Everything Is Becoming Everything Else

Why the communication tools you use daily stop making sense — and what to do about it besides suffer.

I went to send a message last week and the whole thread had moved.

Not far. But it was in a channel, not a chat. I found the thread, sent the message, and thought nothing of it for approximately four hours — until someone told me they'd put an update "in Zoom," and I had to ask a genuinely stupid question:

"Zoom chat, or Zoom channels?"

A pause.

"...Zoom."

Reader, they were not being difficult. They were being accurate. It was, in fact, in Zoom. But just someplace we had never used before. A hashtag, a folder, cross posted to a Canvas, which is their new name for something like a Google Drive, including docs, sheets, and a presentation whiteboard. Which, as an annoyed aside, is really too darn close to Canva, the graphics tool that nearly all nonprofits use because it is free for us, and Canvas, the LMS used by many, many school districts and colleges. I would have pushed back hard on that particular marketing decision.

Organizations are written into being

Anyway, long before anybody said "tech stack," organizations were willed into being out of piles of paper, and the paper had rules.

The ledger made a business into an account — a thing that could be totaled. The report made it something that periodically narrates itself to outsiders. The memo, which feels as natural as a handshake, was actually engineered in the 1880s alongside vertical filing and carbon paper, so that a company could be understood and managed by someone who hadn't been in the room. That little stack of words at the top — To, From, Date, Subject — is one of the great inventions of the last two centuries, and I say that without irony. It's the great grandparent of email.

And then, if you're a certain age, you might recall a small rectangular pink While You Were Out pad. Someone's handwriting with a name and number. A checkbox for Please Call. An entire genre invented to manage the problem of a person not being at their desk.

None of these were novel or unexpected. They were tiny social contracts. Each one told you, for free and without anybody explaining it, who was allowed to write it, who had to read it, how fast, and what you owed once it landed on your desk.

Here is the part I keep coming back to: they mostly held still. A memo in 1975 worked the way a memo worked in 1925. You could train a new hire on the genre once and be done. The rubber ink stamp saying "Received" or "Filed" or "Urgent" or "Done" did not ship a quarterly update.

Love the Stack You're With

I want to be careful here, because there's a popular meme where the beleaguered nonprofit leader is buried under tools that fell on them from the sky — donated licenses, grant requirements, whatever the last good hire happened to know.

That's not my situation. We consciously picked these tools with a fair amount of feature comparisons, longevity planning, and testing. Partly on price, because I run a literacy nonprofit and we are not made of money. And, we've also sunsetting some tools when we realized they just didn't fit our needs. We keep them mostly on function: this one does the video calls well and surprisingly the phone system, that one holds the calendar, this one is where the design lives, that one tracks the projects and the donors better than anyone else we've seen or heard of. And while it sounds good to have one tool do everything, it's often more cognitively helpful to have different places for different conversations and activities.

But what's happening right now is increasingly often is the tools are growing into each other.

The video product grew a chat client, then channels, then tasks, then notes, then a whiteboard, then an assistant that writes the summary for you. The document tool grew comments that behave like messages. The design tool grew a doc. The calendar grew a to-do list. Every vendor is racing toward the same feature superset, and AI has poured gasoline on it, because the fastest way to look competitive right now is to bolt the same assistant onto every surface you own.

Which means the specific reasons we picked each tool — the differences that justified the lines I just drew — are quietly dissolving. Everything is becoming everything else.

Nobody broke the system. The ground moved.

Here's the problem. When you tell a team "project tasks go here," that instruction only works if only one place has tasks. The agreement doesn't have to be carried by anyone's memory or discipline. It's carried by the shape of the container.

So when four different tools you use grow a task list, many of which are auto-populating with AI generated data, the agreement doesn't get violated. It gets voided. There's no thing that can be done but disobey. And then the leader — hi, hehe — starts noticing dropped balls and duplicated work and, if they're not careful, starts diagnosing it as a people problem. Somebody isn't paying attention. Somebody needs a reminder. Something has to be further documented.

Somebody does not need a reminder. The process clear on the map, but the territory moved. And now, everyone is sad and discombobulated.

This is a kind of office grief, you might say, because it's disorienting in a way that ordinary problems aren't: you made a good decision and it expired without you doing anything wrong. No mistake to learn from. No villain. Just competent choices quietly aging out from underneath you, on a release schedule you don't control and were not consulted about.

The fix isn't another or different decision. It's higher awareness.

If the ground is going to keep moving, then setting the terms can't be a founding act. It has to be a practice — something with a cadence, like a budget or a fire drill.

So a few times now, at a couple of different organizations, I've done an obvious and unglamorous thing: I ask.

Not "are you happy with our tools," which produces nothing. A real survey, a communication audit, short, confidential, and built to catch drift. What I've learned about how to write one:

Ask about acts, not apps. The useful question isn't "how do you feel about Zoom." It's a grid: quick question, casual chat, FYI, request that needs a response, ongoing discussion, important decision, urgent. Down one axis, the tools, and not something abstract, like "decision making tools," but Outlook for the Desktop or the Browser, things they actually use. You are asking whether the container can honestly carry the communications you need. If it can't, the grid makes that visible to everyone at once, which is much better than you announcing it.

Ask where things actually go, not where they should. Give people the full embarrassing list of places a responsibility might live — notebook, calendar, task app, email flag, chat, doc, project system — and include the honest option: I mostly remember it. You will learn more from that one question than from a quarter of observation.

Ask what's confusing, and leave the box big. Then read those answers twice and look both for patterns and themes, and for the outliers...the odd perspective that might unlock a much better idea than anyone would tell you face to face.

End with: if you could change one thing, what would it be? People will tell you. They've been composing the answer for months.

Say out loud what it's for. Mine opens by promising it's not an evaluation of anyone's personal communication style. That sentence isn't throat-clearing. It's the whole difference between a team that answers honestly and a team that answers strategically.

And then — you have to discuss the results with the people taking the questionnaire. Don't call out anyone by name, but share what the trends, spreads, and outliers told you about how people in the group communicate with the tools they have. Offer that people disclose their personal communication preferences to each other. And, then do it again, on a cadence, and especially after any tool ships something big. The audit isn't a cure, but a way of helping adapt your interpersonal communication in the face of constant change.

The tools will keep converging. I don't think that trend reverses, and honestly, some of it is good — I like the AI assistant that writes the summary, most days.

But it means the thing we used to understand just from the color and shape of the paper, from the files of our parents and grandparents, we now have to make explicit by convention, by agreement on how we use the tools, out loud, on purpose, and then make all over again when something stops being useful and true.

The final question is whether we're willing to treat each communication type as something that expires — and whether we're willing to sit down together, on some regular and slightly tedious schedule, and clarify our expectations yet again.

I don't think anyone can do that part alone. Even with the help of Zoom.