This week a computer science friend of mine shared one of the many versions of the highly entertaining video of a dad trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, from entirely written (no diagram) instructions from each of his two children. If you haven’t seen this video yet, please take the time to watch it first.

Now, my computer science friend shared this video in the context of the value of good user stories. But really, the lesson applies across so many modalities. I was writing two-page long emails of instructions (statistical thought process plus what code I was asking to be written) at work today, documenting the needs and walking through my thought process. The whole time I had this video in mind, wondering if I was helping my email recipient at all. So I made sure to end my email acknowledging that this was a suboptimal communication method, and that I was happy to discuss.

For other things where this type of documentation isn’t needed, when there isn’t even any point in writing such an email in the first place, that’s where in person or video communication can come in handy. Imagine if the son and daughter in that video had been allowed to video themselves making the sandwich – in which case it could have been a child with a whole different verbal language than the adult, and it wouldn’t have made much difference. The visualization process was that important to the outcome of building the sandwich.

So whether it’s building a sandwich, building a good user story, building a green house, or building an educational estate flow summary document, make sure the communication modality being used is a good one for the job. To paraphrase, educate at all times; when necessary, use words.