Tag: shared understanding

Not All Conversations Are Transactions

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:

  1. 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
  2. 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

Communication is a process by which all parties make themselves co-responsible for the creation of a shared understanding

We are a few days into the invasion of a sovereign country by another sovereign country… and the senseless deaths that ensue. I’m not one for pronouncements but if we can learn anything from history it is this: if we don’t discuss our differences, if we don’t talk, then the only alternative is violence. This is as true internationally as it is domestically. Technology has only exacerbated this fundamental human tendency. The only way to prevent violence is to learn to express one’s differences and learn to hear and understand the differences of others.

“Communication” is not about how eloquent or smart or well-spoken one is. It’s not about the clever tricks of rhetoric or the slick slide deck. My work as a consultant and a coach is to invite people (I work mostly with managers) to approach communication as

a process by which all parties make themselves co-responsible for the creation of a shared understanding.

I am responsible not only to express my ideas clearly (which requires that they be clear ideas to start with). I am also responsible to ensure that the other party has understood what I was trying to say. Conversely, it is also my responsibility to ensure that I have understood what the other party is trying to say.

This is impossible without dialogue: not only my telling you something and you telling me something, but also my asking you if I got you right and your asking me if you got me right… with the purpose of creating a shared understanding. The outcome is that we have both understood the meaning that each other is trying to convey.

People or parties talking without the express work of creating a shared understanding are at best engaging in turn-taking monologues. They are talking at each other. They are not necessarily talking to each other. There is no dialogue.

And while listening is important and one can learn to do that better, nothing replaces the premise of effective listening: a genuine interest in what the other person has to say.

If you know it all, if you’re the most experienced person in the room, if you’re the most senior person in the room, the smartest person in the room, if you think you have forgotten more about this topic than the other person will ever know then you might be far removed from having a genuine interest in what the other person has to say.

photo by Tina Hartung on Unsplash

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