Frequently I find myself either directly involved in, or watching, a chain of emails/texts/messages going in circles.  One person asks a question, which is misunderstood or requires followup, which leads to more questions and goes around and around and around.  It is incredibly easy to keep that chain going… after all, we know the other end is reading them, and we think we can get to agreement if we just. keep. emailing.  

Unfortunately this is rarely the case… At best, this results in wasted time as it takes several cycles to get to mutual understanding.  At worst, it results in damaged relationships.  A much quicker (and simpler) approach is to break the cycle and connect - pick the phone (or jump on zoom) and take the 5 minutes to explain things in person.

Communications technology is a weird thing.  It allows us to instantly send messages, but weirdly this results in us being further apart instead of closer together.  This could be due to the asynchronous nature of text communication (there’s no way to tell when the receiver will read it), in the static nature of the communication medium (sarcasm, for example is REALLY hard to pickup ion text), or in the assumption that other folks will “just get it”.  Regardless, email or comment wars frequently crop up, with individuals endlessly sending messages hoping ONE of them will make sense to the other side.

We’ve all read a response from someone and wondering how the heck they didn’t understand our message.  We took so much time carefully crafting our message, only for them to somehow miss the point.  So we take more time to carefully craft a response… which is received in a similar manner on their end.  This chain eventually becomes self-sustaining and will continue indefinitely unless someone breaks the cycle (the worst I’ve seen was a ticket with 150+ comments on it running in circles).

The problem with these cycles isn’t that the folks involved aren’t smart, or well intentioned, or anything about the person.  It’s about the medium and some assumptions we make about it.  Tools like email, slack and @ mentions are great for quickly sending a message around the world… unfortunately they also fail to capture a great deal of information.  Tone is hard to encode in text… so is sarcasm, body language, and basically all of our body language.  We tend to not see verbal communication run in as many circles because we get that additional information… we can see if someone is confused, or more easily pickup on frustration.

We also make assumptions about how we communicate and how others will interpret what we say.  On our end we assume that our message is understandable.  For ourselves this is (hopefully!) true, after all, we wrote it.  For someone else, however, this may not be as correct.  We all filter communication through our own experiences, and others rarely, if ever, have the same experiences we do.  This ties directly into how someone else would interpret our message.  Over time we get more familiar working with folks, but even WITH experience we can send a confusing message.

The trick, then, to breaking the circle of endless text communication is to step outside of it and use a different method.  Getting back to a place where non-text information is shared (phone, video chat, etc.) will reduce or eliminate many of the problems pure-text conveys.  By making communication more real-time we also provide immediate opportunities for the other parties to ask clarifying questions or point out challenges immediately.  By both reducing the feedback loop, and providing a richer communications environment, we can make our connections much more impactful.