You Stopped Feeling the Distance
A long-distance call used to travel thousands of miles over copper wire. You could hear it. Static, a half-second delay, a voice that cut out right when it mattered.
That distance made you work. You repeated the important part. You asked the other person to confirm they caught it. You slowed down, without deciding to.
Fiber took the noise out. Now you can join a call from another continent and sound like you're across the table. Slack arrives instantly. Docs render clean.
The distance never went away. We just stopped feeling it. And since we can't feel it, we stop doing the work to make sure we're understood.
Context is Never Implied
Many of us have been in this situation before: Product walks through a ticket, the team reads it, nobody has questions, everyone agrees it’s clear.
Two sprints later, the pieces come together, and three people built three slightly different things. The API returns a shape the UI never expected. The edge case QA assumed was never written.
Nobody misread it. The channel felt close enough that no one thought to confirm they held the same version.
Part of that is on the person writing. In 1990, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton ran a study where people tapped out the rhythm of a well-known song while a listener tried to name it. Tappers guessed the listener would get it about half the time. Listeners got it right 3 times out of 120, about 2.5%.
The tapper hears the whole song in their head. The listener hears knuckles on wood. You are the tapper every time you explain something you understand well. The context is loud in your head, so you feel clear, and you have no idea how little is getting through.
Part of it is on the person reading. They aren’t receiving a faded copy of your message. They’re building their own version out of the same words. One engineer reads the ticket through the billing code they just spent a month on. Another reads it for the fastest path to done—same sentence, two interpretations, both reasonable.
Static at least announced itself. A clean message doesn’t. It looks complete, so everyone acts on their own version, assuming it’s the shared one.
Repeat Back to Ensure Context is Understood
The fix is not more meetings or longer messages. It's one habit: when something looks clear, confirm it before you act on it.
When a ticket feels obvious, that is the moment you are most likely the tapper. Say you're reading back before you start. "Reading this as: we block the save only when both dates are set, otherwise we warn. Right?" Thirty seconds there saves the two sprints.
This feels unnecessary, which is exactly why people skip it. The message looked clear, so confirming it feels like asking a question you should already know the answer to. That instinct is the problem. The clearer a message looks, the easier it is to miss what didn't come through.
Watch for Cues Text Strips Out
Reading something back catches misunderstandings about the work. It won’t catch how someone is feeling, and tone is the first thing text loses.
A one-line “sure, that works” can mean any of these:
- I’m on board. The reading you’re hoping for.
- I’m busy and want this thread to end. Agreement as an exit.
- I disagree, but not enough to fight it now. Quiet resistance you’ll hear about later.
- I haven’t really read it. A rubber stamp you’re about to build on.
The words don’t specify which one, so you fill it in, and under deadline pressure, you use the most convenient context. When you can’t see a face or catch someone in the hallway, you have to add that context back yourself.
This is the mechanism under the empathy gap in software teams. The emotional cues that came through in person are gone the moment a conversation moves to text.
So when a reply feels short or off, name what you’re unsure about instead of guessing. “Want to make sure I’m not steamrolling this. Are you good with the approach, or good with moving on?”
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Where can AI save you time?
My friends at Big Creek Growth put together a quick survey to spot the repetitive work you can hand off to automation.
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Polish is Not the same as Understanding
AI makes communication look more polished without improving the thinking behind it. It turns rough notes into clean prose and uncertain reasoning into confident paragraphs.
That polish changes how the message lands. In a 1999 study, Reber and Schwarz found people were more likely to judge a statement true when it was easier to read, an effect they produced with something as small as color contrast. Easy to process reads as credible.
Clean output earns trust faster than it should. A polished summary of a decision can hide that the decision was never made. It’s the same effect as a confident Slack message, at scale. This is part of why I keep coming back to knowing when not to use AI.
So when work comes together fast, check whether you could defend the reasoning without the document in front of you. If you can’t, the thinking isn’t done, no matter how finished it reads.
The static we felt was helpful in many ways. It reminded you that the other person wasn't in the room. The tools got good at hiding that, not at removing it.
The line will keep sounding clear. Whether the context landed is still yours to confirm.