The Communication Style That Fails in Every Business Is the One We Teach in Every Classroom

I've been a technology consultant long enough to recognize the exact moment a company starts dying. It's not a product failure. It's not a funding problem. It's the moment the team can no longer explain what they do in language their customer understands — and they don't realize it.

Last week I watched this same failure mode play out in my son's precalculus textbook, and it clicked: the communication style that kills businesses is the one we're actively training kids to accept as normal.

In every healthy workplace I've encountered, understanding is built through dialog. Not monologue. Not broadcasting. Dialog.

Notice what happened there. The engineer said something technical. The PM didn't fully understand. The engineer re-explained with context. The PM confirmed understanding and translated it further. Four exchanges, full alignment. The speaker took responsibility for being understood, not just for being technically correct.

Now look at how a textbook handles the exact same kind of information transfer:

There is no feedback loop. The textbook broadcasts once, assumes comprehension, and moves on. When the student doesn't understand, there's no "let me try again." There's just silence and a due date.

This is not how understanding works. This is how misunderstanding gets institutionalized.

I see this pattern constantly in consulting. A team works together long enough that their internal shorthand becomes invisible to them. They stop noticing that their jargon means nothing to someone outside the room. They start assuming everyone shares their context.

Then they talk to a customer. And they sound exactly like that textbook.

The product didn't change. The value didn't change. What changed is that the team forgot how to say what they do in words that mean something to the person paying for it. They drifted into their own dialect and never noticed because everyone around them speaks it too.

This is the curse of knowledge. And it's the exact same thing that makes textbooks unreadable.

The dangerous thing about communication drift is that it's gradual. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to become incomprehensible. It happens in small steps, each one feeling justified.

I call that last stage the Textbook Phase because it's identical to what I watched happen with my son's homework. The textbook was technically correct. Every symbol was precise. The math was valid. And my teenager — a smart kid who was genuinely trying — looked at it and said, "I don't even know what it's asking."

That's not a student problem. That's a communication problem. And it's the same one I see kill companies.

Here's what gets me. School is supposed to prepare kids for the professional world. But the communication model that dominates education — one-way broadcast, no feedback loop, blame the receiver for not understanding — is the exact model that fails in every professional environment.

In the real world, if your coworker doesn't understand your explanation, you try a different explanation. You use an analogy. You draw something on a whiteboard. You go back and forth until both of you are aligned. That iterative exchange is how every functional team operates.

Nobody in a healthy workplace says "I already explained it correctly, the problem is that you didn't understand." That person gets fired, or at minimum gets very honest feedback in their next review. But that's precisely how textbooks operate, and we train students to accept it as normal for twelve consecutive years.

Then those students become employees and founders and managers. And some of them carry that broadcast mentality straight into their organizations. They write documentation nobody reads. They build products nobody understands. They create onboarding processes that feel like opening a textbook to chapter seven with no context. And when people struggle, the default assumption is the same one from school: the audience isn't smart enough or didn't try hard enough.

The companies that survive are the ones that never stop asking "does the customer actually understand what we're saying?" Not "did we say it correctly?" — that's the textbook standard. But "did the person on the other end walk away with the understanding we intended?" That's a fundamentally different question, and it requires something textbooks can't do: listening.

The healthiest organizations I work with treat communication as a responsibility of the speaker, not the listener. If the customer is confused, that's a signal to change the message, not a judgment on the customer. If a new hire takes three months to understand the product, that's an onboarding problem, not a hiring problem.

And at home, I'm trying to teach my kid the same principle in reverse. When a textbook confuses you, that's information about the textbook, not information about you. The explanation is the thing that failed. Your job is to find a better one — ask questions, find different resources, have a conversation with someone who will actually go back and forth with you until it clicks.

Dialog is how understanding is built. Monologue is how confusion is distributed.