Make Sure Everyone is Having the Same Conversation

Have you ever been in a meeting and noticed different people involved in the same discussion are having different conversations? Or just as likely, different people coming away from the meeting with different takeaways? I suspect if you have worked on a large team, you’ve noticed this is a common problem. It's also likely you have experienced this after the fact when it becomes clear that people are working towards different outcomes than were discussed in your meeting.

The reason this is so common is that people bring many types of biases to meetings, including recency bias and anchoring bias. These biases are unintentional, and people generally don’t recognize when they are affected by them. What is worse, research has shown that some biases (e.g. anchoring) gets worse the larger the group size.

Since bias is unintentional, however, it only becomes an issue when ambiguity exists. The ambiguity in meetings, especially engineering related ones, is often caused by shorthand that people use in normal conversation. People use words like ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘us’ (pronouns) in everyday conversation and never give it a second thought. At work, however, these terms can be overloaded. For example, is ‘we’ your team, your org, your company, just the parties talking? People will come to a conversation with different perspectives and how they interpret pronouns is largely related to the context they brought with them into the conversation. Another common example is when people refer to a work item using shorthand instead of fully referring to it. In engineering, there are usually many issues that are similar and fit under the umbrella of the same shorthand description (e.g. multiple bugs in the same piece of code). People fill in the ambiguity by substituting the issue they are most familiar with that fits the description even if that is not the intended issue.

Effective managers attempt to limit (or even better, eliminate) pronouns and broad classifiers. I know this seems ridiculous at first glance, but once you start to pay attention to how people use pronouns and how people interpret them, you will understand why precise nouns are always better and lead to quicker conversations with better outcomes.

A close kin to pronouns are arbitrary broad classifiers. For example, a person might refer to “the UI fix” in a conversation. It is highly likely at any given time there is more than one bug related to the UI. People participating in the conversation are going to instantly fill in the ambiguity with the UI bug they care about, leading some people to a wrong assumption. Make sure your team uses very specific language when talking about issues, because when there is ambiguity there will be miscommunication.

It is also important to remember in any large group conversation, only a fraction of the participants are fully engaged. Ideally, all participants would be fully focused, but this is seldom the case. People who are multitasking only process parts of the conversation and intuitively fill in blanks with existing context. When language is loose in these conversations, the people who are not focused on the conversation will have the wrong understanding and takeaways.

Finally, it is important that for any conversation, the initiator sends out notes documenting the outcomes. It’s important that when they do, they use concise and unambiguous language. Just as in speaking, shorthand notations are prevalent in writing and must be eliminated. If a conversation is worth having, it's worth the time to send out notes to ensure agreement and disseminate decisions.  

Tips and Techniques

• Eliminate pronouns in conversations, encourage others to do the same.

• If others are using pronouns, make sure to ask for clarification of pronouns if you believe the meaning might be ambiguous.

• Don’t use shorthand when referring to issues or problems, be explicit and detailed.

• Follow up a conversation with notes to make sure everyone has the same takeaways.

• Make sure all action items have an assigned owner captured in the notes so everyone involved is on the same page.