Government Has a Communication Problem: We Write for the Process Instead of the Person

I have spent more than two decades in New York City government, much of it working with budgets, technology and procurement.

I started as an analyst. Today, as a director responsible for IT procurement and budget functions, I deal with hundreds of procurements in a typical year along with contracts, capital projects, operating budgets, vendors, consultants and executive requests.

That means a surprisingly large part of my job is actually communication.

I may spend the morning discussing technical requirements with IT staff, review a vendor quote before lunch, explain a funding problem to an executive in the afternoon and then tell a vendor why its response needs to be revised.

All four conversations might involve the same project.

They should not be the same conversation.

That is something I learned over time.

Earlier in my career, I sometimes thought good communication meant providing all the information.

Today, I think good communication means something different:

Give people the information they need to make the decision they actually have to make.

I Have Learned to Start With the Answer

Budget analysts are trained to explain numbers.

Government employees are trained to document processes.

I have been both.

That combination can produce some very long emails.

Earlier in my career, I was more likely to explain an issue chronologically.

First this happened.

Then we contacted the vendor.

Then Finance raised a question.

Then the technical team changed the requirement.

Then the vendor revised the quote.

Then we discovered another issue.

Finally, somewhere near the bottom, I would get to the point.

I’ve learned to reverse that.

If my boss needs to know that a procurement is going to be delayed, the first sentence should probably say the procurement is going to be delayed.

If I need a decision on $3 million in funding, start with the $3 million decision.

If a vendor’s revised quote increased materially, identify the increase before explaining its history.

Then give enough information to understand why.

That sounds simple.

It took me years to appreciate how much more effective it is.

My Boss Doesn’t Need to Become an IT Procurement Director

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as I’ve moved into more senior roles is that communicating upward is an exercise in editing.

I may have spent hours understanding an issue.

I may know the contract history, funding source, procurement vehicle, pricing, technical requirements, previous quotes, expiration date and every problem that occurred along the way.

My boss doesn’t necessarily need all of that.

He needs to know:

What happened?

Why does it matter?

What do you recommend?

What do you need from me?

If he wants the fourth level of detail, I should have it.

But I shouldn’t make him absorb it before he can understand the first level.

That has become one of my personal measures of whether I really understand something.

If I cannot explain a complicated procurement or budget problem to an executive in a few sentences, perhaps I don’t understand it as well as I think I do.

With My Staff, I Need a Different Level of Detail

The same issue may require an entirely different conversation with my team.

If an employee is responsible for moving the procurement, “we need this done quickly” isn’t particularly useful management.

What exactly needs to happen?

Who needs to do it?

What is outstanding?

What is the deadline?

What should be escalated to me?

What can the employee decide without me?

I’ve learned that when an employee produces something different from what I expected, my first reaction shouldn’t automatically be that the employee did it wrong.

Sometimes I didn’t communicate the assignment clearly enough.

That is an uncomfortable lesson for a manager.

I can know exactly what I mean in my own head and still fail to communicate it.

The employee doesn’t have access to my head.

Management communication isn’t successful because I said something.

It’s successful when the other person reasonably understood what I meant.

Vendors Have Taught Me to Be Very Specific

Procurement has probably sharpened my writing more than anything else in my career.

When I ask a vendor a vague question, I shouldn’t be surprised when I receive a vague answer.

If a quote changes, I don’t simply want to know why the total is different.

I want to know which line items changed.

What was the previous unit price?

What is the new unit price?

Did quantities change?

Did the support period change?

Did the SKU change?

Are we comparing the same product and service periods?

If I believe support should run from one date through another, I should say exactly that.

Precision matters because ambiguity costs time.

One unclear question can generate an incomplete response, which generates another email, which gets forwarded to someone else, which generates a meeting.

A two-sentence ambiguity can consume hours across an organization.

I’ve learned to spend another minute making the question precise.

It often saves considerably more than a minute later.

I Also Ask People to Tell Me Why Something Can’t Be Done

Another communication habit I’ve developed is questioning absolute statements.

“We can’t do that.”

“Legal won’t allow it.”

“That’s not capital eligible.”

“That contract can’t be used.”

“The vendor won’t agree.”

Maybe.

But I usually want another sentence.

Why?

Not because I assume the person is wrong.

Because the reason determines what we do next.

If something is prohibited by law, that’s one answer.

If an oversight rule requires something, that’s another.

If it’s simply how we’ve historically done it, that’s something else.

If a vendor says no because nobody actually asked them to modify the provision, that’s worth knowing too.

Throughout my career, I’ve found that some of the most useful communication begins after the word “no.”

Explain the constraint and we can determine whether another path exists.

Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves

My background in budgeting has also taught me that throwing a dollar figure into an email isn’t financial communication.

Suppose I tell an executive that a technology initiative costs $4 million.

Is that a lot?

Maybe.

How many years does it cover?

How many users?

What are we replacing?

What are we paying today?

Does the price include implementation?

Is maintenance included?

What happens after the initial term?

What happens if we do nothing?

Is there a cheaper procurement vehicle?

Can some portion legitimately be funded through capital rather than the operating budget?

Those are the questions I spend much of my professional life thinking about.

The dollar amount is data.

Explaining what the dollar amount means is analysis.

That distinction is one reason I don’t think a good budget professional is simply someone who is good with spreadsheets.

The job is translating financial information into decisions.

Sometimes My Best Email Is the One That Stops the Email Chain

Anyone who works in government knows the email chain.

It starts with a relatively simple issue.

Three people are copied.

Someone adds four more.

Another person replies only to part of the question.

Someone forwards an earlier message.

An attachment gets revised.

Another person responds to an old version.

Eventually there are 25 emails and everyone technically possesses the information, but nobody is entirely sure what the answer is.

I’ve been in plenty of those chains.

Sometimes the most valuable thing I can do as a director is stop them.

I write something along the lines of:

Here is where we are.

Here is what has been resolved.

Here is what remains open.

Here is who owns each outstanding item.

Here is the decision we need.

That may be one of the least sophisticated things I do.

It is also sometimes one of the most useful.

I Have to Fight My Own Instinct to Over-Explain

This article itself demonstrates one of my weaknesses.

I like detail.

If I’m responsible for millions of dollars in public spending, I want to know why a number changed.

If a vendor says something is required, I want to understand why.

If a contract has an unusual provision, I want to understand what it means.

If someone tells me something can’t be done, I want to understand the constraint.

That curiosity has served me well.

It can also make me verbose.

I have had to learn that transferring everything I know to someone else isn’t necessarily communication.

Sometimes it is just transferring my cognitive workload to the reader.

The higher I’ve moved in government, the more I’ve appreciated the value of being able to say:

Here is the issue. Here is my recommendation. Here is why.

And then stop.

If someone wants the backup, I have it.

My Education Reinforced This in an Unexpected Way

I have accumulated more formal education than I ever expected when I started working for the City at 23—a history degree followed over time by graduate education in public administration, business, public health and eventually a doctorate.

Those disciplines communicate differently.

History teaches you to build a narrative from evidence.

Public administration teaches you to understand institutions.

Business teaches you to frame decisions.

Public health teaches you to think about populations and evidence.

Doctoral work forces you to defend conclusions with research.

Government management requires pieces of all of them.

But none of those credentials matter very much if I can’t explain an issue clearly enough for someone to act on it.

The point of knowing more shouldn’t be making everyone else work harder to understand you.

AI Is Making This Both Better and Worse

I use artificial intelligence enough to see enormous potential for government communication.

AI can summarize a long document.

It can compare two versions of a contract.

It can organize an argument.

It can turn technical language into something an executive can understand.

It can help identify the important differences between lengthy documents.

That can save extraordinary amounts of time.

But AI can also produce five pages when three paragraphs would do.

Government already produces enough words.

We don’t need technology helping us produce unnecessary words faster.

I want AI to help me answer the same question I’ve learned to ask myself:

What does this person actually need to know?

The Best Communication Usually Ends With What Happens Next

At this stage of my career, I increasingly judge a message by whether the recipient knows what to do after reading it.

Not whether the writing sounded impressive.

Not whether every acronym was included.

Not whether I demonstrated how much work went into the issue.

Does the reader understand:

What happened?

Why does it matter?

Who owns it?

What happens next?

And, if necessary:

What decision do I need from you?

That is the communication discipline I wish I had understood better when I was a young analyst.

I still don’t always get it right.

I still write emails that are too long.

I still occasionally provide more history than somebody needed.

And I still have to remind myself that the person receiving my message hasn’t been thinking about the issue for the previous three hours the way I have.

But after more than 20 years communicating across budgets, procurement, technology and government management, I have become convinced of one thing:

Expertise isn’t demonstrated by making complicated things sound complicated.

The real skill is understanding something complicated well enough to make it clear.

Government doesn’t have a shortage of information.

We don’t even have a shortage of communication.

What we have is a shortage of people’s time and attention.

Good messaging respects both.