communication
8 free lessons tagged communication across Business. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Running It: Airtime, Silence, and the Difficult Person
Facilitation is mostly managing who speaks and who does not. This lesson covers why the loudest voice dominates for structural reasons, techniques that redistribute airtime without confrontation, handling the person who derails, and what to do when a group agrees too easily.
Most Meetings Fail Before Anyone Speaks
A meeting is a decision about how to spend the combined attention of everyone in the room. This lesson covers the four things meetings are actually for, why mixing them fails, who should be present, and the preparation that determines whether the hour is worth what it costs.
Getting Technical Work Adopted
A correct system nobody uses has failed. This lesson covers why adoption fails for reasons unrelated to quality, writing documents senior people actually read, managing expectations set by AI hype, working with domain experts rather than around them, and building the credibility that gets you consulted early.
Explaining Uncertainty, Error, and What the Model Cannot Do
Technical work is probabilistic and stakeholders want guarantees. This lesson covers communicating error rates in terms people can act on, why the two kinds of mistake are not interchangeable, setting expectations before deployment rather than after, and saying no to a request that will not work.
Why Technical Explanations Fail
Technical people explain badly for specific, fixable reasons rather than through lack of effort. This lesson covers the curse of knowledge, why answering the question asked is often wrong, what stakeholders are really asking underneath, and the register problem that makes accuracy and clarity feel opposed.
Delivering It: The Room, the Pushback, and the Politics
A correct analysis presented badly changes nothing, and a correct analysis that threatens someone gets attacked on its method. This lesson covers reading the audience, socialising findings before the meeting, handling challenge, delivering unwelcome results, and where persuasion becomes manipulation.
Charts That Answer the Question You Asked
Chart choice is not aesthetic, it follows from the comparison you want the audience to make. This lesson maps question types to chart types, covers the encodings people read accurately, and works through the design choices that mislead, including the ones that mislead accidentally.
Start From the Decision, Not the Data
Most data presentations fail before a chart is drawn, because they are organised around what the analyst found rather than what the audience must decide. This lesson covers how to identify the actual decision, why the analysis order is the wrong presentation order, and what an audience needs to act.