people in my audience are so patient with me that they apply Hanlon's razor to my message, that is: that they do not attribute to malice, what they can adequately explain by my stupidity. But I can never be certain that they do, and in the end, it is my responsibility to make it as difficult as possible for my target audience to misunderstand me. Because in the end, it is my personal brand that I put at stake, every time I communicate.
(Translated from Hensigt, handling og virkning)