You Can’t Ship What You Can’t Say Clearly

Most engineering orgs still treat communication as hygiene, not infrastructure.

It’s “everyone’s responsibility,” but no one’s job to design, test, or evolve it.

So we over-index on technical drills:

• Deployments are rehearsed

• Outages are simulated

• On-call is rotated

But clarity? Alignment? Influence under pressure?

That’s left to vibes and social seniority.

And it shows.

You’ve seen it:

• A decision frays two meetings later

• A multi-team effort stalls despite shared goals

• A high-stakes review goes sideways because the story wasn’t ready

This isn’t a personality issue. It’s an interface failure.

Not between systems—but between humans operating them.

Hard truth:

Systems thinking breaks down at the boundary between people and process.

If you don’t train for that boundary, don’t be surprised when velocity decays and trust erodes.

If you want operational resilience, build these into the system:

• Clarity Postmortems: When did signal drop? What assumption went unspoken?

• Rotating Facilitation: Like on-call for meetings. Treat signal ownership as a skill, not a seat.

• Decision Debriefs: How was it made? What made it stick? Where did it drift?

• Truth in Public: Don’t just give feedback—model non-defensive truth. Make it safe to sharpen ideas.

• Promote for Signal, Not Style: In chaos, who brings clarity? That’s leadership.

Avoiding these conversations to “preserve harmony” is how dysfunction ossifies.

Handled right, these aren’t soft skills. They’re critical path diagnostics.

Prompt:

Where did your last cross-functional project stall—not from code, but from confusion?

Trace it. Name it. Then train the interface.