Chad Silverstein explains the importance of avoiding ambiguity in communication, especially when leading teams or sharing vision and change. He urges specificity, concrete actionable decisions, written follow-ups for visual learners, checking listener understanding (play-back), and regular practice to refine clear, concise messages.
Chapters
So I think ambiguity and things like complexity, I like to keep things simple. One of my principles and my core is to keep things simple. And I can't stand when people can't be clear on whatever it is that they're trying to articulate. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you got to help them. But you have to be able to know what you want, know why you want it, and be able to then to communicate that. And when you keep things too general or you make things too complicated, or you're ambiguous about whatever it is that you're sharing, especially about a vision or something, a message, a change, you have to be really careful. If you're leading a team and you're not providing specific, concrete, actionable decisions or clarity, and then writing that out and showing people so that people who are visual learners can see it and they want to know the facts versus people just want to be able to just do a town hall meeting and just ask you questions to let you clarify yourself. And you have to make sure that when you speak that you're being clear and that you have people play back what they heard so that you can correct yourself and make sure you correct maybe something they heard that maybe they heard wrong. And whether you said it a certain way that made them hear it that way or they heard it a way that was not the way you intended, doesn't matter. What matters is, is that your message was not heard the way you wanted it to. And it's probably your fault for not clearly communicating that clear, concise, and direct. And so try to stay away from being too ambiguous when you're explaining changes your vision. Get specific, drill it down. And the way to do this beforehand is to practice it. This is why we come to practice. We share these kind of things. We write these things out, we sit on them, rinse them, and repeat. And eventually you get something really good that's not ambiguous, that's very clear. And no matter who hears it, it's like putting it on the low cookie shelf that anyone could just go grab it and understand it and eat it and feel good and consume it and move on and decide whether or not they want to be part of it.
