The better part of a decade ago, I read Brad Stone’s account of the history of Amazon, The Everything Store. I highlighted this passage, and Readwise has just served it back to me:

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.

Reading this brought back a vivid memory of walking to work along London’s South Bank and contemplating this idea. It struck me as completely misguided: close joint working seemed involve frequent, easy communication.

Re-reading it today, I understand it completely and have gained an insight into why I previously struggled with it.

These days, some areas of my work are characterised by close, organic working relationships. Each of the teams involved understands their role and that of others. Communication between the teams is relatively frequent and easy, but also specific and targeted. The parts of the team that need to communicate to move the process along do so, like a well-oiled machine. And each part of each team has a well-honed sense of when to ‘shout’, expanding the circle of communication and raising a concern that different teams need to come together to solve.

A decade ago, nearly every area of my work was like that: my frame of reference for ‘communication’ wasn’t wide enough to understand what Stone was getting at. My focus was on improving the accuracy and quality of the communications, not on reducing the overall quantity.

These days, a much larger proportion of my working week is taken up by meetings where people talk about their areas of work in the hope that someone else on the call might be doing something similar or adjacent. My email inbox is filled with ‘newsletters’ with a similar intent. This is the opposite of working in a close, organic way. This is ‘communication’ that ought to be engineered out: an organisation in which this sort of communication doesn’t need to occur would be a much more functional entity. A decade ago, I simply didn’t know that this sort of unproductive communication existed, let alone that organisation often actively promoted it.

It turns out that communication is indeed a sign of dysfunction.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.