Someone on my team was going on leave. We did what you’re supposed to do — sat down, went through the handover. Programs assigned. Files shared. A neat little document listing who was covering what. Everyone nodded. Everyone felt covered. Two weeks later I found out a customer had been waiting on an answer that…
When I got made redundant from Amazon, I had, for the first time in years, an empty calendar and no meetings to run to. So I did something I’d never made time for while I was in the job: I sat down and mapped out exactly where communication had broken down over the previous year….
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…
