Wait, what are we talking about?

What the heck is he talking about? I think to myself, rubbing my temple to ease the confusion. I exhale slowly, formulating my response. I’m in a Slack thread at work, and I always try to pause and reflect a bit before posting. Especially when I suspect miscommunication is afoot.

I offer again, “We’re not changing the document, just optimizing it. Otherwise, we can’t send it at all.”

“We can! We do! We send hundreds of these things every day!” the exclamations lining up like torches lighting the way to Avernus (the “first layer of the Nine Hells” according to DnD lore).

“But then we have these problem cases.”

“So let’s solve the problem! Not create a whole new one!”

High alert mode. I glance down, half expecting to see my heartbeat through my rib cage. I remember 4-7-8 breathing, and start using it to calm myself down.

“I’ve proposed a solution. It’s a good one in my opinion. It solved the issue today, did it not?”

“It’s not scalable. There’s the cost factor. Licensing. We’ll have to get sign off from every client. It’s too complicated.”

My eyes dart around the room, seeking something that doesn’t exist. Licensing is $30/mo per seat. Two seats max. And no sign-off needed—they asked us to send this, and we can’t without it. Right?

I’m starting to doubt everything. Starting to give up. Starting to not care. “Ok what do you suggest?”

“Go through the procedure, get the client to tell us the most important pages in the document, and only send those.”

“But that didn’t work in this case. Each of the important pages were too large on their own.” I was sure I’d already explained this.

“Well, then we can’t send it.”

“But…I sent it?!” Heart racing again. What is happening here? Did I wake up inside the movie Brazil, in which nothing makes sense but everyone carries on as if it does? Am I going to fall into depression, lose my mind and run off into the shining abyss with a lady driving a truck?

“Yes you sent it. It was a manual process.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” now I’m resorting to the exclamation mark, harbinger of chaos. This cannot end well, I’m thinking.

“We’re in a thread about an API.”

I blink. I blink again. Then a beam of Holy DawnShard WeaveLight smacks me in the face. He thinks I want to do this for every document automatically.

I scroll up through the thread and find my second message, pasting it into Slack as a quote.

I don’t think they have an API for this.

“I was talking about a manual process, only for the problem cases.”

A few moments…

“We are in agreement.”

Mind. Blown.

I paraphrased that discussion, and hopefully the other party doesn’t feel misrepresented if they read this. There’s no blame here. If anything, I contributed to the miscommunication more than anyone else. It’s a common issue with the written medium: the shared sense of continuity is assumed, but far from guaranteed.

The thread started on one topic, and in my mind that topic changed when I posted the message about the API being unavailable. But from the perspective of someone whose job it is to analyze technical solutions, the thread continued to be about pros and cons of using an API. Likely they didn’t see my one pivotal message, in a sea of messages.

We were able to, artfully it seems in retrospect, hold two conversations in parallel. We managed to formulate messages that were just conceivable enough as part of a single conversation, to make us both think we were talking about the same thing. But we weren’t.

If you’re ever in a conversation—especially a written one—where the other person doesn’t seem to make sense or isn’t hearing you…

If you start asking yourself, “what are they talking about?”

Reframe the question. Keep tacit assumptions in check and revisit first principles about the conversation at-hand.

“What are we talking about?”

If I had asked that at the beginning of the thread, it could’ve saved me some stressful moments :)