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Bullets 2 and 3 combined are actually recommended for spoken communications as well. As the listener, before responding, it's a good habit to say "This is what I understand about your proposal" and proceed to summarize and give the original speaker an opportunity to correct you.

Probably over half of the communications problems I've seen at work are because people don't follow this basic practice. They respond based on what they understood, not based on what the speaker was saying.

As one book I read put it: You should be able to reflect their world view back to them as if you yourself are advocating for it (even if you completely disagree). When you do this, they'll believe you understand them. For many people, only then will they listen to your critiques.

There's also a subtlety where if you focus too much on what someone said, you might lose why he said it and how it pertains to the situation. I've gotten through some communication problems by focusing on how I understood the person's position, instead of what the arguments he brought forth. When you do that you get this funny situation where it almost seems like each person is participating in different conversations, but at the same time the discussion is progressing effortlessly. I think of it as letting yourself be free to frame and reframe the issue at hand however you like.

> As the listener, before responding, it's a good habit to say "This is what I understand about your proposal" and proceed to summarize and give the original speaker an opportunity to correct you.

I find a practice like this is also helpful for following up after a meeting. For meetings that warrant my taking notes, I like to type them up immediately afterwards, send them out to the other attendees, and solicit corrections or confirmations while the meeting is still fresh on everyone's mind.

It was a bit scary when I first started doing that since I'd fear that I might have misunderstood something and would be revealing my ignorance. But to the contrary, I've found that it tends to encourage others to share their notes for comparison and elicit further discussion. (If there's something I've misunderstood from a meeting, usually someone else was confused too.)

I've been doing the same for the past 10+ years.

The problem that I found with it, is that a recurring receiver (let's say a client) will eventually start trusting your minutes so much that they don't even bother to read them and just answer with 'Looks good' and basically you lose the power of minutes.

To counter this, recently I've been trying to insert one wrong bullet point from the beginning, making the receiver pay more attention down the line. I don't have yet enough data points to see if this approach works.

That last point is pretty hilarious!

I find writing up the minutes during the meeting and distilling to “are these the most important points?” works to grab folks’ attention.

I had managers -do-this- (repeat what they understood as the key element) in meetings and thought of it as a very annoying waste of time. With five people in the room, assuming you do, on average, two rounds per agenda item, there are nine repetitions.

Many people -- everyone? -- repeat what was said? Not sure I follow

You are right, the extreme value where everyone everytime repeats what was said before, to ensure common understanding, is an unlikely example. My point is that repeating information already present lowers information density. The "good habit of repeating what you understood" can quickly become very annoying.

Ok. Maybe it's enough that the one who is "the most responsible" for getting the things done, repeats

> They respond based on what they understood, not based on what the speaker was saying.

Lets say there are three main steps in responding to communication: 1. Comprehension of the original communication. 2. Mapping that communication onto the reader's priors. 3. Crafting a response that communicates the results of that mapping.

The problem seems to be that the first two steps are typically left implicit indefinitely. As a result, there can be discontinuities lurking hidden in or between any of those three steps and it's a hell of a lot of work to pry those discontinuities up to the surface.

Well, the whole point of repeating back their world view is to prevent implicitness and reduce hidden misunderstandings.

It's really not hard to do. You'll never get there 100%, but getting to 80%? It's easy.

FWIW, it doesn't have to be a "new communication channel", you just documented some best practices for email.

> No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high.

If something was left implicit or de facto re-ask for it to be explicit or de jure.

> The reader is quizzed on the the contents of the communication before they can respond (randomly generated quizzes might be amusing). > The reader has to retype the original communication themselves before they can respond....

A simple "What's you're rationale?" or if you're less confident "Sorry, I understand the action items and can execute them but I didn't follow the motivation. So I can do an even better job (or so I can make this decision without you next time), could you walk me through your thought process?"

> Timeout value, if no responses that pass the above tests in a given time frame, whomever asked gets to complete the task with no input and nobody can change the outcome for ... a week or so and everyone has to live with it. > Anyone who wants to change it after the timeout value better explain why they didn't ask before hand... no idea how this would work, yeah we're getting into the weeds here.

This is the most important email best practice that trips up junior workers. Make the default of your email your desired outcome.

Instead of: "Does everyone approve?" then if people respond asking "Ok, when should I do it? Thursday?".

Try it like this: "I'll make the change on Thursday. Please let me know if there are any concerns.".

1. Make the default response (i.e. no response) in your benefit.

2. Ensure there is a timeout value attached.

None of this is difficult or theoretical, its just a set of best practices you can get your self and others used to.

So, don't end the email with "Does everyone approve?"

Start with "Unless you disagree, I'll ..." Instead :)

Maybe a nit, but I think it’s very valuable:

“I’ll ..., unless anyone disagrees”

2 changes:

- Starting the sentence with a doubt can highlight doubts so I’d avoid that.

- “Anyone” distributes responsibility, because https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility

Thanks! Those are good points. I've read about diffusion of responsibility before but didn't think about it now

Oh man, I hear you. The amount of sad encounters (especially lately) that I've had as a result of people not understanding what I'm saying because they don't actually read what I wrote are enraging. I almost quit one client over it because their IT guy is the worst. He will decide ahead of time what your email probably says, and that's what he reads into it even if I wrote the opposite.

I try to blame myself first for poor communication, but I asked some mostly independent people to help mediate and they basically came back and told him to read better and review past messages if he couldn't properly remember the context.

I'm just starting to dip my toes back into the freelance web development world, after deciding indie game development wasn't for me.

My main problem with clients has always been 1) They don't really know what they want, beyond "a website", and 2) The reading comprehension of pretty much everyone I interact with is surprisingly low. I've mostly dealt with small-business owners, whose personalities seem to veer towards the eccentric.

With my current client, I'll send out emails requesting clarification for certain features that need to be implemented on the site. If I'm lucky, I'll get an email back with at least one of the issues having been addressed. There's been emails where the response was in no way relevant. At one point I even got a photo of someone's backyard sent to me as a response.

I've learned to only send him a single line of text if it requires a response, to increase my chances of getting something I can act on.

I really like making web sites, and programming in general... It's just the frustration of poor communication that makes the job so frustrating. I think if I were more of a salesman/people-person, I would probably be better about figuring out what they really need, and offering solutions to them... rather then just getting upset that they don't what they want.

I've seen people like this doing day to day business: it's absolutely awful. They attend meetings starting with software and ending up with elephants.They can't sit for more than two minutes and there's always phone, email, whatever. To expect for such a personal to produce a written piece on what they want,while they can't even do it verbally,is impossible. These are usually somewhat successful in some sort of a niche but would drown in any other environment.

I see similar issues with support emails. One thing I learnt is to never ask more than one question in an email as only the first question gets answered.

I’m sure it has been getting worse over time. I’m at the stage where I am surprised when I receive a coherent request.

Probably the most common question is “I tried you software, it don’t work”.

"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."

Can be shortened to “Hey! Listen!”

Not without loss of several significant subtextual channels: respect, clarity, and intent to name a few. Communication is a discipline; verbal shorthands like these are analogous to copy/paste laziness over thoughtful, intentional code.

> they don't actually read what I wrote

How long are those texts?

What about trying a maybe reverse text order? Start with: "do this, that, that. Because ..."? The actions first? I'm guessing

> I was thinking about an imaginary communication system that would allow for decision making where there were some rules:

> [...]

> - The reader has to retype the original communication themselves before they can respond....

In email (not following Outlook/conversation style) and newsgroups, people would trim the original quoted material down to what they were responding to and then type their responses inline. While that would, in a way, meet that requirement, it could still lead to people responding to selected parts of your message while missing other parts. But, that would allow you to reiterate the points they didn't address in your subsequent response.

Yeah, it's really unfortunate that inline replying effectively died out, replaced by top-posting. I think inline replies, while lending themselves to the selective quotation problem you mention, nevertheless force more careful consideration of the original text.

I'm not even sure selective quotation is really a problem. Selective replying happens regardless of whether they are quoting or not, but is just more explicit when they are documenting which parts they reply to.

I agree. I still do this. But nowadays lot of people feedback that they do not understand my way of replying. Compared to many of my early digital acquaintances I was socialized quite late on the internet starting in 97. Compared to my colleagues I often feel old and out of sync with my style of long form written communication.

> nowadays lot of people feedback that they do not understand my way of replying.

Some clients, like Outlook, will actually collapse the original email and only show the top-posted reply. An inline reply would appears as an empty email in their client.

I have this same problem and would describe it similarly.

> - No responding from mobile devices. The poor response rate is just too high.

For me, the tendency of slack to let users write very short sentences/phrases is the issue. Etiquette for slack allows very IM like messages, whereas Emails are generally required to be more verbose.

It's probably a question of personality, custom and habit, but I tend to write like I speak (some would say "no, you speak like you write" :-) in any forum, including Slack, sometimes in defiance of the cultural norms of the audience.

It leads to something of a reputation for verbosity, but never the accusation of ambiguity or excessive terseness. I don't think anyone's ever said to me, "What did you mean by that two-word reply?"

It can be quite useful when replying to each point though, you can quote each one independently since they're not merged into one big blob of text.

Not saying it's impossible otherwise of course, just slightly more convenient.

I hope I never have to go back to using email for work.

Long messages for tickets, slack for near real time chat.

Email for transactional spam and emailing old friend once a year.

You could only have such a system in an environment with a huge power imbalance between the sender and recipient, like Tim Cook sending a message to an Apple IC engineer. But with that kind of power imbalance all of these things happen anyways -- if an individual engineer gets an email from Tim Cook he definitely isn't firing off a poorly-thought-out reply from a mobile device.

I sort of see what you're saying. When a person with Great Authority says that Something Needs Doing, I need to think through what I'm going to say about what I'm going to do. But the single best response is to spend those fifteen minutes seeing if there's an obvious solution. If there is, you can be quite terse and just say: "done". Do that five times and even Tim Cook has your attention.

No, actually the opposite is true. The whole idea of any policy is to give artificial "power" to one side to straighten out the situations where the balance of power is unclear.

An exec (the remote-only version of Tim Cook if you like) can use their leverage to change the existing email flows between all managers and all engineers. Because it's more scalable than micromanaging one engineer.

In other words, some people are good at organizing through setting policies (the better sort of politics) and it's a good place to discuss such ideas.

Parent's formulation doesn't look convincing though :)

This is why Amazon takes the first 20 minutes as time for reading their written communication before big decisions.

I hate this approach (even more so when I was involved in writing the written communication) because it usually turns into idly waiting for others to finish reading, while I get distracted, bored and just plain could be doing something more productive.

I understand the concept and some people must find it useful and valuable, but I’ve personally never got anything of value out of it other than making sure everyone has read the content before the meeting proper starts. Personally, I find asking somebody to attend a meeting, where 20 minutes is just silently reading, rather disrespectful of their time.

What about everyone reading the material before the meeting, and a computer aided individual quiz to find out if they did?

Unless (all for the meeting really important ppl did), meeting cancelled

That would be great!

Hi! I recently opened my quiz generation service to public. Would you try out the quiz AI assistant at https://QuizRecall.com and let me know what would you need to be added to make useful also for your use case?

Give the quizzes at the end of the blog posts a shot:

- https://vaclavkosar.com/ml/starspace-embedding

- https://quizrecall.com/rack/Cynefin-Framework--Making-The-Be...

I use the service for personal training, but it is opened for others now as well.

This sounds like a typical engineers approach to solving a social problem. Just hire better staff and pay them what they are worth.