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There's so much good insight here and so much to aspire to in my own communication (and the communication of my company).
Few things are as important to study, practice, and perfect as clear communication.
The fact that this doesn't seem to be a truth universally held baffles me.
Real-time sometimes, asynchronous most of the time.
Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.
Communication shouldn't require schedule synchronization. Calendars have nothing to do with communication. Writing, rather than speaking or meeting, is independent of schedule and far more direct.
It's about respect and efficiency. 2 people might need to meet briefly to try to come to terms over something but it's hard to imagine in what context it wouldn't make more sense to have a long-form written exchange first that was reviewed and then a set of agreed upon points that needed to be discussed. When I demand synchronous communication, I demand that you work at my bidding, not that you organize yourself to respond to me when it makes the most sense for you.
Give meaningful discussions a meaningful amount of time to develop and unfold. Rushing to judgment, or demanding immediate responses, only serves to increase the odds of poor decision making.
The expectation of immediate response is toxic.
Time is on your side, rushing makes conversations worse.
As the proverb goes, "When you rush, that's when accidents happen." I think this might be a byproduct of the startup culture that prioritizes shipping as rapidly as possible above all else. It's certainly true that sometimes we're in a race with someone else with similar levels of skill and with the exact same idea but I think more often than not the "gotta go fast" attitude is merely an excuse for authoritarian decision making that wants to press hard in one direction without ever pausing to reflect on whether it's the right direction to press in. Meaningful decisions take time. Solving hard problems takes time. Our brains require time to feed us the best solutions. None if this can be magicked away.
Speaking only helps who's in the room, writing helps everyone. This includes people who couldn't make it, or future employees who join years from now.
This is such a rare insight it's almost embarrassing. People don't seem to care about the loss and rework that is inherently present in ephemeral media. Which is not to say that ephemeral things don't have their place. But for communication with meaning and purpose (and what other kind of communication should your company be aspiring to?) wouldn't it be better if it had a place to live on?
The end of the day has a way of convincing you what you've done is good, but the next morning has a way of telling you the truth. If you aren't sure, sleep on it before saying it.
The time to ship anything is almost never the moment you finished it. You need time to press forward and then you need time to fix what you broke in your mad rush to done. This is true for products and it's doubly true for communication.
Ask if things are clear. Ask what you left out. Ask if there was anything someone was expecting that you didn't cover. Address the gaps before they widen with time.
I appreciate the emphasis on good communication inviting feedback proactively, recognizing that your average person is quite reticent to speak up. It reminds me of a quote from The Art of Agile Development by James Shore: "If someone speaks once during a retrospective, she is more likely to speak again. By waiting for a verbal agreement, you encourage more participation."
98% of our internal communication happens inside Basecamp. That means all company-wide discussions, social chatter, project-related work, sharing of ideas, internal debates, automatic check-ins, status updates, policy updates, and all official decisions and announcements all happen in Basecamp.
This seems like such a utopian dream. How many times have you been frustrated because you can't find where the decision was made about something between multiple Jira instances, projects, and cards, Slack, in person memory, your notebook, their notebook, etc.?
I don't see this as an argument necessarily in favor of Basecamp either. Whatever tool your using just needs to be elastic enough that it can support all the workflows required.
I love the idea of the automatic questions, especially that they're public. An automatic reminder to reflect on the day, reflect on the week, reflect on the past 6 weeks and project into the next 6, and engage socially feel like awesome rituals to be in.
