To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?

One of the most important strategies for avoiding complex failures is emphasizing a preference for speaking up openly and quickly in your family, team, or organization. In other words, make it psychologically safe to be honest about a small thing before it snowballs into a larger failure. Too many of the large organizational failures I’ve studied could have been prevented if people had felt able to speak up earlier with their tentative concerns.

I once had a coworker who was also a friend. One day he walked into my office with some news. “I figured out what I’m doing wrong,” he said. "I’m so busy trying to prove to everyone I’m right that I can’t see the world from their point of view.

A mentor of mine once taught me that the best way to avoid finding the perfect solution to the wrong problem at work, when time allows is to hold two separate meetings: one to define the problem, and one to come up with the solution.

Tip: Remember that writing out the problem makes the invisible visible. Write down what you think the problem is, and then look at it the next day. If you find yourself using jargon in your description, it’s a sign that you don’t fully understand the problem. And if you don’t understand it, you shouldn’t be making a decision about it.