Handling Miscommunication

About this Episode

The episode centers on miscommunication—why it happens so often and how to handle it better, especially in remote work. Mike opens with a story about baking baguettes for his in-laws: he and his wife look at the same “thin and crusty” loaves but interpret that comment totally differently. He thinks she’s critiquing what he intentionally made; she’s trying (poorly) to request thicker, softer loaves for garlic bread. Only when she circles back and explicitly explains what she meant do they align, adjust the next batches, and get the bread right. That small domestic example sets up the theme: communication is hard, assumptions are deadly, and clarity requires deliberate effort.

From there, the group digs into remote work realities: cameras on, clear signals, and good tooling. Kyle and Will argue hard that turning on video dramatically reduces miscommunication by adding facial expression, body language, and a sense of shared humanity and accountability—especially across locations, time zones, and cultures. They rail against “Helen Keller mode” (muted, cameras off) and the bloated calendar of half-attended meetings that results when people aren’t fully present. They stress being “remote-first” even in hybrid environments, using the right tools (Slack vs. Teams vs. Jira/Confluence), and leveraging things like transcripts, screen recordings, and diagrams to convey ideas. Visuals and written records aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re how humans actually process information and how teams keep “receipts” for decisions and responsibilities.

The conversation then shifts to practical tactics for both preventing and repairing miscommunication. Preventatively, they recommend restating what you heard (“So what I hear you saying is…”), insisting on written decisions, documenting problems with specifics (what you did, what failed, error messages), and always answering the who/what/where/when/why/how when assigning work. Rich PR descriptions, Jira tickets with a clear “why,” and AI-assisted meeting summaries all make future understanding and debugging much easier. When miscommunication does happen, they suggest treating it like a production bug: regulate emotions first, acknowledge the other person’s experience, look for root causes rather than blame, and focus the discussion on “what happened and what do we do about it now.” They close with a quote: “The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, misrepresentation, and drivel,” underscoring that silence isn’t neutral—if you’re not communicating clearly, you’re inviting confusion and distrust.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I am hosting again today. With me, I've got, as usual, Will Archer. Welcome, Will. We've got Kyle, and we've got Jordan. Thank you for joining us.

And we have a topic to discuss that's been on my mind. It's...yes, stuff has come up lately, but stuff comes up always on this topic. In fact, outside of work, something came up for me today [laughs]. I'm going to my in-laws tomorrow. I'm getting a family get-together. I get along well with my in-laws, so this isn't, like, a bad scenario [laughs]. It's an okay scenario.

But I am bringing bread. We're having lunch, and I'm supposed to bring the bread. We're going to make some garlic bread. Anyway, so I was thinking, a couple of weeks ago, you know, I want to make baguettes. I love crust on my bread, so I want to experiment with that. So, I was making some baguettes, you know, baguettes are long and skinny. That's their thing. That's why you do them because it's crusty.

And I was going to make three batches to take to my in-laws: sourdough, a white bread, and whole-grain bread. And I had made the sourdough one, and I had made a test batch earlier in the week. And this batch came out fantastic, exactly how I like them, because I like crust on my bread. I've been that way since I was little. I love crust on my bread. I love a crusty, you know, the more crust the better [laughs]. I love a crusty bread.

So, baguette is perfect because, you know, it's so crusty: so thin, you know, thin loaves, lots of crust, love it. And I talked with my wife about it earlier in the week. She's, like, "Yeah, that's the kind you like. I like the bigger loaves because they're chewier in the middle." But she had some of the crusty ones, and she liked those, too.

I kind of forgot about that conversation, and I went to make some bread today. I'd, like, raised overnight, got to the bread today. This is going somewhere [chuckles]. This is going somewhere. So, I made the first batch as a sourdough one because I'd let it raise in a warmer environment because sourdough takes longer. And they came out of the oven. And I put it up, and my wife looks at them. And she's, like, "Those are some really thin loaves [chuckles]. They're thin and crusty."

And I looked at them, and I thought, yep. I think that's what I said [chuckles]. "Yep, they are. That's exactly what I was going for." And, in my mind, I thought, yeah, that is true. That's what baguettes are supposed to look like, and that's what I did. And as I was thinking about that, like, "Why are you even saying this? Are you thinking that I'm doing something wrong? Because [chuckles] I know you kind of like bread a little softer, but we're supposed to be having small loaves because we're going to be making garlic bread."

So, my mind was running, and her mind was running as well because she was thinking, why did he not say anything? So, what she was thinking was, those aren't the loaves that I want. I want to bring bigger loaves. And what I was thinking is, yeah, they came out exactly the way I wanted them. So, two totally different perceptions of this conversation.

She came up to me about 15 minutes later, and she says, "You know, I was talking to you a few minutes ago, and I said that those loaves were thin and crusty. Did that come across as an attack?" I'm like, "Well, no, not really [chuckles]. But I wasn't sure what it was." And she said, "What I was trying to say is that I want thicker loaves. I want us to bring loaves that are bigger around so that they're less crusty, softer on the inside." Like, oh, okay, so that's what she wanted.

When she was talking about the bread, what she was trying to communicate is, how about for those other two batches you don't break it into three loaves but you break it into two? But that was not explicitly mentioned by either me...I didn't restate anything. Like, I didn't do anything to clarify. And her expression, you know, what she had said to me was true on its face, but didn't give me any information.

So, neither of us had done anything to improve the communication to get to the outcome that I actually wanted to get the right bread over to the in-laws. But she came back to me. She followed up, and we coordinated. I made the second batch already during lunch. They came out beautiful, these gorgeous loaves. I almost want to take a picture and post [laughs] it with the podcast because, oh yeah, they came out really good. And the last batch I'm going to do this evening afterward.

Everything worked out great because we got together to clarify and figured out what the exact requirements were. We went back and forth. I repeated, "Okay, so you want a bigger loaf. Do you want, like, one big loaf, or do you want two?" And we coordinated. So, she didn't want one really big loaf. Two was just about right. We tried it. It came out just like we wanted.

The topic today is about handling miscommunication. There's an example from just normal life today. We've all had it. We've probably all had it today because this happens all the time. And if you're working with any other human being, it's happening all the time because it's hard. Communication is hard no matter what.

Every time I try to talk to people, or if anybody tries to talk me, if somebody tries to talk to me, it's hard to get things right. And when you're working with people overseas, so they have different time zone, different culture, it gets even harder. There's all kinds of things that make this communication harder. And I want to be tactical for our conversation today. What can we actually do? And I've got some notes written down because I've got some ideas.

And I'm kind of, like, in our overall, you know, look at the big picture of the map of our journey. So, I'd like to talk some about what you do before you make a decision so that you can avoid miscommunication in the first place, and then also talk some about, like, okay, miscommunication has happened. What did we do to deal with it?

KYLE: One thing I've found...because, at Acima, it was very much, you know, you were talking face to face for the most part, and granted, miscommunication happens there. But when the Acima folks, which are located in Draper, when we started interacting a lot with the Rent-A-Center folks over in Texas, I ran into a lot of miscommunication. And I found that a lot of that was because of virtual interactions. And there was one button, be it in Slack or Teams, that really helped me, and that was the video button.

Turning on, giving them my mugshot, just so that they could see me, and I could see them. Like, there's something about facial interaction, or, you know, yeah, facial features, and what you're doing as you're communicating. And being able to kind of read lips as well, I think, really kind of helps at least me. And that cleared up so much of the miscommunication that I was experiencing when working with the other guys, like, just that.

WILL: Oh my God, yes.

MIKE: [laughs]

WILL: Oh my God, yes. I do not, so, like, you know what I mean, like, I, you know, consultant, hired gun, wandering samurai, you know what I mean. And I don't have the latitude to, like, rule with an iron fist in ways that I miss dearly. But I have no idea, no idea how people who manage distributed teams have allowed the rampant use of Helen Keller mode, right? [chuckles] Where people are muted, and video is off [laughter].

Like, it is, like, the stakes are so low. Turn on...the flick of a finger, right? The benefits are so high. And the cost of just willfully disregarding this kind of communication is so ridiculously high. It is negligence of the highest order I have...I know why it is. Like, I know why it is. But you just can't do it.

And, like, me, so, like, me, you know what I mean, I'm a high-priced consultant, right? Fully remote. People don't see me. They've never seen me. I've never been in an office. Like, I've seen face-to-face one person that I've worked with for the past five years, right? If you're a remote distributed worker on any circumstance, that camera needs to be on all the time.

I have survived many, many, many layoffs in my...this is best practices. They need to see your face. They need to see your face for your benefit, for their benefit. There's absolutely no excuse unless you're doing something with your time at work that you ought not to be doing.

And then, I mean, real talk, you know, you need to get right with your workday. It is a privilege, and we are paid lavishly to sit here and think hard thoughts and type on a keyboard every day. Do better. There's no excuse. None. As people who are in a position of authority, I cannot overstate this, and I could not put it in more emphatic terms on a family podcast [laughter]. You've got to get right with this immediately. Sorry. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk [laughter]. I feel very strongly about this issue.

DAVE: I dig it. I dig it. For those listening at home that don't have the cameras on, my camera's currently showing nothing [laughter] because I'm microwaving my lunch while talking to the podcast.

WILL: Yeah, that's right.

DAVE: Not that I'm the object lesson, Will. That's right. That's right.

WILL: We're recording him. And we [inaudible 10:19] to the world, and he's microwaving his lunch.

DAVE: That's right. That's right.

WILL: Okay. All right, then.

DAVE: Yeah. Yeah. You're so right about the camera thing. I have noticed it correlates highly with psychological safety that we've talked about in the podcast in the past, where, if you turn off your camera, you kind of feel safe because you're hiding. But who are you hiding from? You're hiding from the people that pay your rent, right? You're hiding from the people who want you [laughter] to solve really intricate problems for them, and that interplay is there.

The one thing I would say, I would say you don't go far enough, which is that face-to-face in person is so much easier because there's no latency. And when we get on cameras, that latency there, like, we've all had that, "Oh, you what? Oh, you- Wh- Wh. I'm sorry. No, you go ahead. No, you go ahead [laughter]," right? That whole latency thing, like, that messes up conversation more than you might think, and so you have to lean into it really, really hard.

MIKE: I've been remote a lot of my career as well, and I couldn't agree more that having the camera on is...you know, there's the occasion I turn the camera off, big meeting where I'm not going to participate. Even then, sometimes I'll turn the camera on.

WILL: No. I will leave the camera...I'm not going to unmute myself in a 200-person meeting.

MIKE: Right, because --

WILL: But, like, I'll do it. Like, I'll be on camera. Like, everybody knows what my cat looks like.

KYLE: But it's that whole thing, right, where now I don't see Will as a black box. I've never seen him in person, but now I see Will, and, oh my God, Will's human. He's got a cat. Maybe I have a cat, you know. All of a sudden, the things that I hated about you don't matter as much, you know what I mean? If I've had a bad conversation, maybe now I want to communicate with you better. It really does affect everything in my mind.

WILL: Yeah. I feel like, yeah, I can't overstate it. I can't overstate it. Like, for distributed teams, there are so many people who are sort of like, you know, like, there are challenges around remote work. But when people are, like, oh, we just couldn't figure out how to make remote teams work and they're making these just sort of, like, boneheaded, day one, unforced errors like that, it's very hard for me to take leadership seriously when they're that bad at it. We can't make this work. We just can't figure it out. And I'm like, have you tried the easiest, stupidest, laziest thing you could possibly do? No? You know, I don't know. I think, yeah, I won't pull any further on that thread, but, like, come on, guys, try --

KYLE: Well, it is a cop-out at some point, right? Because the minute that you go from one location to multiple locations, your remote philosophy kind of goes out the window because your remote teams still have to interact with each other. Regardless of whether or not they're at home or in the office, they're going to have to interact with each other.

WILL: I don't know any...like, I know...I think pretty much across the board to, like, greater or lesser degrees, like, every place that I've worked and, like, all of my friends work, have all been, like, we're really serious about RTO. We're serious about RTO. We're serious about RTO. And every last one of them is lying through their teeth because they're doing nothing. They have, like, many conflicting standards, many distributed teams. Like, even if they're in the office, [inaudible 14:15] with the same office, and it's just, like, I don't know, guys, you got to do better.

MIKE: Even if everybody's butt in seat, you have to be remote first because you're not in the same office. So --

WILL: Exactly. There's no, I don't think...I mean, like, the excuses, it's non-negotiable. You have to be good at this. You have to be good at this, and if you're not good at it, you need to figure it out. You know, I don't know. Yeah, sorry. I don't want to make this into a RTO rant, you know, that is just sort of where a lot of these miscommunications come in because it's harder. It's just harder. It's harder than it was, you know, back in the day. Well --

KYLE: It's difficult

MIKE: Different.

WILL: It has new challenges, you know, because I don't actually think it's all the way hard. I think our tools for collaboration, for, like, you know, keeping receipts, for keeping logs and messages, for keeping logs and messages that happened last year, stuff like that, I mean, I think, like, the tools are there. And if you make just a little bit of effort, you know, getting really good at Jira archaeology, getting really good at generating Confluence documents, getting really good at taking AI tools and generating documentation for your stuff, getting really good at, like, you know, Slack messages and groups and, like, it's easier.

You can do an easier, better job faster. You have to accept, like, this is the reality that you're living in. And it doesn't matter about your feelings. You're going to have to come to terms with it, and adapt to it, and use the tools that are sitting on the workbench in front of you. Pick it up. Pick it up and use it. It's so easy.

JORDAN: Back when we were still talking about turning your camera on, I was thinking that, like, on top of aiding in communication and, like, seeing the body language, I think it also adds some accountability. Because I remember back in college when it was COVID and we had, like, remote classes. And everyone's camera was off, and just the teacher was just, like, in this Zoom call with, like, 30 other people, cameras off.

It just felt so easy to ignore the teacher and not answer any questions because no one else is. Like, you can't see what they're doing. You don't know if they're participating or not. And I think having the camera on, like, it's less intimidating speaking up, and you can see everyone, like, I don't know, listening, participating, so...

MIKE: True.

WILL: There's a lot of people, well, I mean, I think, one symptom of camera off mentality, and you're right, the absolute lack of accountability. Because if you've got your camera off, you can be doing anything. Like, I'm not going to lie. Like, I've got some long-running, like, tasks cooking, like, right now on the big screen while I'm talking with you guys. And I will go over here because I got stuff going on. And you know it, and it's okay. I'm not sorry. And I'm not going to stop [chuckles].

But what you'll run into, like, symptomatic of this is this sort of, like, meeting creep. Meetings are really expensive. And you shouldn't be in as many of them as you are. And there shouldn't be as many people in them as there are. And because everybody's on Zoom, you know, deaf, dumb, and blind, or, you know, whatever, the Teams or Google Meet, or whatever you use, they're all pretty much the same: deaf, dumb, and blind.

There are all these meetings, and everybody's half in there. And they're not paying attention. And they're just filling up their day. If you had to have a meeting room for this, like, because I did it, if you had to find a meeting room, and you had to book a meeting room, and you had to get butts in seats, this meeting load was not possible. And no one would even think to do it.

MIKE: I think it's one of the things that we haven't cleaned up yet after COVID. There's still some cobwebs [laughs] to wipe out of the corners. We got in the habit of doing everything, all of these online meetings, without really saying, yeah, if we're going to do this, we need to do it well.

WILL: Well, I mean, cam's up, mic's up. What? If you don't want to put your camera up, or it's noisy, if it's noisy, why are you in this meeting? Why are you here? Don't be here. If you don't have time to pay attention to the meeting, don't be here. If you wanted to, like, I mean, just think about doing it, like, the way you would have had to do it, standing behind a one-way mirror.

And it could be, like, oh yeah, I was, like, hey, Will, what do you think about this? Oh, yeah [laughter]. Say everything you said the last five minutes all over again. What? It's crazy to think that you would do something like that. It's insane. Or somebody, like, think about, like, you know, back in the day stand ups and, like, somebody is just on their laptop. That is, like, if somebody did that in person.

We're all sitting around a table. And if somebody is just, like, they got their headphones on [laughter], and they're on their laptop, like, that's extremely disrespectful. And it's not like my time has gotten less valuable because I'm not immediately in front of you. And I can't poke you and say, "Hey," you know, it's so disrespectful. And I just, you know, I don't know where it ends. And I don't think this is, like, a silver bullet that is going to solve all the problems. But if you're not doing the basics, you know, it's hard to, you know, do the basics, like, the smallest, the smallest thing you could possibly do. Because it's okay to not have the meeting, man. It's okay. Just don't have the meeting or [inaudible 20:15], and send me an email. It's all right.

MIKE: Well, that's actually the perfect segue. We've talked a lot about...and we're in universal agreement that cameras on is just invaluable for meetings. But you're not always in a meeting. We have these asynchronous communication tools: Slack, Teams, email, you name it, for a reason, because they're useful for the times when you don't need a meeting.

And then some of the rules of communication are even higher [chuckles] because you have to make up for the fact that you don't have the face time. So, let's talk about some of the things there.

The first one I'm going to say is you always restate. If somebody's saying something to me, I will try, and I'll make an attempt here. I am going to do my best to say, "So what I hear you saying is," and I will restate it every time. And I actually get a lot of statements of appreciation of that. I think it was, like, yesterday, somebody said, "Mike, can you restate that?" Because they're so used to me doing it that they ask me to do it because they know that I'm the person who does that.

Because when you hear somebody else say it, it shows all the gaps in where the communication is and all the things they're right. You can say, like, "Oh, yeah, nailed it," or, "Yeah, that's right, except..." right? It makes such a difference. If you haven't restated it, I feel like you don't have a shared understanding. And if I'm sharing, I will often ask the person I'm talking to, "So, could you restate what I said? Could you say that back to me?" I want to know what I missed because I probably missed something. I feel like that is just absolutely vital. What do you all think?

DAVE: 100%. My notes for this one literally start with, confirm understanding, so yeah.

KYLE: Yep.

WILL: I do it maybe less often. I do it if we have a disagreement, right, where I think this, and you think that. I want to make sure I have a clear understanding of what you're saying. And, usually, it's because I'm going to try and tell you how you're wrong, but there's just a better way to do it, you know what I mean? Where it's just like, I understand the point that you're making, and this is why I don't think we should do it that way. And, occasionally, I'll be wrong on that, but more often, it's just a rhetorical device to get my way [laughs].

MIKE: Unless everybody has their cards on the table, right? Unless everybody knows where everybody is coming from, then there's, like, no validation.

WILL: I mean, it's very hard to move me off of my position if I don't feel like you understand why I'm doing things the way I'm doing.

MIKE: Sure.

WILL: I do it, but it also works on me. If I'm, like, "Hey, this is the engineering trade-off that we have to make, then I think it's like this." And my boss or my supervisor or some other responsible party is, like, "No, this is not the trade-off we're making." Like, if we had a problem with the strength instructor and somebody is just, like, "I can't get these people to move, so you're going to have to do it the stupid way." And I'm like, that checks out. Let's do it the dumb way [laughter]. Because that's the job, right? Spice must flow.

JORDAN: Additionally, I've had an experience. I think it was...maybe I'm making this up. But I feel like this is pretty common, where let's say during the internship when I was working with Chloe, and we were talking about implementing some kind of feature. And, like, somehow we had a disagreement on how we should do it.

But as we talked about it and talked through it, like, our different points, we realized that we were kind of arguing the same point. We were [inaudible 24:01] for the same thing.

KYLE: Yeah, all the time.

JORDAN: It's just the way that you said it sounded wrong. But without the clarification and validation, it's like, why are we wasting our time when we're going to do the same thing? And we just said it differently. So, I think it's super, super important to clarify and validate your understanding of things.

MIKE: Absolutely.

WILL: Yeah. Well, I mean, and, a lot of times, you'll find, like, that if you clarify and restate somebody's position and they're, like, once you're done with that, you'll just be, like, this doesn't matter. I don't care if we call the class this or that, or it goes in this directory, or it goes in that directory. It doesn't matter. Send it [chuckles], you know.

DAVE: Jordan, the situation you described, I like to call that being in violent agreement, right?

WILL: Yeah. Dave and I love that [laughs].

DAVE: Yeah, yeah. It's like, Will and I will come down to a back and forth. I'm like, "No, this should be dynamic." "No, it should not be static." Wait, wait, what [laughter]?

MIKE: Okay. Next one I want to call up. So, somebody mentioned this to me the other day, and they said that Paul Graham said something about if you haven't written down a decision, it wasn't made. I looked it up. I couldn't find it exactly like that. But I did find that Paul Graham quoted Leslie Lamport saying, "If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking." Which is to say, if you haven't written it down, you haven't actually come to an agreement. Because a week from now [chuckles], you're going to have a very different perspective of what you talked about.

WILL: I would go even further, and this is, like, a very 21st-century, 2025 distributed communication mode. Don't talk about work in DMs. It makes it a secret. You can't hold people accountable for not living up to their obligations. There's been a lot of times where I'll ratchet things up because I need people to show up. And if it's in a DM, it's real hard to be, like, "I asked you on Monday to review this MR, which is very important to my deliverables, and it's been sitting on your desk for days," if it's in a DM.

But if it's in a channel, then I can just sort of start bringing other people in. I could bring your team lead in. Now I can bring your manager in. And when the director comes to me and he's, like, "Where's my stuff?" I could be like, "Here you go. Here's a thread breaking down exactly why your feature isn't getting shipped. Let's have a conversation, you and I." And often, you know, like, just, you know, sunlight, you know what I mean? Like, it's, yeah, it's very helpful.

And when there are disagreements and there are conflicts, if you have receipts and you deliberately maintain aforementioned receipts, then, you know, when those conversations arise as they inevitably will, then we can have...we can skip some steps about who said what, when, why, and how.

MIKE: Absolutely. Any other thoughts about writing it down?

DAVE: My favorite cultural touchstone in that regard is Adam Savage on MythBusters holding up a clipboard and saying, "Writing stuff down is the difference between doing science and just screwing around," and that applies everywhere. It really does.

The thing we're teaching in Skills Clinic right now is calling your shot, which is where you...actually, you have to say it out loud or write it down. And nobody ever writes it down, but you say it out loud. When I run this, this will happen. Here's my test. It's going to fail on this line with this error, right? Like, this is not going to fail with a key error on 39. It's going to fail with a no method error sandwich on line 42. And then you run it, and you see if it happens.

WILL: I think that's a really good segue into, like, how do I get help, right? How do I get help? Where is the problem? There's a problem. And, like, man, like, document it, document, document, document, document, document, where it's like, I did this thing, and then it gave me this error on this line. This is what I have tried. Who is, you know, who's responsible for this module? Because I'm seeing this thing, and I want to fix it.

And, like, when you break it down line by line by line by line by line, you both, like, you know, A, you know, okay, you're establishing a clear chain of accountability. B, whoever is jumping into this thing to help you knows exactly where to start digging for the truth. And, C, it makes it really fantastically easy for the next person who's also using this shared library to determine, like, oh, Will stepped on this landmine. And this is what he did to defuse it, you know? And, man, just, like, just be thorough, you know?

MIKE: I would add to that. If somebody comes into a channel and says, "I'm having a problem getting a network connection to work," nobody will say anything.

WILL: Story of my life. Yeah, man. You don't need anybody else [laughter].

MIKE: But if you say exactly what you did, I've got this problem; it was in this class on this line; here's the error I'm getting; here's what I've tried, it's like catnip. Engineers can't resist because they're halfway through the problem, and, like, I got to solve this. And they will jump in, and you'll get 10 people responding. It's the exact same problem.

But if you don't communicate the background of what you're trying to solve, nobody bites because it's too much labor to get into it. You never engage. Once you get somebody through reading your explanation with what you've done, they can't help but be engaged. They can't go back to whatever they're doing because it's all they're thinking about [laughs].

DAVE: They can't go back to the blissful ignorance of not knowing this problem existed?

MIKE: Exactly [laughs].

DAVE: You guys know the Gentoo rule, right? If you need to get...it's back in the days. So, Freenode was an IRC network, Internet Relay Chat, text chat online. Back before AOL instant messenger was on graphics. One of the channels on Freenode, which was one of the big networks for open source, was the Gentoo channel, and that's a flavor of Linux.

And the people that run Gentoo back 20 years ago, 10 years ago, very, very intelligent and not very patient. They did not suffer fools. But they had a little bit of an ego on them. And somebody discovered and they published it, and people have used it since, and it works. If you do it in the channel, you'll get yelled at. But what you do is, you figure out what your problem is, and then you phrase it as an insult. You walk in and go, "Gentoo stinks. It can't even drive an Epson 1180P printer." And you will have 15 solutions before you can turn around. [laughter]

That does actually apply to the conversation when we're talking about communication and miscommunication. Randy Pausch gave a really famous...he's the guy who gave the really famous last lecture where it was really his last lecture because he was dying of cancer. And he mentioned a thing called the head fake, which is where you're talking to somebody about this, about this, about this, about this, and about this.

And by the time you get to the end of it, they discover, oh, you were actually teaching me about this really important other thing, and you head-faked me. You tricked me into thinking the conversation was about this, but it was secretly all about this. And I think that's when you weaponize it is when you deliberately do it to manipulate somebody's understanding. But I think it's also valuable to understand that, in communication, this happens all the time. There's intentional head fakes, and then there's all the unintentional ones.

Going back to the camera theory, there are cultures where giving shame to another person is the highest offense. You cannot do this. Those cultures tend to run their cameras because they want to watch, and they want to make sure, am I my understanding? And dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. There are also some cultures where you must not accept shame to yourself.

And I have worked with a team...I've worked with several teams over the past 15 years from that part of the world. I'm not going to name names because it's kind of a negative connotation. But, in that culture, it's, you cannot cause me to lose face. I've never gotten one of those people to turn their camera on, ever. And it's just, ah!

You know, it's like, I literally taught a class to 30 icon avatars. And, like, I was begging them, like, "Guys, I need to see your face," and they were muted. So, I'm telling jokes, and I'm just getting crickets back. And they're like, no, no, no, keep going. We're laughing. And I'm like, this doesn't help [laughter]. Turn your cameras on. Engage.

MIKE: May throw out another suggestion. We talked about the importance of writing it down. I guess it's just something else that's related: make a picture.

WILL: Oh God. Yes. Yes. Like, it's so...again, it's so easy. And this is something that I've been really bad at. And I've gotten better because I had somebody on my team, and it was a lady. And she had the most beautiful LRs, right? PRs, whatever you call them. Like, they were great.

And all she did was just took a screen cap, where it's, like, yeah, there's that, cap, that, cap, that, cap. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Figma, man. Figma is, like, crushing. I don't know whether they're crushing it or not. I don't know whether they're crushing it or, like, I don't know, going to get acquired or what. But whatever they're doing, they've taken the industry by storm, where it's just, like, show me a picture. You know, let me pull out the, you know, let me pull out the numbers from that picture. God. Revolution, man.

MIKE: It's huge. I did some little looking today, trying to find out a solid statistic, what percentage of your brain is dedicated to vision processing. It was just choose your own number. The statistics are all over the place. Nobody has a real number. But it looks like at least 10% of the neocortex and maybe as much as 50% of your total brain processing at a given time is visual.

Those numbers probably don't mean very much other than it's non-zero, right? It's a significant percentage. There's a big part of the way we think that's visual. And even when you're not physically drawing something, when you're trying to explain something to somebody, you're trying to paint a picture. You're just doing it the hard way [laughs].

You'll get there eventually with the words, and, in their mind, they're visualizing it. And if you just take the shortcut and draw it, here's a diagram, here's what I'm going to do, they're like, oh, okay [laughs], and then, again, a month from now, when you're going back to say, "Well, what did we decide?" Well, just look at the picture.

KYLE: I'm just going to say, I'll take it a step further and see what you guys think about it. One thing that I've started doing is, everybody's in meetings. We're always busy. We're always, you know, kind of like Will brought up earlier, trying to get two things done at once. We're working on our machines on a task while we're in a meeting.

One thing that I've found is, if I'm not getting through somebody or we're just not communicating very well, I'll take it a step further with the picture idea. There's a screen recording in both Slack and Teams. I've just started sending a snippet of a screen recording saying, "This is what you do," or "This is what I'm thinking you're talking about." And I've been sending it to them. And it's been helpful for me. Do you guys do anything like that, or...?

WILL: Man, I'll tell you what I love to do. There's another technological innovation that is really great. Teams has transcripts of all the meetings. Just read them. Oh, man, like, I don't have to be here. I could read the transcript. I read so fast, so fast.

KYLE: It does misrepresent at times, though.

WILL: Oh sure.

KYLE: I've been misrepresented [laughs] by the transcript [laughs].

WILL: You know, honestly, I mean, like, I've never had an issue where I couldn't suss out. I mean, I have seen plenty of...I don't think I've ever seen a transcript that really got the full 100% transcription of what was actually said. But I've never had any trouble figuring out what people meant, what people actually said, right? Maybe not what they meant, but I know the words that came out of their mouth. I know the content of every sentence. And I can get an hour meeting in about two minutes if I have to read closely.

You can also just do a screen recording because storage of bits is free. It's like water. It's infinite at this point in our lives [laughter]. So, just go to the meeting and save it. If you've got to go back to it, go back to it. I mean, it's one of the very few instances...actually, no, that's a lot. I really like Teams a lot for meetings.

MIKE: Yeah, it's good at meetings.

WILL: Only.

MIKE: [laughs]

WILL: It has a chat feature, but that's just for chatting during meetings [laughter]. If you're not in the meeting, you shouldn't be using Teams chat because it's bad.

KYLE: Maybe we need to sell it this way at a certain company [laughter].

WILL: There's just a lot of people...well, there's a lot of people who the chat record it isn't meaningful in that way in that they communicate via meetings and sort of, like, Jira and Confluence and, like, these sort of, like, text document things. That's what they do, and that's how they communicate. And the asynchronous chat thread of communication doesn't exist for them. That's not how they do their jobs.

And so, like, Teams, absolute, utter wholesale unsuitability for that task is transparent to them. It just doesn't make any sense. But I am living in the horrors of Teams taking over for Slack, and indescribably bad.

MIKE: They are different tools for different jobs. That's how I think about it.

WILL: It's true. But, like, you know, because, like, well, but I've got Teams chat for free, so I'm not paying for this other chunk. Because communication between development teams is very, very, very expensive, and 20% efficiency would pay for Slack a hundred times over.

MIKE: So, use the right tool. It does help. So, somebody mentioned the W's: what, where, when, why, who, how? I'm going to say six. I'm going to throw how in there. If you want to get something done and you don't answer all those questions, it's probably not going to get done.

DAVE: Or not done right.

MIKE: Exactly. So, if you're going to make a decision, what are we going to do? Where will it be done? Where in the code? Where, you know, whatever the context is there. When will it be done? When does this need to be done by? Why are we going to do it? So, we can compare it later. Who is going to do it, and how are they going to do it?

And I think you can just go through the list every time, and you get to the end of your meeting. So, what have we decided? And that's another thing. You get to the end of a meeting, if you haven't written it down, like we've talked about, you haven't made a decision. But if you can say all of those things, and some of those are probably more important than others, definitely who, when, what, if you haven't answered those --

DAVE: Why.

MIKE: Yeah, why.

DAVE: The why is real important. There's a thing that I've said a lot, which is I hate it when I open up a Jira ticket, and it says, "Click to add a description." And, you know, the title is, you know, like, upgrade this gem to, you know, version dot 5, or something like that. Okay, fine. So, I go off, and I do that. But the ticket doesn't say why we're upgrading it, which is, well, it's so that our Axios connection can run in double latency. Really? Because we cut the contract with Axios two years ago. Are we really still working on...right?

And we never wrote down why we needed it. And you can go a year, and you can pull up that ticket, and if the why is on there, you can still see that the why is still correct. And that makes it so that a year now, if you need to relitigate that decision, you have the information to do so. You don't have to call another meeting and start over at ground zero, or worse, go implement it and waste two weeks.

KYLE: Right. It's funny that you say that, just because while we're having this conversation, I'm like, do we need a template in Jira for this? Because this would solve so many issues.

MIKE: [laughs] There's templates in GitHub for pull requests.

KYLE: Oh, man.

MIKE: Fantastic [chuckles]. Because they get people to fill in those, you know, they fill in all the boxes, and you get the thing. So, what's your testing instructions? Why are we doing this? What ticket led you to do this? It goes a long way.

DAVE: A few months ago, I started getting PRs from co-workers that were just lush. They're, like, I did this, and I moved it over here, and I did this, this, this, and this, and I kept these modules over here, which relate to these things. They were using Copilot to write their PRs. And say what you want about AI, but I like my co-workers more now.

MIKE: [laughs]

DAVE: They're better people [laughter]. I don't have to do nearly as much code forensics when they hand me a PR because, like, the reasoning. And, of course, the AI gets one wrong every so often, and, you know, that gets kind of fun. But, yeah, the value in just saying, I did this, and I did this, and I did it this way to follow this, you know. And I did it because of this rule or this reason just gets so good.

JORDAN: In my case, seeing the more verbose descriptions of things, I can learn so much more about, like, why people did things. Because, like, I don't know, to you guys, you, like, have multiple options, maybe, of, like, oh, we can use this, or we can use this. But, in my case, I'm, like, I have no idea, like, what we're doing.

And if you give me, like, just an idea of one, like, I don't know, framework or technology, I can, like, kind of grasp the other ones. But, like, if it's just, I don't know, on a PR with, like, a thousand additions and no description, I'm like, I don't know what this is achieving. And this is, like, how am I supposed to, like, update one part of this when I have no idea, like, what any of this means? So, I really appreciate, like, when, I don't know, a year or two ago, some developer gave testing instructions so I can recreate it, and, like, descriptions of why so I can look back and understand.

DAVE: Fantastic. Most of our team is using Copilot, and I've been playing around with Claude, Claude Code. And I discovered output mode the other day, which any junior programmers, please open up Claude Code and type slash output mode, and it will give you three options. There's normal mode, which is what most of us use. There's also learning mode, which is, or no, sorry, explanatory mode, and that's where it will say, oh, okay, you want to do this migration. Well, first, we're going to run this generator, and da-da-da-da, and then it does it.

But there's also learning mode, which is where it's like, okay, so you want to add this new parameter. The first thing you need to do is go out and create this on this controller, and then we need to open it on the param so that it gets passed through from the view form. Open the file, and create that method now. I'm like, you're actually going to make a human type? Our AI taskmasters are already here, and they're beautiful. Love it.

I think I've mentioned this. I've been using AI stuff at home to work on projects that I have no business...I have no subject matter expertise to work on them. And having an AI do the...come, let me explain to you all the parts you do not know. Ah, so good.

MIKE: I'm going to call one more thing out. Like I said, I worked on this list, so we can talk about these things. One more thing before we talk a little about what happens when it's already failed.

So, the last thing I want to say is you reinforce, and you follow up. You said something once, maybe they heard it [laughs]. You say something twice, better chance. If people know that they're going to hear it again, even if they don't know, and then they hear it again, then they've heard it much more. I've read people talk about public speaking. You need to say the same thing over and over again. If you actually want people to hear it, understand it, you have to repeat it. And that's not trying to be condescending; it's just human nature. Reinforcement makes it stick.

DAVE: I was trained on the triple mantra of tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them what you told them.

MIKE: It works.

KYLE: I might take it one step further and go into something else that you've brought up, which is write it down. As the receiver, I've found it to be great when either I get a Slack message after a meeting or an email that has it written down. Yeah, I heard it three times. I acknowledged it, but I also have it written down, and I can reference it later.

MIKE: Yeah, absolutely. I get that. There's a delivery manager who's been using AI to summarize every meeting that he's in and then publishes that. So, anybody who wasn't there gets it. I read it every time [laughs], even if I was in the meeting.

KYLE: That's cool.

MIKE: Yeah, it's awesome. I can go back and say, oh, this is what we talked about. This is why version 4.3 didn't go out on time, and why this is when we're going to release 4.3.1, and here's why. It's amazing. I'm like Will. I read much faster than I listen, and I tend to understand better anyway when I do. I love that.

KYLE: That makes me think of the Slack recap feature. Have you used that at all?

MIKE: I have.

KYLE: And it catches you up on the chat channels that you may not have been watching.

MIKE: Mm-hmm.

WILL: I think it's another source of miscommunication. This is a thing that...I had a buddy who talked about people who were working with him, and he was having trouble with one of his devs. He was a little...good dev, maybe a little spectrum-y, not like us, you know, we don't know any people like that. But he was having a really hard time, like, where sort of, like, the dev would be like, "I communicated all of this stuff in the Slack thread with all the developers, and we broke it all down, and it's right there in the thread," and he was right.

But the situation that my buddy needed to express was that you have to put the digest where leadership can read it, right? Like, people who are managing a dozen different teams, a dozen different deliverables, like, make it easy for them.

Just like you're making it easy for developers to help you with their module, make it easy for your boss or your boss's boss who is directly responsible and cares quite a lot about your work and how it's going, but only has maybe, like, 3% or 4% of their total attention span that they could devote to your particular problem. Meet them where they are, right?

Like, if people...like, where I'm working now, right? Like if it ain't in Jira, it didn't happen. So, when I have updates, status reports, updates, comments, questions, like, boom, boom, boom, it goes into a Jira ticket. And so, when people are looking at Jira, they can see exactly where it is, and that's where they're going, so that's where I'm communicating.

And it just makes it easy so that, like, whoever is consuming your status reports, you're going to them, right? Not, like, oh, it's here in this, you know, this obscure Slack channel. Like just, honestly, to some degree, you've got a good boss. They'll tell you, and maybe remind you a couple of times until you get with the program. If you have a bad boss, they'll just be, like, "Where is it?" You know, and then you have to have that conversation, but, like, figure it out. Figure out how they want their news and meet them there. It's your job, you know? Maybe it's not your job, your responsibility [chuckles].

MIKE: Well, I think that's actually a perfect pivot to thinking about...so, miscommunication has happened. What do you do about it [chuckles]? And you're talking about what are the root causes here, why it went wrong.

As I was thinking about this, bugs in our communication, they're like bugs in our code. Stuff goes wrong. And it's going to happen. I don't care how good you are. You're going to have bugs in production. And, likewise, we're going to have failures in communication. We should do all the things we've been talking about to try to fix them up front, right, to try to avoid them. But they're going to happen anyway. We're still going to have miscommunication.

So, when you find one...we're pretty good as engineers at going and solving problems, right? Identifying problems. But we don't always apply those problem-solving skills to stuff outside of the code, but we can. And somebody is going to come up to you. So, this scenario is going to come up. Somebody is going to come up to you, and they're going to say, "This bad thing happened to me. What do you do [chuckles]?"

And I think that there is a series of steps. First thing, I'm going to say one thing up front. You acknowledge. Because even if they are wrong and they got the wrong message, their experience is not wrong. Like, they just lived through that. And you should say, I'm sorry. You just went through that.

WILL: I'm going to push back. I'm actually going to push back, and I'll tell you why. I'll give you a Mike story, but it will be fast. I am right now in the process of teaching my six-year-old math, right? And he's a natural reader, not a natural mathematician. Math is a little abstract, a little bit frustrating. He gets really, really frustrated with the problem.

It's the first thing that I have to tell him. It has nothing to do with math. It's about emotional regulation. And you can't feel strong emotions and think creatively in terms of problem-solving. You can't do it. Your brain has one gear. And you're feeling your feelings, or you're thinking about your problem. And when something goes wrong, and it's going to go wrong, it's going to feel bad. You will feel bad. And you need to put that away because maybe it was your fault, or maybe it was their fault, or maybe it was some other random person's fault. But none of that matters until the problem is solved.

And once the problem is solved, you're probably going to feel better anyway. But, like, you absolutely have to know that this emotion is coming for you and address it. You need to see it coming, and you need to catch it, and you need to crush it so that you can do anything. Like, that is job one, and, like, you've got to be ready for it.

MIKE: That's okay. Going back to the violent agreement, you're saying the same thing. If you don't acknowledge, if you don't acknowledge they're having an experience and just pretend it doesn't exist, you're just going to go down a...you're never going to get better.

So, I see the same things when I'm working with my kids at math. If they get into that emotional cul-de-sac, there's not going to be any progress at all [chuckles]. You've got to deal with that. You've got to fix that first. One thing I've found...we've got a little trampoline in the living room [chuckles], one of those little just exercise trampolines. I'll say, just go jump on the trampoline for a few minutes. Stop doing school, and clear your head. And they'll do that, and they'll say, "Oh, I'm feeling better." "Okay, great. Come over. Let me help you." So, there's no, like, go to the trampoline of shame.

It's, "Hey, I can see that you're in a bad spot. Why don't you go do something else?" And they say, "I don't want to jump on the trampoline." I say, "What do you want to do?" And they'll say, "I want to do some deep breathing." "Okay, sure. Great, do that," and then come back, and we will work on it. Because if you don't address the fact that they are experiencing this emotional reaction, yeah, you can't go forward.

WILL: I mean, it's a tremendous source of miscommunication where we, I don't know, engineers, like, I don't know, man. I have a black belt in engineer jiu-jitsu at this point in my career, like, getting people to...I don't want to say, like, take accountability for, right, but, like, engage with the problem that, you know, it intersects with their work on some level, and it might not be their fault.

I don't really care whose fault it is, but I want you to engage with this thing and be like, I'm crawling up your leg, you know, for some reason. It intersects with your work in some capacity, you know what I mean? And maybe it's not you, but I just want you to engage with this thing that is happening that I'm trying to find a solution to, you know?

And one big part of that is, like, you know what I mean, like, be really non-confrontational in terms of, like, getting that engagement and not setting people off, you know what I mean? Because, like, if I'm receiving, I don't know, I'm going to call it feedback, right, but, like, you know what I mean, like, there's communication, like, something went wrong, right?

Yeah, like, me, I have an obligation to, like, accept and anticipate that negative emotional reaction and suppress it so that I can engage. But, I mean, like, if I'm also, like, if I'm pitching, right, that at you, like, I need to be really, really aware, and cognizant, and empathetic, and, like, not set people off because, like, the same thing, you know what I mean?

Like, you've got to be aware of that emotional context, and you have to address it. That has to be the foremost thing in your mind because, otherwise, you're just being sloppy. It's just sloppy, lazy work in communication, if that's not in the forefront of your thinking and your communicating, you know? [inaudible 55:22]

MIKE: So, acknowledge [inaudible 55:23] happen. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's what we're doing here. We're having a discussion. And then, you know, root cause [chuckles]. What's going on here? If you get into who is to blame, just like you do a root cause analysis in an incident, it goes nowhere fast [chuckles]. If you say what went wrong in this communication, well, that's a whole different question, right? How did this communication fail? Go for a root cause.

You find whatever is going on in your mode of communication that is failing, and you do something about it. That is a very different approach than figuring out who we need to throw shame at [chuckles].

And you say, you know, don't go being confrontational. That doesn't generally help anybody. If you go in there and say, "I'm trying to solve a problem, and what's the root cause here? How can we work on this together?" And, you know, that makes all of our lives easier. It's a different conversation. And if we go on that bug hunt, right? Let's go and try to solve this. It makes everybody's lives better.

WILL: Absolutely. I mean, like, I mean, the conversation is always about, like, what happened, right? What happened? What do we do about it? I mean, really, that's the only conversation that's worth having. You know, what happened, and what do we do about it? I mean, I wish, you know, it's just a frustration that I have with people, you know, because it's something that I think you'll see a lot. You'll see it over and over and over and over again. And I just wish I could get it into people's heads.

I've come out smelling like a rose just because, like, I was a stand-up guy cleaning up my own messes. This was all my fault, like, completely my fault, 100%. Like, I blew it in, like, a transparently stupid way and made a giant mess for everybody to clean up. Probably, you know, I don't want to put a figure on it because, like, I don't want that on the record [laughter]. But, like, probably a number, and it's probably a big one.

And just because, like, I was a stand-up guy and I'm like, okay, let's get this thing going, and everybody was just like, "Will, you're great. You're a rock star." And I'm like, no, no, I made a giant screw up, and I wrecked your whole day. I made a giant screw-up, and I wrecked your whole day, and I just took accountability for it [laughter].

You can be dumb, and you can be mean, but you can't be both. So, just pick one or the other. It was my day to be...And if it's your day to be dumb, you don't know it [laughter].

DAVE: I like that. I like that. The version I heard of that was if you drive to work and you don't know who the idiot is, it was you. If you sit down and play poker and you don't know who the sucker is, it's you.

Yeah, that's actually a good thing. We've touched on that a little bit is, like, understanding what impaired judgment feels like. Because the first thing that impaired judgment feels like is numb. Like, you don't feel it when your impairment is just...is impaired, when your impairment is justified. Wait, what? Is judged. When your judgment is impaired, you don't feel it.

One of the things that I do for that is I build unit tests. I have little static activities that I've just done over and over, little routines. And if I'm not feeling great that day, I struggle. And if I'm doing fantastic, then I crush it. And that kind of informs, what kind of work do I want to...Maybe I just need to back off and take some methodical rows. Or, no, if today's the day we cut that big spike, let's do it.

WILL: Oh, man. That's an indulgence I don't feel like I usually get, like, what is it? What's it going to be today? Like, well, I guess it's going to be [laughter] a hot one today. It's like my workload's like the weather, you know. It's just like, it's raining today, baby. Sorry [laughs].

DAVE: Yeah, that's...Honestly, I push on the team, on my team, the favorite Agile system I ever used was Tracker just because there's only one place for a task. There's only two tasks in the system, the one you're currently working on and the one at the top of the backlog.

And when you move your task into delivered, the only task you can take is the one at the top of the backlog. They were pretty draconian about, like, XP. Everyone is a subject matter expert. If you get the ticket and you can't work it, well, you're going to have to pair program with somebody who does. And after six months, everybody knows it.

WILL: Oh man is it --

DAVE: Kind of an aside, but yeah. But, yeah, like, gauging your mental acuity, yeah, that's useful when you have an assortment, when you have a smorgasbord of things to work on. And, on those days, it's like half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at, and the other half of being smart is not trying to take on the world with your dumb.

MIKE: Well, and it does let you, you know, even if you've got the same workload, if you know that your communication is not going to be great, you can be up front and say, "Yeah, I have a cold today or," you know, whatever it is. You might need to repeat that to me twice. I'm going to work on it. I'm here. But I'm going to need to hear that again. And people are generally very willing when you're open, like you were saying, Will. You know, when you're transparent, my experience is that people generally engage.

So, we've talked about a lot of tactics at both, you know, pre, you know, we talked about shifting left in software development. You want to solve them as early up the chain as possible. We want to do everything we can to prevent the miscommunication in the first place. Some of them are still going to make it to production. We've talked about how to deal with the ones that do. It was interesting, emotional regulation has a lot to do with what came after. Anything else that...any final things we want to cover before we break?

WILL: Ah...go ahead.

DAVE: I would just say the quote by Northcote Parkinson. He's the guy that says work expands to take all the time allotted for it. He's got another really good one, which is, the void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, misrepresentation, and drivel.

MIKE: Oh.

DAVE: I like that. There was a time in my career when I thought being silent was neutral, and it was just a zero. No points won, no points lost. There is, you grow, or you die. If you're not communicating, you are withering in people's minds.

MIKE: Will, you [inaudible 01:02:07]

WILL: No, no, no. I can't do anything with that [laughter]. Like, you know, I think when somebody makes a good point, and, like, the meeting's over, you say like, yeah, that's it.

DAVE: Nice.

MIKE: That's a great ending.

WILL: Let's end it. Let's wrap this one up. We'll do what Dave said.

MIKE: Let's ship it [laughter]. Until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.