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More direct communication

It turns out to be the right deci­sion, because in just a few min­utes, you’ve sort­ed every­thing out, come to a clear under­stand­ing, decid­ed how to move for­ward, and set­tled the mat­ter. You hang up and go back to your dili­gent work as usual.

But at a meet­ing a few days lat­er, it becomes clear that your con­clu­sion went unno­ticed by all your oth­er col­leagues, as they are not on the same page at all. I believe it! They weren’t part of your phone call.

Doc­u­men­ta­tion among others

If you have a reg­u­lar chan­nel where every­thing hap­pens and it func­tions as a doc­u­men­ta­tion of what you do, also doc­u­ment essen­tial mat­ters dis­cussed in oth­er forums (such as phone calls, phys­i­cal meet­ings with­out min­utes, and infor­mal ​“cof­fee machine” con­ver­sa­tions) in the reg­u­lar channel.

My good friend Tom Airaksi­nen (who brought this phe­nom­e­non to my atten­tion) told me that after such ​“pick up the phone” calls, he usu­al­ly writes a sum­ma­ry in the reg­u­lar chan­nel, some­thing like ​“For those who weren’t part of our con­ver­sa­tion; this is what we concluded:”.

If it’s not a chat chan­nel that serves as the doc­u­men­ta­tion base, per­haps you have anoth­er doc­u­ment with­in the work group where every­thing impor­tant is not­ed, like a logbook?

Do this

Do you rec­og­nize the sit­u­a­tion I’ve described here? Maybe you’ve also expe­ri­enced some­thing like this caus­ing trou­ble for you? Then think about where the best place would be to note the impor­tant things from a cru­cial con­ver­sa­tion in your col­lab­o­ra­tion forum.

At the next suit­able meet­ing, sug­gest to those you work with that you doc­u­ment the essen­tial things more than before so that any­one can eas­i­ly check what has been said and what applies when the need arises.

Few­er misunderstandings

If you doc­u­ment oral agree­ments and out­comes of con­ver­sa­tions where all dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion is already doc­u­ment­ed, all par­tic­i­pants will have an eas­i­er time keep­ing up with what applies and what has hap­pened. There will be few­er mis­un­der­stand­ings than usu­al, which will save you time and mon­ey, not to men­tion frustration.

What do you do?

Have you solved this prob­lem dif­fer­ent­ly? Let me know!

(Do you have lots of dig­i­tal doc­u­ments to keep track of? Try mak­ing a map of your dig­i­tal doc­u­ments!)