This resource first appeared in issue #88 on 20 Aug 2021
and has tags Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools
How to break out of the thread of doom - Tanya Reilly, LeadDev
5 situations when synchronous communication is a must - Hiba Amin, Hypercontext
We’re all spending a lot more time in written communication than we were before, and there are huge advantages! But there are some common failure modes, including having interminable conversations that don’t actually result in some conclusion. Reilly has three hints for winding up those discussions:
- Rollup: distill a long thread into the state of the conversation - “To summarize: the problem is X. Possible paths forward are A, B, C. Sounds like we’re leaning towards A. Have I missed anything?” This is an incredibly useful tool to have at your disposal for long-running synchronous conversations too.
- Maybe this is a stupid question, but…. - if the conversation isn’t going anywhere, it can be because people are talking past each other, and there’s some point which isn’t clear or isn’t understood the same way by all parties. Being willing to ask a question that seems obvious is very useful.
- Move to synchronous mechanisms like a quick call - sometimes the loss of non-word signals that come across in voice or video, or just the long turn-around of async communications, is slowing things down. At some point it may be easier to hop on a quick call.
Speaking of that last point, Amin talks about some situations where you shouldn’t even try to communicate asynchronously if you can avoid it - they’re all areas where building relationships is the goal, or higher-bandwidth-than-just-text communications are necessary:
- One-on-one meetings
- Team building
- Difficult conversations
- Crisis communication
- Onboarding new employees
