Many people and organizations transmit in UDP. We need to communicate in TCP. Get the ack. Confirm the signal was received.
Personally, If I get or take a task, I repeat the request, confirm the deadline, and document the delivery. This way when there's a conflict I can demonstrate that someone forgot or ignored or overlooked.
When talking to someone in person, if you say something, before they give a formal ack, their body language already tells you a lot about how they perceived the message.
If the reception was unfavorable, you have an opportunity to immediately add more to clarify if it was perceived incorrectly.
With a formal communication system such as an API, the API itself describes what messages it wants to receive and what the meaning of those messages are. But in human communication you’re not limiting yourself to messages the recipient has completely described. You’re creating new messages. New messages which the sender expects to be received ina certain way but there’s no guarantee it will be because we don’t know if the recipient is setup to handle it as you expect.
Yup. And also, what you're getting an ack to matters.
Not helpful: you say: Project X is now priority 1. I say: I think you said, project X is now top priority, right? you say: ack!
Helpful: you say: Project X is now priority 1. I say: Just to confirm - we are going to pause project Y and Z, and move Alice and Bob to X. That probably means We are going to lose Acme as a client because they are waiting for Z. I can see how this might make sense, but just wanted to double check. you say: I didn't think about Acme. No, I didn't mean that - let's rethink.
One ack gives you no new information, one enables a really good communication. If you said "Ack" in the 2nd case, that's mean a lot!
I think this is one of the biggest points about communication: It requires both sides.
It doesn't matter if you have a clear and well-defined protocol for how you communicate if the other side can't, won't, or don't follow it.
It's like a web browser that only supports HTML. It may get the content your web server sends, but not the context and intent included in your CSS and JS.
And it's a lot easier to just say, "I only need the content, anyways."
A manager raising their voice does not change the message. Being more confident with myself, the volume, intensity, or cadence no longer impacts me in the same way as it did before. I now look forward to those moments of calm responses to the unprofessional interactions.