Whose Communication is it, Anyway?

Whose Communication is it, Anyway?

You've been in this meeting. The agenda is loose, the conversation drifts, three people leave with three different ideas of what was decided, and the follow-up email two days later reveals nobody quite agrees on who is doing what. Afterward, the verdict is quick: that meeting was badly run.

Maybe it was. But that verdict hides a quieter assumption, one that costs organizations more than any single messy meeting: the belief that clarity is somebody else's job.

TL;DR: We tend to hand responsibility for clarity to whoever is leading the meeting, or to whoever holds the most status in the room. A good facilitator helps, but clarity isn't something one person can deliver to everyone else. Each of us is responsible for two things: getting our own message across, and actively managing our own understanding. When the person "in charge" isn't directing traffic, that personal ownership is what keeps the conversation from falling apart. And even when they are, it's still yours.

The default we inherit

Most of us learned communication inside hierarchies. Teachers ran the classroom. Managers ran the meeting. The person at the head of the table set the pace, and everyone else followed. So it makes sense that we walk into a room and quietly assign ownership of the conversation to the organizer, or to the most senior person present.

That default has a cost. When clarity belongs to someone else, confusion becomes someone else's problem too. We sit with a question we don't ask. We nod at an action item we don't fully understand. We assume the leader will circle back, summarize, or catch what we missed. Sometimes they do. Often they don't, because they are managing the agenda, the clock, the politics, and their own nervous system at the same time as everyone else's.

Why we all think we've been understood

Part of the problem is that our brains are not very good at judging how clear we are.

Research on what psychologists call the illusion of transparency shows that people tend to overestimate how much of their internal state others can read from the outside. We know what we mean, so it feels obvious. Related work on speakers found that people consistently overestimate how effectively they've communicated their intended meaning, even when listeners have misunderstood. In other words, the feeling of "I was clear" is not reliable evidence that you were.

The same bias runs in the other direction. As listeners, we often fill gaps with our own assumptions and walk away confident that we understood, without ever checking.

Understanding is built, not received

Here's where the neuroscience gets interesting, and where it supports the idea that communication is jointly owned.

Brain imaging studies of real storytelling have found that during successful communication, the listener's brain activity comes to mirror the speaker's, with a slight delay. The stronger that alignment, the better the listener's comprehension. And in some regions, the listener's activity actually anticipated the speaker's, which suggests listening is an active, predictive process rather than passive reception.

Linguists arrived at a similar conclusion decades earlier through the concept of grounding: mutual understanding isn't transmitted from one person to another. It is built collaboratively, through signals like questions, paraphrasing, acknowledgments, and corrections, until both parties have enough evidence that they're on the same page.

Put those together and the answer to "whose communication is it?" becomes clear. It's shared. Nobody can do the listener's half of the work for them. And a listener can't build understanding from a message the speaker never shaped.

When nobody is directing traffic

In an ideal world, the person who owns the meeting sets purpose, manages airtime, checks for understanding, and closes with clear owners and next steps. That's genuinely valuable, and I'd argue it's a core leadership skill.

But plenty of meetings don't have that. The organizer is new, or overloaded, or conflict-averse, or simply thinks the conversation is going fine. The most senior person may be the least aware of confusion, because people are least likely to show it in front of them.

This is when personal ownership matters most. You don't need a title to say, "Before we move on, can I check what we just decided?" You don't need permission to say, "I want to make sure my point landed. What did you hear?" Those moves don't undermine the facilitator. They do the job the room needs done.

A note on hierarchy and the body

It's worth being honest about why this is hard. Research on employee voice shows that people carry implicit beliefs about when it's risky to speak up to those above them, and those beliefs keep them quiet even when speaking up would help. Research on psychological safety shows that asking questions and admitting confusion depend heavily on whether people believe they'll be embarrassed or punished for it.

That's not just a cultural issue. It's physiological. Under stress, the brain shifts resources away from the prefrontal cortex, the region we rely on for working memory, flexible thinking, and precise language. When you feel exposed in a high-status room, you are literally working with less of the capacity you need to be clear or to track what's being said.

Which is why owning your clarity starts before you speak. Notice your own state. A slower exhale, feet on the floor, a moment to organize your one main point: these aren't soft extras. They protect the very capacity that clarity depends on.

Two jobs, one person

Every person in a conversation holds two responsibilities at once.

Your message. Know your point before you make it. Say it in one sentence first, then add context. And instead of asking "Does that make sense?", which almost always gets a reflexive yes, ask something that invites real evidence: "What stood out to you?" or "What would you do with this first?"

Your understanding. Treat your own comprehension as something to manage, not something that happens to you. Paraphrase what you think you heard. Ask the clarifying question you're worried is obvious; someone else is almost certainly wondering too. And before the meeting ends, confirm your part: what you're responsible for, by when, and for whom.

If you're the one leading, your job gets bigger, not smaller. Model these behaviors out loud, and make it normal for others to do the same. That's how clarity stops being one person's burden and becomes part of how the team works.

So, whose communication is it?

It's yours. Not only yours, but always yours. The person running the meeting can build a structure that makes clarity easier. They can't make you understood, and they can't understand on your behalf.

The good news is that this is a skill, and like any skill rooted in the body and brain, it can be trained. You can do this work on your own by leaning into what is actually in the room, rather than your perception of the room. But,

If you'd like help building this kind of clarity into how you and your team communicate, book a consultation. And for a deeper look at how the nervous system shapes the way we speak and listen, download The Body Leads.

References

• Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
• Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127–149). American Psychological Association.
• Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
• Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332–346.
• Keysar, B., & Henly, A. S. (2002). Speakers' overestimation of their effectiveness. Psychological Science, 13(3), 207–212.
• Stephens, G. J., Silbert, L. J., & Hasson, U. (2010). Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(32), 14425–14430.

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