We treat most workplace communication as if it were transactional: I send a message, you receive it. I deliver information, you process it. Success is measured by whether the exchange occurred.
But some conversations aren’t transactions at all. They’re acts of creation.
When two people genuinely work together toward shared understanding, when they practice what I’ve called “co-responding,” something emerges between them that belongs to neither person individually. This isn’t metaphor. It’s a describable phenomenon you can learn to recognize.
What emerges
Consider what happens when you and another person truly co-respond: you’re not just expressing yourself clearly and listening carefully. You’re asking “Is this what you meant?” You’re offering “Let me see if I understand…” You’re working together, iteratively, to create mutual comprehension.
Two things accumulate in this process:
- The effort itself. This is genuinely shared labor. The questions asked, the clarifications offered, the patience extended. This work exists in the space between us; and
- The understanding that results. When we successfully co-respond, the comprehension we create isn’t just two identical thoughts in two separate minds. It’s a jointly constructed meaning. You understand what I meant, I understand what you meant, and we both know that we’ve understood each other. This knowing-together exists between us.
These two elements, the accumulated effort and the achieved understanding, form something that persists.
How precedent accumulates
This precedent-setting isn’t abstract. It has tangible effects.
Each genuine exchange establishes conditions for the next. The relational space between you becomes more capable. Communication becomes easier, faster, more nuanced. Not because either of you individually got better at communicating, but because of what you’ve established together through prior exchanges.
You see this when a brief exchange conveys what would have taken paragraphs with someone else. “The Q3 situation” means something specific between you and this colleague because you’ve established that understanding through repeated co-responding. With someone new, you’d need twenty minutes of context.
You can feel the difference. With some people, conversation flows. You pick up threads months later as if no time has passed. Complex ideas require fewer words. You’ve established precedents through genuine co-responding that make this possible.
With others, every exchange feels laborious. You’re explaining the same things the same way for the fifth time. Nothing has accumulated between you. You’ve been talking at each other, and those precedents, of not seeking confirmation, of not offering clarification, yield only transactional results.
You see erosion in real time: someone asks “So what you’re saying is…?” and you cut them off with “No, just do what I asked.” That moment establishes what’s possible next time. And the time after that.
What precedent you’re setting
Here’s what unsettles me: most of us don’t recognize that every exchange sets precedent.
Each conversation establishes what’s possible in the next one. What you do—the questions you ask, the clarifications you seek, the patience you extend—becomes part of what exists between you. What you don’t do—the questions not asked, the assumptions left unexamined, the shortcuts taken—becomes part of what exists between you too.
These precedents accumulate. They don’t reset. The world doesn’t start over each time you have a conversation. You’ve had exchanges before. You either left things well-tended or you left an impression. If you’ve had several of those, they add up to something.
We measure communication by immediate outcomes. Did they understand? Did they agree? Did they comply? These questions treat each exchange as discrete, complete, forgettable.
But if every exchange sets precedent, then there are no neutral transactions. You’re either establishing conditions that make future understanding more possible, or you’re not. The care you take matters. Not because you’re “investing” for some future return, but because what happens now shapes what’s possible next.
Most of what we call “communication” in organizational life creates no precedent worth having. It’s transactional by design. Send the email. Deliver the message. Check the box. Move on.
The irony is that the transactional approach is less efficient. Without accumulated understanding between persons, every exchange starts from zero. You’re perpetually re-establishing context, re-explaining, re-confirming.
Whereas genuine co-responding creates precedent that compounds. The tenth conversation is easier than the first. Not because either of you got better at communicating, but because of what you’ve established together.
What this asks of you
If every exchange sets precedent, then communication isn’t about your eloquence or your message or your persuasiveness.
It’s about what precedents you’re willing to establish with another person.
Which requires time you might not want to spend. Patience you might not feel you have. Genuine curiosity about what the other person means, which is impossible if you already know what they’re going to say.
It requires treating understanding as something constructed together rather than transmitted from one person to another.
Most of all, it requires recognizing that the question isn’t “Did they get my message?” but “What are we establishing together?”
Not all conversations are transactions. Some are acts of creation.
The question is: which are you practicing?
And what becomes possible, or impossible, because of it?
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photo by Tatiana P