Saying It Louder Doesn't Make It Clearer

There's a joke that goes: how do you sell a deaf person chickens?

You just ask really, really loudly.

It's a bad joke. It's also, somehow, the default communication strategy in most workplaces.

When we're not being understood, we repeat ourselves. We send the follow-up email. We bring it up again in the next meeting. We add more slides. We bold the important parts. And still — somehow — everyone walks out of the room with a completely different idea of what just happened.

More volume is not the answer. It never was.

We're not actually talking to each other.

Here's the thing about communication breakdowns: they're rarely about the words. They're about everything underneath the words — the assumptions, the context, the completely different mental models two people bring into the same conversation without realizing it.

You ask about scheduling. They answer about capacity. You say "process." One person pictures a flowchart, another pictures a Slack thread, another pictures something they half-remember from a LinkedIn post. Nobody flags the disconnect. Everyone nods. The meeting ends.

Two days later, three people have done three different things, and now you have a problem.

This happens constantly around process — maybe more than anywhere else. Ask three people on the same team how they handle the same workflow and you'll get three different answers, each delivered with complete confidence. Nobody's lying. They each genuinely believe their version. The actual process lives somewhere in the gap between all of them, held together by habit and institutional memory and vibes.

It works until it doesn't.

If nobody's hearing you, that's data.

Here's a hard one: if you've brought up the same idea in two meetings and gotten no traction, stop bringing it up.

Not because you're wrong. Maybe you're completely right. But if the message isn't landing after two tries, saying it a third time isn't a strategy — it's just noise. And organizations are really good at tuning out noise.

Either the timing is off, the audience isn't ready, or you're speaking a language that doesn't translate to their priorities. Any of those is worth knowing. None of them are fixed by repetition.

Flag it. Park it. Move on. Come back when conditions change.

The whiteboard is not beneath you.

The most underrated communication tool isn't a new platform or a better deck template. It's a blank space and a marker — or honestly, just your finger tracing a path on a shared screen.

Start here. Then what happens? Then what? Who does that? Where does it go?

It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But it works because it forces everyone to look at the same thing. Visual people see the flow. People who process by hearing talk through each step out loud. People who learn by doing get to trace the logic with their hands. Suddenly everyone's working from the same picture instead of three separate ones they built in their own heads.

No fancy software. No prep required. Just: what actually happens, in order, beginning to end?

Get comfortable saying "I don't know."

Most of us are genuinely talented at hiding when we're lost. We nod along, fill in blanks with assumptions, and then act on those assumptions like they're facts. It's a very efficient way to create very avoidable problems.

The fix is uncomfortable but simple: ask people to show you, not tell you. "Walk me through how you actually do this" hits different than "explain the process." One gets you the theory. The other gets you the truth — including the three workarounds everyone does and nobody talks about.

And if you're the one who's lost? Say so. It takes more confidence than it sounds like. It also tends to move things faster than six more meetings of politely nodding and hoping it clicks eventually.

Slow down to speed up.

When things are working, there are probably dozens of quiet little processes humming along that you're not thinking about. When the wheels start coming off — when the same miscommunications keep happening, when nobody can agree on what was decided — that's not a call to push harder.

That's a call to slow down. Draw the picture. Ask the dumb question. Actually listen to what comes back.

Turns out that's usually a lot faster than shouting about chickens.