The CTO’s Communication Breakdown

You're not having a conversation with your CEO. You're having a conversation with your story about your CEO.

I’m sitting in my living room. It’s Tuesday afternoon. My coach is on speakerphone. My wife and I haven’t spoken properly in three days.

“Tell me what happened,” she says.

I launch into it. The dishwasher. How loading it became World War III. How a simple conversation about whether glasses go on the top or bottom rack escalated into us retreating to separate corners of the house. I explain my position. It’s logical. It’s efficient. It’s right.

“And how did your wife respond?” my coach asks.

I pause. I don’t actually remember what she said. I remember how wrong she was. How she dismissed my approach. How she made me feel like I was being controlling when I was just trying to be helpful.

“Etienne,” my coach interrupts my spiral. “What if I told you that your ability to communicate with your wife has nothing to do with the dishwasher?”

I’m confused. We literally just fought about the dishwasher.

“What if,” she continues, “your communication is breaking down because of how you think she views you? And what if—stay with me—what if none of that story you’re constructing about what she thinks is actually true?”

The room tilts slightly.

She lets the silence sit before continuing. “Daniel Kahneman has this concept: what you see is all there is. Your brain builds the most coherent story it can from the information available. But that story isn’t reality. It’s just your System 1 thinking, making sense of incomplete data.”

I’m still processing when she lands the punch: “What if this isn’t a relationship problem at all? What if it’s just a communication challenge?”

When the C-Suite Speaks Different Languages

Three months later, I’m in an executive meeting. Our VP of Sales is frustrated. Our CMO looks confused. And I’m sitting there, technically correct, wondering why no one seems to understand what I’m saying.

I’ve just explained why we can’t ship the feature they want by Q1. I’ve laid out the technical constraints, the architectural implications, the testing requirements. It’s airtight. It’s logical. It’s right.

The CEO sighs. “Can we just get a rough estimate?”

And suddenly I’m back in my living room, fighting about the dishwasher.

According to research by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 86% of corporate executives cite ineffective communication as the primary reason for workplace failures. Not bad strategy. Not lack of resources. Communication. 49% of director-level executives report that miscommunications happen frequently or very frequently at work.

But I wonder how many of those executives recognize that they’re not dealing with relationship problems. They’re dealing with communication challenges wrapped in assumptions about how others view them.

The Geek-Speak Trap

Paul Glen and Maria McManus wrote The Geek Leader’s Handbook as a collaboration between a geek and a non-geek. Their research reveals something fascinating about technical leaders: we fundamentally experience time differently than our non-technical colleagues.

“For geeks, the future is looming,” they write. “For non-geeks, the future is promising.”

Think about that. When I hear “Q1 deadline,” I see all the technical landmines between now and then. Each one feels immediate, urgent, looming. My non-technical colleagues hear the same deadline and imagine possibilities, opportunities, promises.

Glen and McManus also discovered why technical people hate giving estimates: “Very often geeks refuse to answer these questions because they don’t want to lie. To give an estimate is to say something you don’t know absolutely to be true, and therefore it is to tell a lie.”

When my CEO asks for a rough estimate, she’s asking for a conversation starter. When I refuse because I can’t be precise, I think I’m being honest. She thinks I’m being difficult.

We’re not having a disagreement. We’re having two entirely different experiences of the same conversation.

What You See Isn’t All There Is

Remember my coach’s question about my wife? The same principle applies in the C-suite.

Daniel Kahneman describes “What You See Is All There Is” (WYSIATI) as one of our most powerful cognitive biases. Our brains construct coherent stories from whatever information is available, treating that limited data as if it were the complete picture.

When my CEO pushes back on my timeline, my brain constructs a story: “She doesn’t trust my technical judgment. She doesn’t value the engineering team. She thinks we’re just making excuses.”

But Kahneman’s research shows that these stories we construct are fiction. Compelling fiction. Convincing fiction. But fiction nonetheless. As he writes, “You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it.”

The problem? I’m not having a conversation with my CEO.

I’m having a conversation with my story about my CEO.

The Real Culprit Behind C-Suite Chaos

Research from Gartner found that poor communication is responsible for 70% of corporate errors. Not technical problems. Not market conditions. Communication.

But when you dig into the data, something becomes clear: most communication breakdowns aren’t about the words being said. They’re about the assumptions beneath them.

Technical people, Glen and McManus found, have “very finely tuned unfairness detectors.” When we feel slighted, underappreciated, or undervalued, our response is immediate and visceral. But sometimes what we’re detecting isn’t actually unfairness, it’s miscommunication that we’re interpreting through the lens of how we think others view us.

A study of self-awareness reveals something sobering: 95% of people believe they are self-aware, but only 10-15% actually are. Most of us are walking around convinced we understand how we come across to others, when in reality we’re operating from a fundamentally flawed model.

This is the invisible crisis in C-suites everywhere. Directors and middle managers, the people most responsible for translating between technical and non-technical worlds, report the highest rates of miscommunication. The very people who need to bridge these gaps are drowning in them.

Three Symptoms of Communication Cancer

You know you’re infected with communication breakdown when:

The Interpretation Spiral: Someone says something neutral, and you immediately know what they “really mean.” Your colleague says “interesting approach” and you hear “that’s stupid.” Your CEO asks “how long will this take?” and you hear “you’re too slow.”

The Defensive Reflex: Questions feel like attacks. Requests for estimates feel like traps. Conversations about timelines feel like interrogations. You find yourself saying “as I already explained” more than once a week.

The Translation Tax: You spend more energy trying to figure out what someone meant than engaging with what they actually said. After every meeting, you need a meeting to decipher what happened in the meeting.

These aren’t relationship problems. These are communication problems disguised as relationship problems.

Getting Back to Clean Communication

My coach’s advice about my marriage transformed how I operate in the C-suite. She said: “Stop trying to figure out what your wife thinks of you. Just communicate clearly about the actual problem.”

Radical, right?

Start with Assumptions on the Table: Before your next executive meeting, try this: “I’m going to share my recommendation, but first I want to name my assumption. I’m assuming you want this feature because of customer feedback, not because of competitive pressure. Am I right?”

Watch what happens when you externalize your assumptions instead of letting them drive your interpretation of the conversation.

Use the “Help Me Understand” Protocol: When someone says something that triggers your WYSIATI story-building, pause. Say: “Help me understand what you’re optimizing for here.” Not “Why are you pushing back on my timeline?” Not “Don’t you trust my judgment?” Just: “Help me understand.”

You’re not asking them to defend themselves. You’re asking them to share information your brain doesn’t have access to.

As a side note, I’ve seen a-types weaponize the “Help me understand” phrase so be sparing with its use.

Separate Facts from Stories: Practice distinguishing between what actually happened and the story you’re telling about what happened. “The CEO asked for a rough estimate” is a fact. “The CEO doesn’t trust my technical judgment” is a story.

Glen and McManus found that geeks communicate in facts while non-geeks communicate in stories. Neither is wrong. But knowing which you’re doing matters.

Create Communication Contracts: Explicitly agree on what different types of communication mean. In my organization, we now distinguish between “rough estimate” (30% confidence, order of magnitude), “estimate” (70% confidence, +/- 25%), and “commitment” (90% confidence, deliver or explain). Before this, every request for timeline felt like a trap.

Check Your Self-Awareness: Record yourself in an executive meeting (with permission). Watch it later. Not to critique yourself, but to notice: Do you actually sound the way you think you sound? Are people reacting to what you said, or to how you said it?

Remember: only 10-15% of people are actually self-aware, even though 95% think they are. You probably aren’t in that 10-15%. Neither am I.

The Dishwasher Revelation

Six months after that coaching call, my wife and I were loading the dishwasher. I caught myself about to “explain” the right way to do it.

Then I stopped. “Hey, I’m realizing I have opinions about this, but I’m not actually sure what you’re optimizing for. Are you optimizing for speed, water efficiency, or fitting the maximum number of dishes?”

She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. Then she laughed. “I’m just trying to get the dishes clean so we can eat dinner. I don’t care about any of that other stuff.”

All those fights. All that tension. All because I was having a conversation with my story about her story about me, instead of just asking what she actually wanted.

The C-suite is no different.

When your CEO asks for a timeline, she’s not attacking your competence. When your VP of Sales pushes back on your technical constraints, he’s not dismissing your expertise. When your CMO seems confused by your explanation, she’s not being willfully ignorant.

They’re just speaking a different language than you are. And you’re both constructing stories about what the other person means, based on incomplete information, filtered through how you think they view you.

Most of what we experience as relational problems are just communication challenges. The question is: are you ready to treat them as such?

Because here’s what happens when you do: those 44% of projects that fail due to miscommunication? They ship. That $420,000 per year your company loses to communication breakdown? It gets reinvested. That stress, that friction, that sense that no one understands you? It dissolves.

Not because you became a better communicator. But because you stopped communicating with stories and started communicating with people.

The dishwasher doesn’t care how you load it. Your C-suite doesn’t care about being right. They care about building something together.

Stop fighting about the dishwasher. Start asking what success looks like.

Everything else is just noise from the story you’re telling yourself.