Clear communication is something I think and talk about a lot. Showing people the value of clear communication and teaching them how to communicate clearly is pretty much what my business is about. So I was highly amused to find that clear communication was a recurring theme in the latest installment of a book series that I enjoy — The MurderBot Diaries by Martha Wells.
To give you some context, Murderbot, the first person narrator, is a sort of android, a person composed of organic and technological components, and it (its preferred pronoun) was programmed to be a security expert or “sec unit”. Given its nature, Murderbot finds interacting with humans to be an ongoing challenge.
In the new novella, Platform Decay, when Murderbot and its human companions are escaping bad guys through tunnels that are described as “dark clammy corridors with whispers of movement just out of sight”, it realizes that it could have done more to mitigate the strain on its charges. “I knew what the whispers were but I hadn’t been exactly communicating clearly on that.”
Since it recognizes that clearer communication would have been helpful, it tries to do better. It notes its successes, like simply saying “This way” when the humans indicate a need for restrooms and refreshment, and telling another sec unit to “get the hell out of here”, at which point the other unit “immediately changed direction…and jumped into the forest.”
Situations where simple directions were called for provided some wins for Murderbot, but more complex scenarios were still a challenge. When some bad guys are encountered, one of the humans tells it “whatever you have to do”. Murderbot, (whose violence skills are what you would expect from someone who calls themselves Murderbot) notes “I never know how to respond to things like that and my attempts at clear communication so far had been rewarded with blank or incredulous stares.”
The more emotionally complicated the communication, the harder it gets. When Murderbot tries to establish boundaries with Farai, a human companion, it manages: “‘You can’t give me orders. Or you can, but.” and then notes to the reader, “which was me trying to say she couldn’t force me to do anything.” Not exactly a crisp delivery. But what follows is quietly remarkable. In a later moment of honesty with Farai, after she says she should have trusted its judgment, Murderbot thinks, “Okay, communicate clearly and be honest.” And it does: “I was going to kill them. When you told me to do whatever I had to do, I knew you wouldn’t hate me afterward.”
Uncomfortable thing, said plainly. Connection made.
And finally, there is a particularly telling moment when Murderbot makes what it believes was a clear attempt to ask someone a question, it gets no response. It thinks: “I’d made it clear I was asking her, right?” Then it reviews the video footage of the exchange. “I sort of had. Okay, not really. The whole ‘communicate clearly’ thing is not going well.”
Haven’t we all reviewed a conversation in our heads and realized that what we said out loud bore little resemblance to what we meant?
Here’s what Murderbot kept bumping into: simple and concrete communication is actually pretty manageable. “This way.” “Get out of here.” Step one, step two, done. It’s when communication requires expressing something uncomfortable — an intention, a boundary, a feeling, a need — that we start translating our inner experience into the fewest possible words and hoping the other person fills in the rest correctly.
Which they usually don’t. Because they can’t. They don’t have access to the footage.
This is where so much workplace friction originates. Not in the step-by-step instructions, but in the moments that ask us to say something vulnerable or complicated out loud. The expectation we assumed was obvious. The boundary we hinted at rather than stated. The intention we thought we’d made clear, right up until we reviewed the tape.
Murderbot is working on it. So are the rest of us.
What’s a communication moment — at work or otherwise — where you later realized you hadn’t been as clear as you thought? Let me know in the comments!