Shared Documents Are Not Shared Understanding
Your boss emails you on Monday: "Can you send me an update on the project by Friday?"
You spend three nights building the perfect status report. Burndown charts. Bug ratios. Completion percentages. Overtime hours. Projected delivery dates with confidence intervals.
Friday arrives. You send it. Your boss replies: "Thanks, but I just wanted to know if we're still on track for April 10th."
How many times has that happened to you?
The Documentation Trap
We share a lot of documents in organisations. Requirements specs. Design docs. Project plans. Confluence pages. Notion wikis. Google Docs with seventeen people's cursors blinking at once.
We assume that sharing a document creates shared understanding. It doesn't.
A document describes what someone wants. It rarely captures why they want it, what alternatives they rejected, or what assumptions they're making that seem too obvious to state.
The 50-Page Requirements Doc
Imagine you're a developer. Someone hands you a 50-page requirements document. It's detailed. Thorough. Professionally formatted.
You read it. You build what it describes. You ship it.
And it's wrong.
Not wrong according to the document—you followed that exactly. Wrong according to what the stakeholders actually needed. The document captured the explicit requirements but missed all the context: why certain approaches were rejected, what constraints weren't written down, what "obvious" things nobody thought to mention.
The gap between what's written and what's understood is where projects go to die.
A Slack Conversation
Here's a small example of how quickly misalignment happens:
Person A: Is Dave working from home?
Person B: He is, sorry.
What does "sorry" mean here? Is Person B apologising for not knowing sooner? Apologising on Dave's behalf? Expressing sympathy that Person A needed Dave in the office?
In a chat message, the cost of misunderstanding is low. You clarify and move on.
But scale that ambiguity up to feature development. Multiply it across months of work. Now the cost of misunderstanding is enormous—wasted effort, missed deadlines, frustrated stakeholders, demoralised teams.
The Fix
The solution isn't better documents. It's shorter feedback loops.
Don't disappear for three months and emerge with a finished product. Check in constantly. Show work early and often. Ask "is this what you meant?" before you've invested too much to change course.
Before you act on any document, have a conversation about it. Five minutes of clarification can save weeks of rework.
No matter which side of the organisation you're on—whether you're writing requirements or implementing them—making sure both parties genuinely understand each other is paramount.
The document is a starting point, not a contract. Shared files are not shared understanding. Only conversation gets you there.
Sharing a document doesn't create shared understanding. Requirements specs capture what people want but miss the context: rejected alternatives, unstated assumptions, obvious-but-unwritten constraints. The fix is shorter feedback loops—check in constantly, show work early, clarify before you build. Five minutes of conversation beats fifty pages of documentation.