Organizations that make team communication work really well don’t try to make every message count.

But they set aside a space and behaviors for communication that really matters.

Take Amazon: not every message is or was a 5-page memo. Not everything would be prepared over weeks, then read in silence at the start of a meeting. But things that really mattered, were. That discipline of planning and focused reading and productive discussion — it elevated communication from the usual noisy mush to something tuned and tight, a shared practice that shared real understanding.

Take military leader Helmuth von Moltke, a similar example. He’d brief his officers with terse texts, each line just long enough to capture a direction and a reason for that direction.

He trained his team to interpret texts like these consistently, and later to write in the same way to brief their own teams. Presumably much other communication was less focused, but the special culture around these written briefings made them work.

Now we have many more words to read and hear each day. We can’t possibly take them all in deeply. But by starting habits where certain types of information get special treatment, we can keep the quality of communication high where it counts.