I had a revelation this morning that stopped me mid-stride during my run. My business partner had been complaining, legitimately I might add, about poor follow-through on opportunities he was bringing to the table. As I dug into his concerns, I discovered something that felt less like a business insight and more like a mirror being held up to my face.
The rule crystallized in my mind with uncomfortable clarity: If you want a formal response, you must provide a formal input.
Simple, right? Almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet here I was, lobbing informal, messy, undefined requests at my team and then getting frustrated when I received informal, messy, and undefined responses back. I was expecting them to transcend my chaos, read my mind, and interpret my lazy approach to explaining what I wanted and somehow transform all that into a formal, articulate, well-crafted solution.
That sounds ridiculous when I type it out. But that’s exactly what I was doing.
The Spreadsheet Moment
My business partner illustrated the problem perfectly. He drew what looked like a spreadsheet on a piece of paper and said, “What I’m expecting is a structured response, with rows and action items identified, including the latest action engaged in and by what team member.”
That’s when it hit me. I was doing the exact same thing.
He would lob an informal note (tongue-in-cheek style, full of wit, sarcasm, and disjointed contextual references) and then expect the organization to ingest, process, and transform that request into formality with detailed follow-through. Meanwhile, I was coming up with ideas, lobbing them over the fence to the dev team, and then getting upset a few weeks later because I wasn’t getting a formal and detailed response back.
We were both guilty of the same fundamental error: expecting others to elevate our input beyond the level of effort we put into it.
Context Is Not Optional
This connects directly to something I’ve been thinking about regarding communication. We live in an age where text, email, and social media strip away tone and body language. Acronyms and shorthand don’t help. And no, putting a “J” at the end of your message does not excuse the misunderstanding.
The conversation in your head isn’t obvious to others. If they don’t understand what you’re talking about, that’s on you, not them.
Context is not difficult. It just requires a brief pause and an honest answer to three simple questions:
- What am I saying?
- Why am I saying it?
- What does the other person need to know to understand?
Put that in a paragraph. That’s it. Are you really too busy or too important to do that?
The AI Paradox
Here’s where it gets fascinating. We’re building a company that’s trying to do exactly what humans never do naturally. We want customers to input an informal request into our system, and then have that system guess the customer’s intent, diagnose what to do, and provide a formal and structured response back.
We’re trying to get AI to do what humans just never do. Humans respond like for like. If you give me unstructured data, I give you an unstructured response. It’s the natural order of communication. We mirror what we receive.
Yet we humans have this frustration with the obvious reflection of what we asked for, and now we’re trying to invent systems that will do the opposite. The AI tool we’re building will provide a structured response to an unstructured query and an unstructured response to a set of structured data.
Think about that for a moment. We’re so aware of our own communication failures that we’re engineering technology to compensate for them. We’re building a system that will do the work we’re too lazy or too rushed to do ourselves. This is the work of providing proper context, structure, and clarity.
The Mirror We Avoid
This is uncomfortable territory. It’s much easier to blame others for not understanding us than to acknowledge we didn’t give them what they needed to succeed. When someone doesn’t follow through on our vague request, we label them as incompetent rather than examining the quality of our input.
I’ve seen this pattern everywhere now that I’m looking for it. The executive who complains about poor execution while delivering strategy in scattered emails. The parent who gets frustrated when their child doesn’t understand an instruction that was never fully explained. The friend who feels ignored when their cryptic text doesn’t get the response they hoped for.
We all do it. We all expect others to carry the weight of our incomplete communication.
The Standard We Must Set
If I want my team to provide structured, detailed responses, I need to provide structured, detailed requests. If my business partner wants formal follow-through, he needs to provide formal input. This isn’t about being rigid or bureaucratic. It’s about respecting the people we’re communicating with enough to give them what they need to succeed.
The more we talk to people, the more progress we make. But that talk has to be substantive. It has to include context. It has to match the level of response we’re hoping to receive.
This is the standard: Match your input to your expected output. If you want excellence, provide excellence. If you want clarity, provide clarity. If you want detailed follow-through, provide detailed direction.
The Path Forward
I’m not suggesting we all start writing formal memos for every interaction. But I am suggesting we pause before we hit send, before we lob that idea over the fence, before we complain about the response we received.
Ask yourself: Did I provide enough context? Did I structure my request in a way that makes success possible? Am I expecting others to do the work I was unwilling to do?
The answer might be uncomfortable. It was for me. But discomfort in communication leads to growth. When we embrace the process of providing proper context and structure, we build stronger relationships, resolve conflicts more efficiently, and create an environment where people feel empowered to deliver their best work.
So the next time you’re frustrated by a poor response, look first at your input. The solution might be just one well-structured request away.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll build AI systems that help us see our own communication failures more clearly. Not to replace good communication, but to remind us what it looks like when we get it right.
