The Briefcase #63: I Thought I’d Made That Clear?

On Monday morning, you send a perfectly clear email. You know it’s perfectly clear because you wrote it, and you understood every word. It’s possibly the clearest email that’s ever been sent. No one could ever misconstrue it. You are courteous, and you don’t even mention that all of this has been explained again and again and again.

By Wednesday, nothing has happened, which is odd, because something definitely should have happened. You sent the best email ever in the history of the world, and you’ve been met with stony silence. It’s curious, to say the least.

In this week’s Briefcase, we’re following a straightforward request as it makes its way through an organisation. It is, as you might imagine, a winding road.

📎 “Please review” is doing a lot of work

Your email goes to Elliott in operations. You need his department’s expected spending for next month so you can finish the forecast for Friday’s budget meeting.

You write, “please review the attached and flag any material variances ahead of Friday’s meeting.” Perfect. Elliott runs an entire department, and presumably can handily manage an attachment.

The difficulty is that “review” covers quite a lot of territory. Are you asking him to check the arithmetic? Update the figures? Approve the budget? Convey his emotional response to the figures detailed? Compare it to the Odyssey?

The truth is that you know that column D needs updating and the estimates are acceptable. Unfortunately, you’ve kept that to yourself, sneaky scamp that you are, and Elliott is left in the dark.

You have spent the morning working on this forecast, whereas his morning has been spent chasing up unpaid invoices and scattering parts of his brain across the office. Basically, you’re having quite different experiences.

Elliott reads the attachment. What he does next is not quite what you had in mind.

🤫 The silence becomes personal

On Tuesday, you send a follow-up. “Just checking you’ve had a chance to look at this?” The sun sets, and the sun rises again.

Perhaps he’s avoiding work, or perhaps operations considers itself too important to contribute to the forecast. You briefly consider copying in his manager, which would certainly communicate something. Is it something you want to communicate?

Meanwhile, Elliott is waiting for a revised supplier quote. He thinks you want confirmed figures, and he doesn’t have them. As far as he’s concerned, he is avoiding sending you information that might turn out to be wrong. He’s actually going above and beyond. He’s actually a great guy. Bet you feel bad now.

This is an awkward feature of written communication – a lot of it is suggestive. You’re implying something, but they’re inferring something totally different. Your perfectly neutral follow-up may arrive while they’re already worrying about a deadline, and it might strike them as absurdly snippy.

Before deciding that the silence is an attack on your good nature, it might be worth finding out what is happening at the other end. However, for the purposes of this story, you don’t do that.

🤖 Make it sound more professional

You put three rough points into an AI writing tool – you need Elliott’s figures, you need them by noon on Thursday, and you need them for Friday’s meeting. Then you ask it to make the message sound more professional.

In this particular version, your request returns as an invitation to “support our ongoing forecasting activities through the timely provision of relevant departmental insights”. There is a paragraph acknowledging Elliott’s valuable contribution, and another expresses enthusiasm about continued collaboration. It’s extremely verbose, which pleases you. You send it off.

Elliott, who is busy, uses AI to summarise it. You have used AI to turn three bullet points into 400 words, and then your colleague has used AI to turn them back into three very different bullet points.

“Make it professional” is not quite the same instruction as “make it useful”, and AI isn’t going to solve that part for you.

☎️ An actual conversation occurs

Eventually, you arrange a quick call with Elliott. You are tempted to begin by reading your original email aloud, nice and slow, with emphasis on the important bits. Instead, some wild instinct takes over, and you ask what he needs before he can update the figures.

All is explained. You make an “ahhhhhh” sound for ten minutes. Basically, it’s a somewhat more useful conversation than the one you had planned for, in which you deal with poor, slow Elliott as he attempts to open the attachment.

Afterwards, you send a short email: “please update column D with your department’s expected spending for next month by noon on Thursday. Estimates are fine: flag anything still waiting on a supplier quote and note the assumptions you’ve used. We’ll use this version in Friday’s budget meeting.”

Elliott replies with one remaining question, you answer it, and on Thursday morning, the updated figures arrive.

There was nothing inherently wrong with using email. It was useful for confirming what you had agreed and giving you both something to refer back to. The call helped because it gave Elliott room to explain the obstacle, and you a chance to adjust the request.

🛠️ How to make yourself understood

Before worrying about how professional your message sounds, decide what you need it to achieve. Are you sharing information, asking for a decision or requesting something specific? Put the important point first, make any action explicit and include a realistic deadline. “At your earliest convenience” leaves rather a lot of room for interpretation.

Then read it from the recipient’s side. What do they already know, and what have you assumed they know? Technical language is useful when you share an understanding of it. When you don’t, explain what the information means for their task.

🧠 Final thoughts

If communication is breaking down, try it from a different angle. In this example, the original email wasn’t necessarily wrong, it just relied on Elliott already knowing what you meant, why it mattered, and what you wanted him to do. It’s fine for him not to know these things, even if they are incredibly obvious. It’s fine!