It’s easy to believe that just because people look close to each other on a Powerpoint slide, they’re setup to collaborate with each other. Real life is more complex than slideware.

When people can identify themselves in all their interactions with each other, it reflects a high psychological safety. But just like a failing test can be invaluable in coding, you need the test of “anonymous contributions allowed” to test if your psychological safety is indeed as high as you’d like it to be.

As team size increases, communication becomes more complex. Small teams will eventually bring in new people. Such is life. Team size aside, you’ll find that complex decisions lend themselves better to the written word. Moreover, there are limits to what people can remember, so it makes sense to commit things to writing. If we’re designing continuously, we’re also communicating about it all the time. In today’s post, I want to share three asynchronous techniques to communicate about design.