At PermissionTV, the engineering team and the professional services team sat in the same office and still managed to develop a complete communication breakdown. Not through malice. Through Slack habits. Engineers would drop a message in a shared channel that read as a status update and was actually a request for a decision. PS would respond with what looked like an acknowledgment and was actually a pushback. Nobody was lying. Everyone was reading the same words differently.
When I introduced Scrum to the PS team, part of what changed was not the process but the communication contract. Sprint reviews forced conversations that had been happening asynchronously - badly - into a synchronous format where tone and intent were visible. The number of re-dos dropped. The number of escalations dropped. Not because people started communicating differently in Slack. Because fewer decisions were being made in Slack.
The fractional context makes this harder
As a fractional executive, I am almost always operating without the ambient information that comes from being in a building with people. I cannot read the room because I am not in the room. Written communication - email, Slack, Notion comments, shared docs - is my primary channel for everything: direction-setting, feedback, conflict resolution, trust-building.
This means every message carries more weight than it would in a full-time context. A terse response from me can read as disapproval when I am just busy. An ambiguous ask from a client can read as urgency when it is a background concern. The margin for misreading is narrow and the cost of getting it wrong is high because there are fewer correction loops available.
The discipline I have developed over years of fractional work: write longer when the topic is sensitive, shorter when it is operational. Pick up the phone when a message has already been misread once. Never deliver negative feedback in writing unless the writing is being used to document something that has already been worked through verbally.
When it goes wrong at Embarc
Pharma and biotech clients at Embarc had compliance requirements that made written communication genuinely high-stakes. A message that could be read two ways was a liability, not just an inconvenience. We had one engagement where a project manager's email about scope changes was read by the client as a commitment to something we had not agreed to. The email was technically ambiguous. The client's interpretation was reasonable. We spent three weeks untangling it.
After that I built an explicit norm into every client engagement: anything that could be interpreted as a decision or a commitment gets a follow-up call within 24 hours to confirm shared understanding. It added friction. It prevented the kind of misalignment that costs real money and real relationships.
The pattern that causes most of the damage
The most common failure mode in written communication at work is not rudeness or aggression. It is compression. People write messages that make complete sense to them because they have all the context, and land as incomplete or confusing to the reader who does not. The writer assumes shared context. The reader fills in the gaps with their own assumptions. The gap between those two mental models is where miscommunication lives.
The fix is not longer messages. It is more explicit messages. State what you know, what you are asking, and what you need by when. Do not assume the reader will infer the purpose from the content. Name it.
