Tag Archives: Communications

The AI Doom Fever Finally Fades

Is the AI Doom Fever Breaking? (It’s About Time!) — Cal Newport, AI Reality Check, Deep Questions Podcast

For many years now executives leading the big AI companies have been telling the public that their own products will destroy the economy and gut the white-collar workforce. As Cal Newport observes this is the rough equivalent of a Pfizer executive announcing a new pill that cures psoriasis but also turns half the population into zombies. But lately the extremist rhetoric on AI has started to soften significantly. Instead of totally replacing entire segments of the workforce, these new AI systems will now simply augment existing workers and also lead to massive new opportunities for employment. That’s quite a radical shift in attitude, especially coming from people whose breathless messaging has been so bold.

Nevertheless, tech companies are still laying off tens of thousands of employees and citing AI as the reason. So, we’ll see. Newport thinks the previous over-the-top positioning on AI resulted more from culture, whereas the recent shift in tone is likely more tactical. His analysis is comprehensive and seems pretty accurate given that he’s been pushing back on this rhetorical issue for years now.

A Strange Sales Pitch

In his podcast, Newport runs through many of the recent doom statements. Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft AI has suggested that AI will be capable of automating most knowledge work within roughly a year. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has warned that the technology will soon replace up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in finance, consulting, and tech. Sam Altman of OpenAI speculated last summer about a future in which AI would “do everything,” leaving humans to find new ways to “participate” in the world.

“That’s basically what we’re getting from the AI CEOs,” Newport says. “And I think it’s just lunacy.” Newport has held this position for some time now. And it’s an opinion shared online by many advanced engineers who have been working with AI systems for a long time. However, there are many so-called social media influencers in the AI space who still push the end-of-the world theme. It’s been an odd experience for sure. Granted, software executives have a long history of bragging in their corporate earnings calls that their systems will enable customers to cut expensive employees. It’s hard to think, though, of another industry whose leaders so cheerfully predict that their products will wreck civilization while making their founders and a few insiders rich beyond their wildest dreams. Seems like a difficult sell, eh?

The New Vibe

In late April 2026, Altman posted on X that OpenAI wants to “build tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them,” and added that “jobs doomerism is likely long-term wrong.” A few days later, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back even harder. In a Fortune interview posted May 2, he called the half-of-jobs prediction “ridiculous” and warned that becoming a CEO can leave a person with what he described as “a God complex,” speaking as if their position alone gave them the authority to predict civilization-scale outcomes. Huang also estimated that AI has already created more than half a million jobs, because companies that adopt it grow faster and hire more, and noted that demand for software engineers is actually rising.

Newport reads Huang’s comments as a slightly concealed dig at Amodei, but perhaps it was a subtle signal to the industry that things will be shifting. Either way, the tone has clearly migrated from outright apocalypse to smooth augmentation. Who knows. But at least it’s a welcome change for those directly affected by the recent massive layoffs attributed to AI systems that haven’t even been fully built and deployed yet.

Where the Doom Came From

To understand the old rhetoric, though, Newport argues that you have to look at the tech culture of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, especially among engineers, and especially content articulated in a few internet forums in recent decades. The most influential was LessWrong, founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky and devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Also, the blog Slate Star Codex, written by Scott Alexander, helped push the same themes into a wider readership. Out of this loose network grew the rationalist movement, which is the idea that if you trained yourself to think like a logical engineer, you could overcome cognitive bias and act more effectively in the world. Newport, who was trained in computer science at MIT, recognizes this culture. “I’m around engineers. I am an engineer. I know this way of thinking,” he says, adding that his wife once told him, “Don’t take me to the MIT Christmas parties because you guys are all so weird.”

Two important offshoots followed. One was effective altruism, which applies something called expected-value reasoning to charitable giving and was made famous — and then infamous — by Sam Bankman-Fried when he led FTX. The other was the existential risk community (X-risk), which argued that very rare disasters with very large costs deserve serious consideration right now. Newport summarizes the X-risk crowd as focusing especially on three threats: asteroid strikes, deadly pandemics, and superintelligent AI. Nick Bostrom’s 2002 paper Existential Risks is the foundational text, but the wider X-risk literature also covers nanotechnology, nuclear war, and what Bostrom calls “totalitarian lock-in.” Newport doesn’t mention Bill Joy’s shock article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” in WIRED in 2000 but it certainly fits the paradigm.

The X-risk crew organized a closed-door conference that produced the open letter signed by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and many of the leading AI researchers of the day. Newport places it in Puerto Rico in 2017, but the actual event was the Future of Life Institute’s “Future of AI: Opportunities and Challenges” conference in San Juan in January 2015. The 2017 follow-up was the Beneficial AI conference at Asilomar in California. Robert McMillan’s WIRED piece from January 2015, “AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World’s Brightest Minds,” captured the elite anxiety that emerged from the Puerto Rico meeting and may be the article Newport has in mind when he describes the era. There were other similar pieces in the elite media during this time period as well. The elites aren’t shy with the media.

ChatGPT and the Hero Complex

Then ChatGPT arrived. For people who had spent ten years writing footnoted lists about the coming superintelligence, it felt like the moment they had been preparing for. Newport thinks this was both terrifying and intoxicating. “What if we were right about this risk,” Newport imagines them thinking, “and not only were we right, but it’s happening?” The rationalists sensed they were going to be Neo. They were going to be John Connor. They were the ones who saw it coming and would now lead everyone else through it. It may be hard for normal people to think this way, but we are talking about the tech elite, after all. They do actually live in a different world, one that’s in many ways disconnected from the normal reality of people who have to work for a living. Newport stresses that it’s important to realize that the current AI companies we see now all grew from that culture.

OpenAI, Newport says, originally presented itself as a nonprofit AI safety organization heavily shaped by X-risk concerns. It was started as almost a hobby project for the rationalist crowd before commercial ambitions reshaped what it is now. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI staff who, according to Newport, felt their old employer was not being rigorous enough about safety. Grok came out of the same orbit. The CEOs, Newport says, were not playing 4D chess with investors. They were just talking the way everyone they knew talked in Silicon Valley. The trouble started when their companies got too big to keep speaking only to their own closed subculture. As Newport puts it, “we’re not, you know, in the Mission District anymore.”

Why It’s Breaking Now

Newport sees three potential forces that may be accelerating the recent change in AI positioning:

First, there is real IPO pressure building. As OpenAI and Anthropic move toward public markets, more sober East Coast investors (who wear suites, Newport says) are quietly asking the founders to stop terrifying the customers they hope will pay for AI products.

Second, public opinion is turning. A Quinnipiac poll from March 2026 found that 55 percent of Americans now believe AI may do more harm than good in daily life, which is up from 44 percent a year earlier, with about seven in ten people expecting fewer job opportunities in the future.

And third, journalists are running out of patience. Ezra Klein’s May 2026 New York Times column “Why the A.I. Job Apocalypse (Probably) Won’t Happen” reports that the economists he interviewed are skeptical of mass joblessness. Also, a recent Ronan Farrow piece in The New Yorker even raises the question of whether Altman is actually a strong chief executive for a trillion-dollar company.

Newport says there may be additional pressures in the market pushing AI executives to temper their rhetoric in recent months, but his analysis on the three issues above seems pretty comprehensive as a working hypothesis.

A Welcome Maturation

The Silicon Valley monoculture has finally collided with the rest of the country, Newport argues. Wall Street realism, journalistic scrutiny, and ordinary public sentiment are forcing the language to evolve to the realities of the market. Newport sounds almost relieved. Somebody, he suggests, finally had to tell these founders to “stop talking like you’re Sarah Connor from Terminator 2.” His understated parting advice still applies. Take AI seriously, but not everything you hear about it.

Using Actions to Communicate

Actions work. They resonate. They attract. They move. They generate other actions. And they do these things far more effectively than words.

People talk a lot about communications. But what most people mean by “communications” is just talking. We have to communicate more, right? Meetings, emails, chats, Zooms, reports, and decisions. More words, basically. But people rarely see the direct and reciprocal relationship between communications and actions. Instead, they simply deliver a single message from their brain to someone else’s using words flying through the air. Once they’ve done that, they’ve communicated. No iteration to press for understanding, no checking to see if messages resonate and lead to desired actions, no assertion of responsibility to clarify as often as necessary, no consent to mutually adjust expectations as things emerge. Just dump some words and run. That’s how most people communicate. Badly.

And that’s why communications comes up all the time. The inherent problems are never resolved because people don’t think through all the steps in the process. In fact, the delivery of words is only one very small part of communications. Also, if you rely only on words you need a lot of them to move people to actions. It’s simply not a very efficient way to communicate.

So, what’s a better way to communicate? Simple. Use actions. In fact, I can’t think of a better way to communicate anything than via action. Actions work. They resonate. They attract. They move. They generate other actions. And they do these things far more effectively than words. Some people who genuinely want to communicate well don’t realize this. They don’t know that actions themselves are communications, so they default to just trying to improve their verbal skills. Others shy away from using actions to communicate because actions are complex and more difficult to implement than just pushing words out into the air. Still others know full well that actions deliver clear messages so they intentionally don’t act so they can duck responsibility and hide behind the obfuscation of their words.

Now, words can be used to support and amplify actions and clarify intent, but the fastest way to see through the meaninglessness of words is to judge their corresponding actions. So, are there any corresponding actions? If so, are those actions consistent with the words? If not, dismiss the words entirely and judge the actions alone. You’ll likely get a vastly different message. But beware. Many people have this consistency bit worked out, and they bend their words to fit their actions after the fact to persuade you they were consistent when reality clearly says otherwise. That’s spin. You can spot that when your stomach turns inside out as someone talks to you. Trust your gut, not your head. In the end a person’s action is the only communication you need to understand. And it’s your most effective tool to deliver your own communications as well.

Try it. Work with it. Make it a skill.

A Checklist for Interviews

I’ve done thousands of interviews with experts from a variety of technical fields. Years ago the platform was print. I wrote news and magazine articles and also press releases for corporations and universities. And the fields were biotech, human medicine, veterinary medicine, environmental science, and STEM universities. But most recently everything is digital with podcasts, videos, and live streams and I’ve been interviewing software developers.

Although biologists, veterinarians, physicians, scientists, and software developers all present different challenges in an interview at an individual level, there are certainly many characteristics they share in common. So I figured I’d write down some bits I’ve learned over the years talking to these people about their work. Since print-only is largely dated or dead, I’ll focus exclusively here on doing interviews for modern platforms like audio/video podcasts since that’s what I do now with software developers.

Here’s a quick checklist I go through before each interview to help keep me focused. This list mainly focuses on the personal interactions with the guest, not really on all the tech and environmental issues that also have to be considered when doing interviews on location at different venues. So for now, just Zoom from my kitchen.

Do a little research on the guest before the interview so you at least have some basic background. You’d be surprised how many interviewers just wing it.
Pre plan the start so you can begin efficiently. This is always hardest part for me, especially when doing live streams. Plan the end, too, so you can get out efficiently without dragging the interview out too long. All conversations have a natural life span. Get out before the energy dies.
Listen! Listen to your guests while they are talking so they feel heard and you can facilitate the conversation. This way the discussion feels natural. It’s obvious when one person in an interview is not listening to the other person.
Comment on what the guest is talking about and then bridge to the next question based on previous comments to keep the conversation going. If a clean break is needed, do that and make it obvious. Maybe comment on the previous statement and then say, ok cool, let’s switch gears and move over to X topic. The guest will usually just follow your lead and move too.
Try to keep the conversation going fluently by asking the guest to comment on this or that issue rather than always asking question one, question two, question three, etc. So, weave in some open statement questions like, “You mentioned X issue, I thought that was interesting, can you talk more about that?”
Brief your guest beforehand so you both agree on the general scope of the conversation. Agree on some broad topics but not specific questions. You need some spontaneity in the discussion so how you specifically phrase questions should be done live rather than beforehand. Also, regarding broad topics, ask your guests beforehand to think of some stories they can tell when they answer questions. A few funny or dramatic stories in a conversation can go a long way to making things interesting and less stressful for both parties — and to better engage the audience!
Recognize that being interviewed is a different skill then presenting a session. Some famous developers who present at conferences all the time in front of thousands of people may actually feel and look a little uncomfortable being interviewed. They don’t have a laptop in front of them. They’ve not rehearsed the discussion. Don’t assume they are skilled at this specific task of recorded, free flowing conversations. I’ve seen some pretty smart and skilled speakers freeze up when I pass them the microphone. So make it a habit to put all of your guests at ease right up front. This is a mutual discussion, not a journalism interview. We’ve having fun here. That’s it. You’ll edit out anything embarrassing (which is rarely necessary; in fact, I’ve done it a few times in 500 interviews).
Encourage your guests to ask you questions, too! That helps to break things up in the discussion and may help put them at ease. If that happens, though, don’t be surprised if you feel uncomfortable! Remember, asking the questions isn’t the same as answering them! There are many skilled interviewers who aren’t that good at being interviewed.
Try to not speak too much. You just need to find a balance where you can insert yourself in the discussion to keep things going. Adding a comment here and there to give them a break is cool. But if you talk too much, the interview will look and sound awkward because the guest will be sitting silent too much. This is even more uncomfortable when you are doing a live standup and you are hogging the mic. The guest is the focus of discussion, not the host.
Good quality sound is more important than good quality video. Start there. Now, the gear conversation is longer and more complex and needs a separate checklist based on whether you are just doing Zoom from your kitchen, recording live in person, or streaming live from a stage. All those situations require different gear and different actions based on the situation. The same goes for post production editing. A different checklist is needed. For now, just doing Zoom from a distance, request that the guest use the best microphone possible. If the audio on their side is very bad, don’t do the interview. It’s not worth it. You can only fix so much in post.

Jim Grisanzio interviewing Paul and Gail Anderson at Oracle Code in Singapore in 2019.

NOTE: As usual with all of my posts, everything’s a draft. I’ll keep editing this one and adding/deleting bits along the way. Maybe I’ll craft some gear checklists I go through when traveling to events (if that ever happens again).

Missing the Mailing List

Here’s one little bit (among many) that I miss about working in Solaris Engineering at Sun and Oracle: The Use of Project Mailing Lists. The timeframe for all this is about 2004-2016.

The concept is simple. You dump everyone involved in the project on to a common mailing list (we used Mailman on OpenSolaris) and then you iterate. That’s it. Well, that’s it at least for the conversation part. There’s actually a great deal more involved with the use of mailing lists depending on who’s using the list and for what purpose.

From a communications point of view, most engineers generally already know to trim, quote, thread, bottom post, filter, and use text emails. But if not, many Open Source engineering projects have handy mailing list guidelines to inform new people about expectations for clean, professional online communications. The guidelines help facilitate efficient discussions for everyone involved — people locally, people internationally, existing people, new people.

This is also convenient for community members. So, for instance, if you are remote, when you get up in the morning you simply log in and see all the email from your projects neatly tucked away in a clearly labeled folder — because you know enough to set up filters and folders on your email client. Then you can rapidly parse the conversations that took place overnight because the emails are all properly formatted and threaded as per the community’s mailing list guidelines. Then you can jump in to a conversation at any point and contribute knowing that everyone who needs to see your email will see your email. You can communicate with thousands of people around the world in an organized way, and you can easily switch between a variety of topics on multiple mailing lists. It just works. And it works not only because it’s simple and organized, but also because there is a clear expectation that all project discussions take place on that project list — not in the hallway, not at the bar, and certainly not buried inside individual threads among just a few people.

On OpenSolaris I was subscribed to more than a hundred mailing lists, and those lists generated thousands of emails per month. And yet I never felt overwhelmed with email. Obviously, I didn’t need to see everything every day. I just needed to have it all organized. I needed to know where everything was. This way I could quickly get anywhere I needed to go and contribute if and when I was needed. I also administered more than a dozen lists myself, and I never once felt overwhelmed with admin tasks. I’d clean out the admin queues first thing in the morning and then check them at the end of the day. No big deal.

Additionally, you can use a mailing list to have distributed team discussions — even though there are likely a number of ongoing projects and lists within a team and also cutting across multiple teams. It’s just another list with a specific purpose. How else would distributed team members communicate to each other? Individual email? That doesn’t seem like a good idea because someone is likely to get left out. Hallway conversations? That obviously leaves out people who are remote, and then they are at a significant disadvantage out there on their own. Even worse, when you don’t even attempt to implement an organizing scheme for your team’s online communications, this is what you generally get:

Individual emails with 50+ people on the TO line and a dozen people on the CC line and who knows how many more are buried on the BCC line.
Highly formatted, multi-color HTML mails with massive attachments in different versions that won’t even be attached when people respond.
Multi line email signatures with long titles, high resolution corporate logos, idiotic blinking emojis, and links to piles of external social media accounts.
Threads where people are added and deleted randomly along the way as conversations snake through the company because everyone has to cover their ass.
Responses where people forward mail (instead of just responding) and add a different color text or highlighted text woven neatly into the original mail.
Top posting.
No trimming.
No quoting.
No threading.
No timely responding.
No iterating.
No consideration for anyone outside the local geography.

Most engineers know the list above represents insanity. But what’s really crazy is that people in marketing think it’s all pretty normal. This is something I’ve never come to accept about marketing. But don’t worry, we now have Slack! We’re saved.

And it goes on. It’s a stunning display of dysfunction and we all see it every day. Although some people think this is normal many do not. Many people instinctively know this is a problem because they complain that they get too much email and that everything on the project is confusing. Ya think? Just take a peek inside some inboxes and you’ll see tens of thousands of unread emails like this all lacking any connection to common sense. Heck, I didn’t even know you could have that many emails in an inbox. Also note the lack of folders and filters. But Slack solves that. Right.

After Solaris I spent a pile of time in marketing. At various points I suggested using project mailing lists to help organize discussions and provide a common space around which the team could collaborate. The idea was generally met with silence. However, one time a project manager was kind enough to respond on team call with, “Jim, we don’t do that here.” Well, ok, I guess that settles that.

I sometimes even set up mailing lists, provided instructions on how to use them, and sent mail to the list to force the issue. But people didn’t engage. Instead, they just froze. Or they’d respond back and add people to the CC line who were already on the list. Sometimes they’d CC the original list and sometimes they wouldn’t. That’s when I’d just shake my head, delete the list, and walk away. If there’s no leader on the team who understands distributed global communications and who provides a daily example as a standard then you have no shot. Just accept it. Do what you can on an individual basis to protect your own interests. That was my conclusion from working in marketing following the standard set in Solaris.

So, I feel lucky to have had the Solaris experience years ago. It was a pleasure working with people who just got this concept of communications with very little or no meta discussion about it. By the way, this issue was not specific to Solaris Engineering. I’ve been on Linux user group mailing lists and other FOSS development and policy lists where it was just culturally unacceptable to communicate like I described above. You got spoken to. And fast.

Now, I’ve really only talked about general conversations between team members because we all communicate to manage projects. But things get more interesting as developers engage in technical conversations on mailing lists. They also use the list itself and a number of other tools to get code integrated into source repositories (reviewing code, fixing bugs, testing, etc). See Mailing Lists vs Github for a deeper look. It’s interesting. Otherwise, just search the web on the use of project mailing lists to read some common list policies at some FOSS projects to get an idea of what I’m talking about. The list below may help. And then look at some actual FOSS project archives to see what distributed technical discussions look like for people who need to get real work done (for example, OpenJDK). Contrast all that to how your team communicates — especially if you are in marketing. Sorry for the criticism, but it’s well earned. Actually, I take that back. I’m not sorry at all.

Examples of Mailing List Guidelines

There may be hope coming for non developers, though. Although developers think and work quite differently than non-developers, sometimes the tools themselves can actually influence human behavior and focus people into more efficient paths. See How We’ll All Work Like Developers (Without Learning to Code) from a16z for a bit on that. Also see Jono Bacon’s review of Slack vs Forums for an outline of some of the newer tools for community communications that came along well after mailing lists.

So, I said earlier that I was in Solaris at Sun/Oracle from around 2004-2016. Then Oracle marketing from 2017 to 2021. Now in 2022 I moved back to engineering but this time to Java doing developer relations, or DevRel, as it’s called. DevRel can be implemented in a variety of ways, and it can be hosted in marketing or engineering. Personally, I feel (strongly) that it’s best suited for engineering. It’ll be interesting to compare Java communications to corporate marketing and Solaris engineering. I have a feeling I know what to expect.

Drafts: Original text written in July 2017 after I moved from Solaris engineering to developer marketing. Text updated in March 2022 after I moved from developer marketing to the Java Developer Relations Team in Java engineering. All jobs during this time at Oracle.

Managing Global Conference Calls

Conference calls are a reality for anyone doing international business. Actually, they are a reality for anyone doing any business, but the calls generate more significance as people communicate across global language and cultural barriers and use a variety of devices. The calls can be productive by cutting the need for people to travel, but the calls can also cause confusion and sometimes resentment. I’ve been collecting some thoughts based on my experiences over the years working with global software development teams and so I thought I’d share what I have. Each bullet below can be flushed out more, but I wanted to get an initial cut out of my head so I can see what I’m thinking.

The Goal: Mutual Understanding

It’s important to understand that a conference call is just one tool among many to facilitate communication. Please don’t underestimate the significance of that seemly simple statement. Even under the best of circumstances, effective communication is painfully difficult to achieve for most people even on a one-to-one basis. Then you layer on top of that the many-to-many communications that come with conference calls and then things can get really complex. Then add the international aspect and complexity grows significantly because you have some especially obvious challenges: language, culture, distance, and time. Also, while people navigate these barriers sometimes they are doing so with poor telecommunications technology. Not everyone in every location always has access to sophisticated high-speed video conferencing systems and many times even those systems aren’t so reliable. Because of these challenges, everyone on the team needs to remain flexible so you all have a shot at achieving the final goal — understanding.

The successful flow of your project’s operations around the world is not possible without pervasive communications using text, voice, video, and face-to-face interactions. You need a mix of everything. And as communication via these channels takes place throughout any given day, many mistakes and misunderstandings will occur. It’s normal. So, to help increase understanding, everyone needs to feel comfortable asking for clarifications as frequently as necessary. Does your team encourage this behavior? The only way to improve communication is to ask questions and iterate on answers until understanding is achieved. Go back and forth — and keep going back and forth — until everyone gets it. This is the most important point people miss. Communication that leads to understanding is an iterative process. If you are not iterating then you are not communicating and your messages will not resonate.

Embrace the politics. You may as well get used to politics since there’s no way around it. All human interactions are political. There are always background or non-verbal conversations going on. There are hierarchies. Power structures. Agendas. Here’s why this is important: sometimes communicating to the point of understanding is simply not possible with some people due to circumstances beyond your control. Recognize the situation. Give it your best shot. Document everything. Assess the situation as hopeless. Move on. If you think this contradicts the idea above about iterating to the point of understanding you are correct. Sometimes this is just the reality. Use your best judgement when things get political.

Dates and Times

Be mindful of the time for your meeting in all regions before booking an international call. Check some sites that track global times zones and ask people beforehand if both the time and date are convenient for them. Don’t assume everyone lives in your city. You have colleagues working one hour away and others working eighteen hours away. In a very real sense, if you are doing international business everyone should be considered remote. The notion that this is the home office here where the main team does the core work, and those guys out there in the provinces represent the remote team providing ancillary support will only thwart communication. Even if the team’s actual geographical mix represents that “core-here, remote-there” model the attitude itself may promote poor communication. Since 2020 when pretty much the entire laptop class just packed up and went home this issue hasn’t been as prevalent. But it’s still something to check.

Send a date/time reminder via email if you are not using an automated calendar system. Be aware of when you send your reminder. What time is it in China? Boston? Los Angeles? This is important because you’ll want to have an idea of when your colleagues are receiving your email in their time zone, not when you’re sending it from within your own time zone — especially when you book calls on short notice. Your reminder may show up at three in the morning for your colleagues and they may show up to the meeting late as a result. This is just an exercise in shifting your own thinking to consider your colleague’s situation.

If the meeting is scheduled during regular working hours for you, it’s likely the call will occur during the middle of the night for some of your colleagues. So, don’t be rude by being late. It’s important to consider that it may be midnight on the other side of the planet and your colleagues are waiting for you. Also, end the call early if possible. Why take a full hour when 40 minutes will do? Don’t waste those 20 minutes with small talk. You may be able to spare the time but those 20 minutes may be more expensive for someone else.

Rotate call times if possible so everyone occasionally shares the pain of doing calls at 3:00 A.M. This idea may shock the core team that works 9-5 their time since they rarely — if ever — experience late calls. But the exercise will go a long way to improving communication if everyone knows first-hand what it’s like. Plus, over time if only certain team members are expected to always sacrifice then communication will suffer and resentment will grow — especially if those who never sacrifice are unaware of how difficult it is to work around an inflexible schedule. Doing business via a thin pipe is challenging. Try it. Now, doing this trade-off in call times may not be advisable for weekly calls since schedules and sleep cycles for everyone would be disrupted too frequently. But doing it once a quarter? Everyone should be able to manage that.

Agendas and Notes

Whoever initiates or manages the call should send an agenda before the call, take notes during the call, and send notes after the call. Or this person can certainly assign these tasks as needed, but the point is that agendas and notes should not be considered optional.

Agendas and notes are critical to document meetings because they help keep people on the team focused on the tasks at hand under difficult communication circumstances. Some people will always miss some important items during a conference call, so they should be able to check the notes and ask questions afterward. Do you document your meetings? Do you follow up on actions?

Notes shouldn’t be word-for-word recordings of the meeting. They should be written as a simple outline of bullets and lists highlighting the conversations, decisions, and actions. Send notes within 24 hours of the call to the team’s mailing list. Ask for corrections and/or additions. Make sure people reply-all to encourage conversation. If the notes spark conversation so much the better because that helps to solidify the content from the meeting. Add any additional items from the list conversation to the notes and post the them to a shared wiki archiving, which is especially important to help new people educate themselves as they join the team.

Slides Used to Guide Conversations

Using slides is not an effective way to communicate. Sure, a good graph displaying quality data can be valuable, and I’m also not talking about professionally written sides used for stage keynote presentations either. I’m talking about slides used for regular team meetings or briefings to your director on the project’s status, as an example. They are almost always just piles of poorly written text because you can’t fit this or that bit on the face of a slide. Or worse — you have to fill a slide because you feel a few bullets aren’t enough. No matter. Everyone hates slides. Yet everyone uses them. Do your best to tolerate them if you can’t control the content delivery mechanism. If you can dump the slides, though, a simple text email works wonders.

If you do plan to use slides or any document during a call, send the content to everyone before the call via email or post everything to a common wiki or source repository. So many meetings start with a dozen people messing around trying to get slides open or get logged into some conference system. Or just display the slides yourself on the video call, which is what most people do these days.

If you’re not displaying the slides to the group via video call then you have to be especially mindful to make sure people are following your flow. When talking through sides, remind people what slide you’re on. Communication can decrease jet quick as people hunt around a deck of 50 slides that all look the same to find where the hell the speaker is. Also, stop occasionally throughout the presentation to make sure people are on the right slide or give them time to catch up — especially if you are skipping around all over the place. Check for understanding on breaks as well. People will get lost occasionally on the call because many times there will be network issues, people will lose access to shared web spaces, their call will drop entirely, or the quality of the call will suck so bad it will force people to drop off and dial back in. The quality issues are declining for most people in rich countries but not all teams are centrally located exclusively in rich countries.

If you are listening to a speaker talking through slides and you get lost, stop and ask where they are. Yes! Interrupt! Chances are there are others on the call who are also lost if the speaker is not prompting people frequently.

Call Quality

Remember that some conference call systems deliver poor quality with impressive consistency. Also, some people may have to access the video or call via old home lines, which may further reduce quality. Not everyone has fiber to home. And then there is always a natural delay over long distance telecommunication systems that everyone has to deal with.

Always mute your microphone when you are not speaking because background noise on your end always disrupts the call for your colleagues around the world. We don’t need to hear you flush your toilet or boil water for your tea. However, please also recognize that your mute can disrupt the call when you don’t know how to unmute when you need to talk. Everyone’s waiting.

Use a good quality headset so you are always talking directly into a microphone. Alternatively, if you are using a phone, pick up the handset and hold it directly over your mouth. And please don’t use your office speaker phone because the quality on the other end for everyone else is bad. If you’re in your office, pick up the damn phone. If you are using you laptop, use a headset or get a simply USB microphone so your voice can be heard clearly.

Conference Rooms

Conference rooms kill communication for distributed teams. Remote team members are at a significant disadvantage due to cross-talk, background noise, poor quality calling systems, and the fact that the people in conference rooms always talk to each other and not directly into to the crappy speaker phones. It’s perfectly normal for remote people to dial into conference room meetings via phone or video and hear pretty much nothing but garbage for the entire hour. This is especially true for large all hands meetings when execs sit in a conference room and everyone else is remote. Those meetings many times are painful unless the people in the conference room use headsets. And if the meeting takes place at 2:00 in the morning for remote teams the experience can be infuriating. Instead, it’s best for everyone to be in individual offices using phones — the wired kind are best even in 2023 — with high-quality headsets. This is not hard.

If one person is remote and everyone else is local then using a conference room may obviously be convenient for the local team. However, realize that your remote colleague on the phone rarely has a good experience. In some cases, if the call structure is such that everyone is listening to a single speaker delivering a presentation, a conference room call with a few remote people also listening may work just fine. However, if the remote people are expected to actually participate in complex discussions along with the people in the conference room, communication will suffer because the venue is inferior.

Try phone-only conference calls for your distributed team even if the majority of the team is co-located in the core office. You’ll discover that communication across the team increases dramatically.

Language & Culture Issues

Because your organization is globally distributed, you likely have some non-native English speakers on the call. All participants should slow down the rate of their speech. This means both native English speakers and their non-native English speaking colleagues. It goes both ways. This is rarely recognized.

Slowing down may feel uncomfortable for native English speakers initially, but with practice it’s easily achievable. A simple technique is to just pause longer between sentences or pause longer between entire thoughts. In other words, breathe! Remember, some of your non-native English speaking colleagues listening over that poor quality conference call are probably doing some translating in their heads since English is their second language. Slow down to help increase understanding.

Also, native English speakers should try to not use local idioms and other specialized cultural and historical expressions since they generally don’t translate well across language and cultural barriers.

Non-Native English speakers should also slow down their rate of speech. Remember that your English-speaking colleagues listening over that very same poor quality conference call may not be used to hearing their language spoken in your accent and with your alternative and creative pronunciations. Slow down to increase understanding.

And finally, recognize that there may be an additional issue to deal with: language equality. Native English speakers should understand that although their non-native English colleagues are speaking English the depth of their English can sometimes be pretty thin. So, the communications relationship can be inherently unequal. This affects not only comprehension but also the rate at which communication can take place. There is no way around this in the short term. One thing native English speakers can do is to take some classes in the native language used by their remote colleagues and experience first hand how different life looks living in the other guy’s language. Or just try doing business in your own second language to realize the difficulties when talking with fluent speakers. Just realizing that the situation is not necessarily equal may help both sides be more flexible.

There’s more to say here, I’m sure, but that’s it for now.