SINGAPORE: In the grand chaos of workplace drama, a Reddit post has sliced through the noise with a hard truth: “It’s never the task. It’s never the deadline. It’s never the skill. It’s always the misunderstanding somewhere in the middle.”
That’s the first sticky note slapped on the problem board on r/smallbusinessowner subreddit by a small business owner who claims that most problems in the workplace aren’t about what people do, but how poorly they explain what needs doing: “The moment someone explains what they want clearly, everything becomes 10× easier.”
Call it the “Bob Phenomenon” as one commenter nailed it: “Within that 90%, 85% of the things we blame a colleague for aren’t really that they’re doing the thing wrong, but that communication failed to occur.”
Poor Bob. Always at fault for “doing it wrong,” when in truth, Bob just didn’t get a proper brief. And the real kicker was, “We get completely distracted by ‘Bob is bad at x,’ when really, Bob has no idea what you want because either you or he isn’t communicating effectively,” the commenter added.
So here, the problem isn’t laziness, incompetence, or even failed deadlines. It’s that someone mumbled instructions in a WhatsApp message or somewhere with five typos and no context… and expected telepathic results.
The commenter who manages large-scale projects also confesses that such communication breakdown is what keeps him employed, anyhow, because as he explains, “I manage big projects and at least half my job comes down to helping people not talk past one another.”
Translation: Project management is just glorified communication therapy.
The response suggests that whether you’re dealing with interns, clients, teammates or bosses, the real productivity unlock isn’t another app or workflow. It’s learning how to speak like a human who actually means what they say to another human.
So the next time your colleague messes something up, pause before ranting in your head. Ask yourself first: “Did I actually explain that clearly?” Or were you just expecting them to read your mind via an email or text message that barely made any sense?
Sometimes, the real workplace villain isn’t Bob. It’s more of a very Badly Written Brief.