If you have, you'll know what I mean when I say communication is difficult. Choose your words carefully or risk a tantrum. Get it wrong, and there could be hell to pay. But as toddlers grow up, it doesn't necessarily get any easier. Why is it so hard for us to stay on the same page?

Research shows that understanding goes beyond just interpreting words. It's a bunch of things. Did the speaker use the correct words? Does the listener have the context (background, knowledge, relationships)? What about the speaker's intent? And then there's shared construction of meaning, filtered through each perspective.

All this to say -- it doesn't take much to misunderstand one another.

A study by Grammarly found that we spend as much as 25% of our work week in meetings. That's a huge surface area for miscommunication. Throw agile in the mix, and the number goes up. Add a customer or two, even more. I build software with customers for a living. Imagine trying to solve a complex problem when you are new to the domain and don't have their background. Whoosh!

But wait, it gets worse.

Written communication takes up another 50% of our time and isn't magically better. We are overloaded: WhatsApp, message, Slack/Teams/Gchat, email and more. Notifications everywhere. Designed to steal your attention and focus. We are being trained to think fast and respond poorly. Have you ever used Slack and felt compelled to respond to a topic, before it gets lost forever?

The cost of inefficiency and poor communications is insane. 40% reduction in productivity; 37% increase in project timelines; 32% increase in costs. So how do we fix this?

Very clever, successful people tell us that better writing means better thinking. Paul Graham says "The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard." Dave Perrell says "Writing is like weightlifting for the brain. Just as you’ll improve your food diet if you start cooking, you’ll improve your information diet if you start writing. Testing the limits of your ideas is the fastest way to improve them and raise your intelligence." I agree with them.

So how do we translate this to business, and specifically software development? The answer has to be reducing the number of channels. And noise. We have to re-train ourselves to think slower and be more thoughtful. If you write something down, you can save that hour long meeting. That hour long meeting is actually way longer, depending on the number of people. The silent killer of productivity.

Whether it's a brief, a PRD, or a ticket -- take the time to think it through and write it out. It's important to define a vision and how an organisation should communicate. It's also a cultural thing. It won't work if the natural urge is to ping a Slack message and set up a meeting to discuss.

Same goes for working with a customer. There's an even higher chance for miscommunication. We spend so much time crafting detailed statements of work to manage scope, risk, etc. but this detail and thinking gets lost in the delivery. I've found that customers find it hard to get into a backlog -- mostly because it's not natural to them -- so they just trust us to manage our work. The issue is then when things go wrong, they feel they don't have control. This leads to tension.

When building a product, how do you know if communication is off? You'll know. There's a constant sense of anxiety or confusion. You never feel on the same page. A constant need to share plans. This leads to over-communication, but doesn't fix the root cause: that there is a fundamental driver of the miscommunication.

If this is happening, first diagnose the issue. Establish which critical component is missing and then intervene. It might be a simple fix like a written progress log or weekly digest or wrap up. Highlight the decisions that need to be made, what's coming, or further on the horizon. Or it might be more fundamental like completely different backgrounds or experience. We are bombarded across so many channels, so when you do communicate make sure it counts.

Get communication right and your products will be better, your customers happier.