Explicit clarity prevents wasted cycles

Make the thing that's implicit explicit.

We don't even talk about problems without a qualifier. Are we talking about a business problem? Are we talking about a customer problem? Are we talking about an efficiency problem? Describe the nature of the problem and parse it out.

My three questions to end the meeting are, what did we decide here? Who needs to do what by when? And who else needs to know?

If you really go around the room at the end of a meeting or six people in the meeting, let's say, and you say to everybody, 'What did we decide here?' And they all write it down, you will get six different answers, even though we're in the same meeting.

I think the blast radius of a poorly written memo is way bigger than most people think. If you are just shooting off a message in a Slack channel with 15 other people, and it's confusing, you didn't include information you should have included, there's going to be a bunch of back and forth. Whereas if you had just taken another look at it, those 15 people would be off to the races.