Where Communication Bottlenecks Hide

I lived in Japan for eighteen months, teaching English, and one of the first things that quietly wrecked me was how much got communicated without ever being said. Silence wasn’t nothing — it was information, if you knew how to read it. I didn’t, not at first. I’d ask a question, get a pause and a polite non-answer, and walk away assuming everything was fine. It rarely was.
I got better at reading it eventually. But the bigger lesson wasn’t about Japan specifically — it was about how easily I’d been assuming shared understanding that was never actually there. And once I saw it in that context, I started seeing it everywhere else too, including in every business I’ve worked in since.

At the NGO where I managed the office, there were things I just knew — where a form lived, who to ask for what, how a particular process actually worked in practice versus how it was written down. I never wrote most of it anywhere, because it didn’t occur to me that anyone needed it written down. I knew it. Surely everyone knew it. They didn’t. When I was out of the office, things quietly stalled, and nobody could quite say why.

That’s the pattern behind most communication bottlenecks that don’t look like bottlenecks. Someone assumes the client understood the scope. Someone assumes the process is documented somewhere. Someone assumes “everyone knows how this works” — when what’s actually true is that one person knows, and everyone else has been guessing politely, the way I used to nod along in conversations in Japan I’d only half followed.

Years earlier, working at IBM, someone told me that assuming makes an ass out of u and me. I laughed at the time. I’ve since watched it play out in every workplace, every team, and every client relationship I’ve been part of for the last thirty years. It’s still the most useful thing anyone ever said to me in a meeting.

The fix is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it: stop assuming and start checking. Say the thing out loud that you assumed was obvious. Write down the process you’re certain everyone already knows. It costs a few minutes. The alternative costs a lot more, later, when the gap finally shows itself.

Your turn: where are you assuming shared understanding right now that might not actually be there?