There are lots of ways to get team communication wrong, and I have been guilty of at least several of them!
Email too long. I’m reasonably good at thinking, I think, and reasonably good at writing, and thanks to dictation software, very efficient at turning thinking and writing into a torrent of words. Unfortunately, in a team, there is a considerable cost to creating words and consuming them. I’ve written too many words, too often.
Email too often. Some people are pretty good at juggling a long inbox where each message represents a separate chain of discussion. Many more people are not. I’ve often written many short emails which ignore the truth that humans mostly work in terms of a mostly-single conversation context with each correspondent.
Chat too often. Communicating via a chat tool avoids the many-simultaneous threads-problem, but it bumps into another rough edge of human communication. Even as we use tools which are technically asynchronous, we create distraction (or depending on the hour of the day annoyance). I have both witnessed and been the perpetrator of too-many-chats-too-often.
Long-term / short-term. Some of us have a knack toward thinking at both short-term and long-term levels concurrently all the time. Sometimes this pays off, but more often it is yet another anti-pattern in team communication. A team needs to mostly collaborate and coordinate to get done whatever is on the plate right now.
The Outbox
A few years ago, I stumbled upon a better communication pattern that avoids most of this. I’ve sometimes called it the outbox. An outbox is a place to keep short notes about things you need to communicate to various people; one note/page/file/whatever per person or group. It can be implemented as paper notes, a text file, in Apple Notes or Google Keep, whatever is most convenient. Each person’s output is independent and simple. Whenever some thought comes up, rather than immediately emailing or messaging the person it pertains to, jot a few notes in the outbox.
Then at some reasonable cadence (daily, twice a day, weekly, monthly, etc) discuss it all of it at once.
To keep these discussions sessions maximally helpful, divvy up your outbox between immediate/tactical and strategic ideas. This makes it easy to frequently collaborate on short-term matters, and then less often talk about strategic matters.
This pattern works well with both one-to-one and group communications. You’ll have something useful and planned to say if your team has a regular “stand-up” meeting. You’ll have something useful to talk about next time you have the opportunity to have a discussion with someone. You might even have something great in hand next time you bump into the CEO in an elevator (“great to see you, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about…”).
Even better, a bit of time to percolate in the outbox sometimes gives an idea the chance to go obsolete and be deleted. Maybe you wake up in the morning thinking, “I should talk with Anne about redesigning the company logo”. Should you email about it right now? Well, maybe, but this might be a distraction to Anne who is working on something much more relevant for today. Should you send a chat message to Anne right now? That’s even worse. Instead, jot it in the outbox… perhaps when you meet with Anne at the next interval, you may have realized in between that the logo redesign doesn’t make any sense to pursue tactically. So you discard the idea, never having created a distraction in the first place.
(I’m certainly not claiming this is a new invention. Thinking before you speak is a valuable idea going back forever!)
