Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity!

This vent criticizes developers for not knowing how to listen. that's why it comes off condescending. The root problem is that people don't know what they don't know.

The best communicators are translators. People listen because the message becomes self evident in their understanding.

It's hardly a breakdown because everyone is acting like a toddler with their fingers in their ears.

This is ironically why we reach for systems and engineering. The system can build in gap detection and frameworks for translation. It's not perfect and creates its own problems but scolding each unit human to listen better does nothing for the collective environment: the team, the company… the system.

For the typical "agile" process for software:

- standup: this fits, attempting to communicate status and request help with blockers

- backlog grooming: attempting to figure out what to do with artifacts of generally-async communication (tickets from a backlog, either created by you in the past or by others). attempting to fit them into the process best. Communication is often seen as a necessary evil, and this process often goes faster with fewer people. if people bring up questions, there may be some attempts to communicate in explanations.

- sprint planning: work assignment and time management/estimations. similar to above, questions could spark attempts to communicate, but it's not the primary purpose.

- sprint retro: improve the team dynamics and the flow of the process. communication is usually assumed here, but in practice it's "people saying things, they get written down, then the next sprint happens same as the last." there often isn't effective communication to the people who could change things

I think if the goal of meetings was more specifically "we are going to communicate until our mental pictures are exactly the same" you'd end up with faster/better actual work from everyone on the team.

But in big orgs that's usually not even what's wanted. If the plan sucks, but it's a VP's pet project, it's not good for various whole teams in that org to all effectively communicate with each other to realize it sucks but not have the political skills or pull to change the VP's mind...

This is where I think we have a different definition of communication.

> (i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before)

Hence my clarification of:

  Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually 
  prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.

Another example is when product and/or engineer managers use "stand-ups" to ask each engineer the status of their deliverables. Listen to what they are saying; we micromanage and do not trust the team.

  Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced.

The converse is also true. People saying something assume that people listening are understanding and thinking about the same thing. This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms.

If you're in a meeting and someone puts up a slide deck with a 6 word bullet point that 'explains' what they want, that is a signal that literally no one understands the goal. If they put in a meeting without writing a one page doc about it, they don't understand it well enough to explain it.

And if your progression hangs off delivering that thing, you should by demanding that you get a clearer picture.