Four axes of workplace communication: synchronous, durable, addressed, push or pull

The vocabulary of workplace communication has been shifting away from what a message says and toward where it lives and how long it lasts. That shift is worth naming, because the new words carry assumptions the old ones did not.

What to take away

The four axes

Most disputes about where something should have gone are disputes about one of these four. Someone put a decision on a broadcast, ephemeral channel and expected it to be durable and addressed. Naming the axis is quicker than arguing about the venue.

Synchronous and asynchronous

Synchronous means the parties are present at the same time. Asynchronous means they are not, and the message must carry everything needed to act on it.

The second condition is the part people forget. Asynchronous is not synchronous with a delay; it is a different genre, and it requires the context, the ask and the date in the message itself. A short asynchronous message that assumes shared context is not efficient. It is a request for a synchronous conversation with extra steps.

Durable and ephemeral

Durable means it can be found by someone who was not there. Ephemeral means it cannot, in practice, whatever the retention rules say.

A conversation can be technically retained and practically ephemeral, because nobody can find it without knowing it exists. Institutions whose whole job is keeping records readable a long time later, such as the National Archives and its plain writing program, treat clarity and durability as the same problem, and they are right to.

That is the working definition worth using. Decisions belong somewhere durable, which usually means somewhere with a title, and the decision record sets out what has to be in it.

Addressed and broadcast

Addressed means a named person owes a response. Broadcast means nobody does.

The failure is putting an ask on a broadcast channel, which was covered as an error in the nine communication errors. The newer version is subtler: broadcasting to a small group and assuming that smallness converts it into an address. It does not. Size is not the axis; naming is.

Push and pull

Push arrives whether or not the reader went looking. Pull sits somewhere and waits.

Documentation is pull. An interruption is push. Most organizations write pull material and then wonder why it was not read, or push material that should have been written once and left where people could find it. The choice belongs to the message, not to the habit.

The words that arrived with a tool

Some vocabulary describes a real distinction that existed before any tool. Synchronous and asynchronous did. Durable and ephemeral did. Others are the name of a feature, and they stop meaning anything when you change tools or talk to someone outside your organization.

The test is portable: can you explain the term to someone in another industry without naming a product? If not, it is a feature name. In a document that outlives the tool, it creates a passage no one can read in three years.

The corporate jargon guide sets out the general test: can the original be recovered?

What has not changed

The old questions survive all of this. Who is this for, what do they have to do, by when, and what happens if they do not. A message that answers those four can go almost anywhere. A message that does not will fail on every channel that has ever existed, including the ones with the best features.

Public bodies that have spent decades on this reached the same conclusion. The federal principles of plain language say nothing about channels, because the problem they address is older than any of them.

Common questions

Is asynchronous communication better?

It is better for some things and worse for others. It is better where the message can carry its own context and the reader needs time. It is worse for disagreement, for anything with feeling in it, and for problems nobody has yet managed to state clearly.

How do I decide where to put a decision?

Durable, addressed, and titled. If someone who joins next year cannot find it by searching for what it was about, it is not recorded, whatever the retention policy says.

Do these terms belong in ordinary writing?

Sparingly, and defined on first use. Most readers will follow synchronous and asynchronous; fewer will follow push and pull in this sense. The communication skills guide treats defining your terms as part of the courtesy owed to a reader.

What should I do about a term I think is a fad?

Nothing dramatic. Use it where colleagues use it, define it once in any document that will outlive the year, and avoid it in contracts. The cost of being wrong about a fad is small; the cost of an undefined term in a binding document is not.