What we have here is a failure to communicate
On efficiency, trust, and the cost of moving too fast
In the last three years leading a team for my client’s project, I did a lot of things that—by conventional standards—were wildly inefficient.
I hired people spread across multiple time zones: Malaysia, Brazil, Ireland, the U.S., the Philippines, Latvia, just to name a few.
Sometimes the Americans joined calls at 5 a.m. their time. Other times, someone in Malaysia stayed up until 11 p.m. I often started my workday while half the team was asleep.
Cultural differences added another layer. Some were direct, others more subtle. Some leaned into hustle, while others valued balance above all else.
To make things even less efficient, we spent the first ten to twenty minutes of every group call talking about everything except work. Coffee rituals. Movies. How not to make a tomato sauce. Even how to grow a beard using some very questionable methods.
And once those twenty minutes were up, instead of jumping straight into tasks and deadlines, I’d spend a good chunk of time explaining context. The backstory. The why behind the work. How we ended up here in the first place.
The team eventually started calling me “the context guy.”
By all modern productivity metrics, this should have been a mess.
And yet—somehow—we always hit the targets. Even the unreasonable ones.
I never had to threaten anyone, pressure them, or hover over their work. People were committed. They took responsibility. And when things went sideways—as they inevitably did—we had each other’s backs.
If I had to narrow down the reason those inefficiencies worked, I’d point to something that feels increasingly rare in most environments: good communication.
I’m not referring to clarity alone, but to the part of communication where what’s implicit carries more weight than what’s said out loud.
Because every time you talk about a plan, you’re communicating more than the plan itself. Behind the words you’re either saying:
“I value your perspective” or “I don’t really care what you think”
“I want you to be part of what we’re doing” or “just get this done, you’re being paid”
“it’s safe to express your opinion” or “if you don’t agree, shut the f—k up”
Those messages are rarely spoken directly. But everyone hears them.
And because so much modern communication happens inside systems designed for output rather than understanding, the implicit signals tend to skew in one direction.
Communication then becomes transactional. You’re no longer trying to understand or be understood—you’re trying to land a point, secure agreement, and avoid friction.
We’ve become so obsessed with efficiency that we’ve forgotten something fundamental: real collaboration only becomes possible when trust exists between the people involved.
And trust, inconveniently, takes time.
Communication Breakdown
Poor communication isn’t just a workplace problem. Look closely enough, and it shows up across nearly every part of our lives.
When was the last time you sat down with a friend for a real conversation without being distracted by your phone?
How much goes unsaid during family dinners?
How many genuinely thoughtful exchanges do you encounter while scrolling through social media?
We live in a consumerist world where almost anything is one tap away. That proximity creates the illusion that we can do and be everything. So we stack commitments, say “yes” more often than we should, stretch timelines, and inflate our goals—because anything less might look like a lack of ambition.
With all of this in play, we start to run. Fast.
Speed becomes more than a demand from the outside; it turns into something we internalize. It signals competence. Efficiency. Value.
So instead of calling, we text. Instead of reading carefully, we skim. Instead of pausing to ask questions, we jump to conclusions.
The other day, I saw an influencer say she judges entrepreneurs by how quickly they respond to email. The post received a lot of engagement. Yet in practice, I’ve lost count of how many misunderstandings I’ve seen arise precisely because people replied too quickly—without taking the time to think things through first.
To be clear, speed itself isn’t the problem. Some meetings really could have been emails. The problem begins when speed becomes our only mode — and we lose the ability to discern when to speed up and when to slow down.
A similar dynamic plays out with certainty.
Speak too carefully and you risk being dismissed. Speak too boldly and you’re taken seriously—even when you’re oversimplifying or have no clue what you’re talking about.
The incentive this creates is subtle but dangerous: people stop speaking to understand and start speaking to sound right. Communication turns into performance, and the goal shifts from making sense of something together to winning the exchange.
Real communication asks for something different. It requires vulnerability—the willingness to not know yet, to revise your position, to let a conversation go somewhere you didn’t plan. That kind of openness can’t coexist with rigid certainty.
This doesn’t mean decisiveness isn’t important. It is. Without decisions, nothing moves forward. But decisiveness doesn’t require pretending to have full certainty. Anyone who’s had to make difficult decisions knows this: you never have the complete picture when the moment to choose arrives.
What we don’t need is to pretend we always have the answers.
I used to tell my team openly that what we were pursuing was an assumption—based on A, B, C, and D. They understood that. It gave them clarity without false confidence. And it created room for adjustment. If we were wrong, we’d come back together, talk it through, and recalibrate.
And beneath all of this sits something we rarely account for: emotion.
A lot of communication breaks down because people don’t recognize the role emotion plays when speaking with others.
We assume others see the world roughly as we do. They don’t. Culture, incentives, fear, status, and identity shape interpretation far more than logic ever could.
Without slowing down to surface those layers, people hear the words but miss the meaning.
That’s why I spent so much time sharing context with my team. Not only to keep them informed, but to let them see how I was thinking. And when people understand how you think, they’re more likely to share how they think—and how they feel—in return.
But that kind of openness only emerges in spaces where psychological safety exists.
If people feel that honesty puts their status or identity at risk, they’ll wear a mask. And once the mask is on, it shows up in every interaction.
The hard part about creating psychological safety is that someone has to go first. You have to be willing to show uncertainty. To admit confusion. To slow down enough to listen without judgment.
It’s not easy—which is why speed and certainty are so tempting.
But contrary to what many assume, emotion isn’t noise in communication. It tells us what’s at stake, why something matters, and where someone is speaking from. When we try to strip it away in the name of logic, we don’t become clearer.
We become harder to understand.
A Slow Practice
December was my last month working on this client’s project. Before stepping away, I chose an older form of communication to express my appreciation. I wrote him a letter.
I didn’t send it by mail like in the old days. I emailed it. But I wrote it as if I were going to seal it in an envelope.
It took time to find the right words. And what I noticed was that by slowing down—by engaging in a more deliberate, thoughtful practice—much more of my heart made its way onto the page.
I wasn’t expecting a reply. He’s busy, with countless things competing for his attention. But a few days later, he wrote back. And after nine years of working together, it was probably the most meaningful exchange we’d ever had.
So many unspoken things finally found their way into words—the doubts, the difficult moments, the times we thought it might be over. The hard conversations we avoided because there was always something urgent to get done. The unreal highs, the mutual respect, the gratitude, and the shared belief that we were trying to make something better.
It made me realize how much a slow practice like letter writing can change the quality of our relationships. How it creates space for things that don’t fit into the speed of everyday communication. How it helps us say what matters, and understand each other a little more deeply.
So in 2026, I’m planning to write more letters.
Letters to friends who live far away and with whom I rarely get the chance to talk anymore. Letters to my father, whom I still struggle to communicate with. And maybe even letters to people I don’t know personally, but deeply admire—and feel called to reach out to.
I know that by most standards, writing letters is inefficient. It takes time. “It doesn’t scale.”
And yet, looking back, so did many of the things that made our team work—and many of the conversations that mattered most.
Maybe what we call inefficiency is sometimes just care, moving at a human pace.