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Comment by BeetleB | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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