You know that specific feeling of dread? Oh,
yeah. It usually hits around, say, 9 -3 -0 on
a Tuesday morning. You're clearing out your inbox.
You're actually feeling a little productive.
And then a message lands from the C -suite or
IT. And the subject line is always something
way too optimistic, like the future of collaboration.
Or welcome to Slack. or Teams or whatever the
new Trendy app is. And you just know right there,
before you even open it, that your workflow is
about to get a lot more complicated. It's the
big announcement. We are finally abandoning the
old, broken way, which is usually just email
and moving to this shiny new platform that's
going to fix everything. It's going to stop all
the miscommunication. It's going to make us a
family. And ideas will just flow like water.
The myth of the magic tool, we've all been there.
But that's the real tension we need to get into
today. Because, I mean, we have Google Workspaces,
Microsoft 365, Zoom. The tools are incredible.
I can video chat with a colleague in Tokyo while
we're co -editing a spreadsheet. In real time,
we are so much more technologically advanced
than any generation of workers before us. So
why is communication breakdown still the number
one problem at almost every single company? That
is the multi -million dollar question. Yeah.
Because If the tools are the best they've ever
been, then the problem can't be that it's not
the hardware. So for this deep dive, we're going
to get into a really sharp piece of writing that
tackles this exact thing. OK. It's an article
by Gary Ackerman from HackScience .Education
called Technology and Communication Problems.
And Ackerman's whole point is that we're basically
diagnosing the patient with the wrong disease.
We keep treating communication like it's a software
issue. When really it's a human behavior issue.
And he's pretty ruthless about it. He basically
says these huge tech migrations are just expensive
ways for leaders to avoid dealing with the actual
culture on their teams. I want to start with
a concept Ackerman brings up right at the beginning.
He calls it the organizational paradox. He frames
it using schools, but... Honestly, it feels like
it applies to any company. He says organizations
are created to do something like educate kids,
build widgets. But eventually, they pivot. They
pivot to survival. It's a really subtle shift.
At the start, every decision is about how do
we achieve the mission. But as the organization
gets bigger, the question changes. It becomes,
how do we sustain the organization itself? So
we stop trying to be effective. And we just try
to be efficient at keeping the lights on, maintaining
the status quo. And buying a new piece of software
fits perfectly into that maintenance mindset,
doesn't it? Perfectly. Buying a tool feels like
you're doing something important to sustain the
organization. It's tangible. You can point to
it. Exactly. You can say, look, I improved our
infrastructure. It is much, much harder to say,
I had 20 really difficult conversations with
managers about why their emails are so unclear.
One is a purchase order. And the other is a complete
cultural overhaul. Which leads us right to what
Ackerman calls the leader's trap. The leader
sees all this friction. You know, people aren't
on the same page. Projects are stalling out.
And their first instinct is we need a better
platform. And Ackerman says that when a leader
says that that a new tool will fix communication,
you can make three Very reliable predictions.
And they're pretty damning, honestly. Okay, let's
break these down. The first prediction is about
the leader themselves. Ackerman says, if a leader
thinks a new tool is the answer. That leader
is probably a poor communicator. That sounds
a little harsh. It does, but think about the
logic. If you are a skilled communicator, you
know that clarity comes from your word choice,
your tone, your timing. Empathy. Empathy, exactly.
You know those are internal skills. If you truly
believe that clarity comes from the software,
from the interface... Then you don't really understand
what communication even is. You're blaming the
medium. It's like a bad guitarist blaming his
amp. Or a writer blaming their word processor
for a bad story. Right. Switching from Word to
Google Docs won't make you a better writer. If
a leader thinks, people aren't getting my vision
because we're on Outlook, they're just showing
a massive blind spot in their own abilities.
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. OK, prediction
number two. This is the one I kind of want to
push back on. Ackerman says, money will be spent
to replace existing capacity with identical capacity.
Ah, the one that makes the CFOs cry. But is it
really identical capacity? I mean, Slack feels
different from email. Zoom is definitely different
from a conference call. Aren't you buying something
new? I think we have to separate features from
capacity. Yes, Slack has emojis and threads.
Zoom has screen sharing. But the fundamental
capacity of the system is just, I have information
and I need to get it to you. OK. Ackerman's point
is that your current system, Google, Microsoft,
whatever, it already lets you send text and share
files and transmit video. So functionally, the
pipe is already there. The pipe is wide open.
So when you spend what he calls a shock high
amount of money to switch platforms, you aren't
really enabling a new type of human connection.
You're just swapping the interface. You're paying
millions of dollars to change the color of the
pipe, not what flows through it. And that takes
us to the third prediction, which is about the
cost that isn't on the invoice. He calls it the
drain. The productivity killer. We always underestimate
the cognitive load of learning a new tool. It's
not just, oh, the button moved. No, it's wait.
Where are my archives? How do I search this thing?
If I edit this, who gets a notification? And
while everyone is fumbling around trying to figure
out how to just turn off the notifications. Real
work isn't getting done. It creates this massive
layer of distraction. For like three to six months,
your team isn't focused on the mission. They're
focused on the tool. You have actually degraded
communication, all in the name of trying to improve
it. So if you're a leader, you're basically lighting
money on fire. to swap identical systems, and
you're confusing your entire staff in the process.
Yeah. So if the software isn't the problem, what
is? This is where Ackerman pivots to what he
calls the real obstacles. And he lists six of
them. And the really uncomfortable truth is that
these are all human failings. You can't code
a solution for any of them. So let's start with
the first group, what he calls the skill gap.
He talks about inarticulate speakers and writers.
This is... Just the baseline failure, right?
Most of us are not naturally clear communicators.
We ramble. We assume the reader has context.
They don't. We bury the lead. All the time. But
hold on. We have spell check. We have AI writing
assistants now. Doesn't technology help with
articulation? It helps with the mechanics? It
can tell you that you spelled a word wrong. It
might suggest a better synonym, but it cannot
check your logic. It can't tell you, hey, this
paragraph completely contradicts the last one,
or this tone is going to make the marketing team
really defensive. That's the difference. Clarity
is a thinking process, not a typing process.
Precisely. If I send a confusing message on a
brand new, state -of -the -art platform, I've
just managed to distribute confusion faster and
more efficiently. The tool doesn't clean the
mud off the message. Okay, so then there's the
other side of that coin. Communication is a two
-way street. So we have the inattentive listener
or reader. The I'm too busy excuse. We all wear
busy like a badge of honor. But Ackerman points
out this great irony. We're usually distracted
from one communication tool. By another communication
tool. Oh, that is 100 % me. I'll be reading a
really important email, trying to focus, and
then ping a chat notification slides in. You
have to look. I look at the chat, I answer it,
and by the time I go back to the email, I've
completely lost the thread. That's just the modern
condition. And he mentions the real world stuff,
too. People dropping by your desk, fire drills,
whatever. The whole environment is hostile to
deep attention. A new app doesn't fix your attention
span. In fact, if it's more instant, like a chat
app, it might even make it worse. It might fragment
your attention even more. Which leads directly
into the next obstacle. Too much information.
The deluge. The fire hose. But isn't the whole
point of these tools to help us organize all
that information? That's what they say in the
sales pitch. But in practice, they often just
add to the noise. Ackerman's point is that the
problem isn't the existence of information, it's
the filtering. It's separating the signal from
the noise. If you have 50 unread messages and
48 of them are just thumbs up emojis or thanks
and two of them are The server is on fire. You're
going to miss the server alert. And adding a
new tool usually just adds a new channel you
have to check. Now you've got email and Slack
and Trello and Asana. You haven't organized the
information. You've just scattered it over a
wider area. Exactly. I want to move to the obstacle
that I think causes the most like actual human
conflict in an office. Ackerman calls it disregard
for the audience. This one is all about empathy
or a total lack of it. Right. And he breaks it
down into two errors. The false negative and
the false positive. OK. The false negative is
leaving people out of the loop who really should
have been included. And he uses this really specific
painful example about a resignation. This one
makes me cringe just thinking about it. A leader
decides to quit. They tell a small select group
of insiders they make a judgment call. The rest
of the team doesn't need to know yet. A bad judgment
call. A terrible one. Because what happens next?
Inevitably, HR posts the job opening online.
So you have people, his direct reports, just
sitting at their desks, maybe browsing the company
job board, and they see their own boss's job
listed. And that is how they find out their boss
is leaving. The sense of betrayal there must
be huge. It sends the message, you are not important
enough for me to tell. And again, what tool caused
that? Did email cause it? Did Slack? No. A human
being made a conscious decision to withhold information.
No software feature in the world can force a
leader to be transparent. Then you have the opposite
problem. The false positive. The reply -all monster.
The monster is right. This is the cover -your
-ass email chain. UCC attend people who have
nothing to do with the project just so you can
say later, why I told everybody, you are putting
your own safety above the attention spans of
10 of your colleagues. It's selfish communication.
Yeah. You're polluting their day with irrelevant
noise because you're either lazy or paranoid.
It is, and it's absolutely rampant. So we've
covered how we write, listen, and filter. But
Ackerman also gets into the friction caused by
the tools themselves, specifically our habits.
This is ignorance of tools and norms. Yeah, the
tribal knowledge problem. Every single team develops
its own set of unwritten rule. Like, we use email
for formal requests, but we use chat for planning
lunch. Or don't ever message the boss after 5
p .m. But... Nobody ever writes these rules down.
Never. So a new person joins the team, or maybe
two departments merge, and you have instant friction.
The new guy sends an urgent request over email,
but your team basically ignores email and lives
in slack. So the new guy gets labeled as unresponsive
or maybe annoying? Just because he's using the
tool differently than the tribe does. And here's
the kicker. If you bring in a brand new platform
for everyone, you wipe out all the norms, everyone
becomes the new guy. You reset the entire culture
to zero, which might sound good in theory, but
it usually just means six months of pure chaos
while people figure out new, probably equally
dysfunctional norms. And just when you get settled,
we hit the final obstacle, changing tools. The
fatigue is real. Even if your company doesn't
switch vendors, the vendors switch on you. Interfaces
get updated, your favorite feature gets dropped.
And Ackerman mentions the adoption gap. When
a new feature rolls out, half the team starts
using it and the other half just ignores it.
So you end up in this hybrid mess. Oh, I put
that file in the new spaces tab. What's a spaces
tab? I haven't updated my app. It fractures the
team's shared reality. You're literally not looking
at the same thing anymore. Right. So if we look
at this whole list. Inarticulate writing, distraction,
noise, no empathy, tribal norms, constant updates.
It becomes so incredibly clear. Buying a license
for Microsoft Teams solves exactly zero of those
problems. Zero. In fact, it often makes them
worse by just adding novelty and confusion into
the mix. So why do smart leaders keep making
this mistake? Ackerman says it comes down to
something he calls The previous Joe bias. Ah,
the comfort of the familiar. A leader gets hired,
they look around at the new company, and it all
feels messy and out of their control. So they
think back to their last job. You know, at my
last company, we used a sauna, and things felt
really organized. Therefore, a sauna must be
the thing that creates organization. It's a classic
logical fallacy. Correlation does not equal causation.
And it's worse than that. He argues it's, well,
it's laziness. He says leaders who do this are
effectively incapable of making the decision.
Incapable is a really strong word. It is, but
he justifies it. He says they're incapable because
they can't tell the difference between a technology
problem and a people problem. Right. If a doctor
can't tell the difference between a broken leg
and the flier. that doctor probably shouldn't
be prescribing medicine. And they just don't
understand the consequences. They don't. They
treat the switch like it's just changing a light
bulb. They don't see the thousands of wasted
hours, the frustration, that drain we talked
about. They're just imposing their personal preference
on the whole organization without ever counting
the real cost. So if we strip this all down,
if the magic tool is a complete myth, what's
the actual solution? What should a leader do
instead of calling a sales rep? The synthesis
of his whole argument is that communication is
a behavior. It's not a technology. It's a discipline.
And the solution is boring. It's boring hard
work. It's training people how to write a subject
line that actually means something. It's setting
clear norms like, we do not expect email replies
after 6 p .m. It's holding someone accountable
when they hit reply all for no reason. It's managing
the humans. It's managing the humans. Changing
the platform is often just a very expensive form
of procrastination. It lets you feel like you're
fixing the problem without ever having to deal
with the messy, uncomfortable reality of human
interaction. That is a huge perspective shift.
And it kind of puts the responsibility back on
all of us, doesn't it? It really does. You can't
just hide behind the interface's clunky anymore.
So I want to leave our listeners with a challenge.
We've talked a lot about what leaders do wrong,
but let's just bring it down to our own desktops.
If you are feeling frustrated with your team's
communication, don't go looking for a download
button. Do a little audit first. Exactly. Go
look at the last five emails or messages you
sent and be really honest with yourself. Were
they clear? Did you even need to send them? Did
you include only the right people, or did you
just blast it out to everyone to be safe? And
then look at how you read things. Did you actually
read that last email you got, or did you just
scan the first sentence and guess the rest? Maybe
the glitch isn't in the system after all. Maybe
it's in the user. A tough pill to swallow. But
it's probably the only one that actually cures
the illness. Thanks for diving in with us. Good
luck with your inbox, and we'll see you next
time.