Seth Deegan

LinkedIn

Optimal communication

This is a page that gets updated like a wiki. It represents my thoughts at the particular time I last edited it. The thoughts expressed here may not be the thoughts I have now.

Goal

Foster a communication culture that promotes:

  • Openly sharing and permanently documenting information
  • Efficient and effective communication

Why

Human communication bottlenecks and silos are currently the #1 inhibitor to enterprise growth. Despite AI, agents, and better data integrations greatly enhancing the amount of work we are able to do, humans are still the sole bottleneck of getting things done in this company. Likewise, human communication is the very bottleneck in implementing the very innovation initiatives we are pursuing like AI and agents. If we can accelerate human communication, we can accelerate everything underneath it.

By doing the things below, we can reach a world where the AI enhancements we make will be able to perform significantly better had we not done these things. Read From Hierarchy to Intelligence for more information.

How we reach that goal

Openly sharing and permanently documenting information

Make an effort to utilize platforms that promote Public First access to internal communications, NOT private first.

  • For chats: stop asking coworkers in a Teams DM (private) whether something exists, or pitching a solution there first. Put the conversation somewhere more public when you can: Viva Engage (public) > Teams Team > Email > DM.
    • Viva Engage works because anyone can join a community that is relevant to them, and the most useful information naturally gets pushed to the top. It is an automatic usefulness feature. That is the beauty of an open forum, and why places like Reddit are so valuable.
    • Viva posts exist permanently. Teams DMs expire, which likely costs the company millions of dollars each year in lost communication. For more private matters, creating a Team should usually be your second choice after Viva because it preserves past communication and is still quicker/more convenient than email.
    • How do the best ideas in the world get shared and implemented? They get shared on the public internet. From products like ChatGPT to citations in research papers, the internet being a PUBLIC source of knowledge, not a private one, is what lets innovation spread and succeed. Without it, we would rely on word of mouth. That is painfully slow, and it is basically the system used at companies when 95% of communication happens in Teams DMs. If the public internet is the most successful idea-sharing platform, why don’t we have more of a public internet?
    • Put the tools you are vibe coding on Viva!
  • For documentation + project management: stop scattering work across SharePoint, OneNote, and other platforms. Centralize on Confluence + Jira. They are public-first tools for wiki documentation and project management: version tracked, linkable, searchable, and connected to Jira tasks and automations. Rovo also lets you quickly search across the company to see what people are working on and whether a solution already exists. Move existing documentation here when you can, and use it as your personal work notebook for maximum transparency. Write down your tasks and TODOs here so they do not get lost.
  • Make your calendar public if you can. Letting teammates see what you are working on is another small way to improve communication.

Efficient and effective communication

  • Minimize meetings.
    • Ask yourself: could this be a Viva Engage post, email, Team message, or Teams DM instead? Meetings cost real money. Hourly salary * number of people in the meeting = money the company lost that could have been spent making money. Five people in a meeting, each costing $200/hour? That is -$1000 down the drain when it could have been a -$200 email or basic Teams chat.
    • Keep the invite list small. Meetings work best with max 2-3 people.
    • Include an agenda in the meeting body. For each person invited, state why they need to be there and what they are expected to contribute. If they do not need to contribute, it could probably be an email.
    • Spend less time in meetings. With an agenda, 95% of meetings can happen in 20-30 minutes. After that, most people start getting off track anyway.
    • Block out time on your calendar to get your own work done.
  • Effectively use agents.
    • Have a question? Do not interrupt your coworkers first. Make a chatbot like ChatGPT your first stop for problem solving, then reach out to a human if needed.
    • Chatbots have replaced my Google Search usage. Make them your primary tool for finding new information instead of Google. They are incredibly effective at finding and explaining new solutions, and you can ask follow-up questions immediately.
    • Give agents the overall problem context, not just the task you want done. If you are moving data from an email to an Excel doc, explain the larger problem and why that data move matters. The agent may find a better solution than the task you originally asked for.
    • When working with agents, keep your problems open ended. Do not lead with your proposed solution. Let the agent propose one based on your constraints.
    • When vibe coding an application, it is easy to get carried away building everything you want. Focus first on the features that create the most value as soon as possible. Be honest about whether the app is just for you or for other people too. People often assume others will use their app, but if that is the goal, get others using it from day 1. It is basically a known fact in the vibe coding community that 99% of vibe-coded apps are not used by anyone else.
  • Enhance person-to-person communication.
    • When verbally communicating with people, balance speaking time between participants. Are you doing 90% of the talking? If there are two of you, you should be closer to 50%. Otherwise, the other person may get frustrated because they cannot get a word in, or they may just zone out.
    • If you are invited to a meeting without an agenda, kindly ask the organizer to provide one and explain why you are needed.
    • Stop playing telephone. If the information you need lives with someone other than the person you first contacted, ask the intermediary to create a group chat and connect you directly. Use the “Forward message” tool in Teams to bring people up to speed on chat context.
    • Be respectful and honest. Speak up when you have a better solution to a problem or know a more effective way to communicate. Do not let hierarchy suppress your opinions.

Now for the controversial part: People don’t want to give up their existing habits of communication.

Those weekly meetings with a client? Water cooler talk? Unrecorded conversations? Those are all non-optimal.

Text chats for communication first, where everything documented and organized.

And this is where most humans begin to lose and agents start to win. See agents don’t care about having that side conversation or meeting. They care about completing a goal efficiently and can be trained to do that optimally. The most successful companies are the ones leveraging agents and operating as well oiled machines – not the ones still stuck in slow meetings or trying to find conversations across their unorganized data 2 weeks ago.

Small startups or the 1 person billion dollar company: they will be the winners because they are effectively adopting and optimizing communication. It’s what the entire agentic orchestration research community is after. They work hand in hand with social scientists of the past who tried to optimize internal organization communication structures.

It’s sad to say, but humans talking to one another is not the future.