For a long time I thought good team communication meant each person saying what they think clearly, concisely, and confidently. For the past decade, that’s what I’ve taught very smart people in Silicon Valley to do.

Then I noticed something. Those skills work when the problem has an answer. When the problem doesn’t have an answer yet, the team needs to communicate beyond presentations and succinct talking points. They need to talk it out together. And that starts with having a conversation about what kind of problem they’re facing.

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework sorts problems into four kinds. I’ve adapted it to help my clients figure out what kind of communication skills are needed for each, from giving instructions, to making a persuasive pitch, navigating a discussion where everyone sees it differently, or staying calm when the shit hits the fan. Here is what I have created:

If you look between the top and bottom rows, I’ve added a water line. Above it, the answers are already out there. All a team has to do is find them and clearly articulate the benefits and tradeoffs and then deploy. Below it, things get murky under the surface. There is no clear answer yet. The team has to work collectively and share what each person is seeing to find it and surface it. Conversations are messy because there is no fixing things and moving on. It’s meaning-making at its finest. But lots of teams get lost here, too. In any case, when teams don’t know what kind of problem they are trying to solve, that’s when confusion, burnout, and blame ensue.

Clear problems already have an answer. It lives in a policy, a process, a decision that’s been made. The team doesn’t need to figure anything out. It needs to align that this is the solution and put it into effect.

What makes clear problems tricky is that teams might not agree with the solution handed to them. They see it as a more complicated or more complex problem, and they feel like they’re being told to fit a square peg in a round hole. A product team argues about a deadline because, with the resources they have, they don’t see how it can be done. On the other hand, teams that solve clear problems day in and day out are rarely challenged, and complacency sets in. Leadership usually takes a role of command and control.

ASK YOUR TEAM: Is there one right answer we all already know? If yes, hear it, name it, put it into play, move on.

Complicated problems have a right answer, but finding it takes expertise and work. Research, data crunching, analysis. The answer is out there. The job is finding the one that fits (with a few customizations most likely). This is where presentation and discussion skills matter most.

A team is choosing between two cloud vendors. One has better AI tooling. The other saves two million dollars over three years. The engineer who modeled the costs presents a recommendation in a clear and concise presentation she delivers confidently. The team challenges her assumptions. She defends them with numbers. The team decides.

The dominant mode for all communication here is solutionizing. After years coaching presentation skills at companies like Meta, Netflix, and Airbnb, the pitfalls I see most are over-explaining, expert overconfidence, and entrenched camps. Two experts, two spreadsheets, and a team that can’t decide because both sides stopped listening. I developed three communication tools to help leaders and their teams present and talk through complicated problems more effectively:

ASK YOUR TEAM: Is there a right answer an expert could find if we gave them time? If yes, listen to the expert, analyze what they bring, and persuade each other toward the best option.

Complex problems don’t have an answer yet, and no expertise will produce one in advance. The answer only shows up after the team tries something and watches what happens. This is where team communication skills live: powerful questions, hypothesizing, listening for what’s emerging, and finding the pattern that turns into a novel solution.

For example, a robotics team puts its first autonomous machines on a live factory floor. They worked in testing. With people around them, they don’t. Nobody knows why yet, and no simulation will say. The team has to get on the floor, ask the operators what they’re seeing, try small changes, and watch until a pattern shows up. Once it does, the problem moves above the line and an expert can design for it.

Most of my clients live in complexity. They know how to solve Complicated problems. Now they want to dive into domains with no clear solution, and that takes a different kind of communication. You can’t give a 30-minute presentation laying out the answer. You explore with your team, listen to what others are seeing, and let new ideas emerge from the discussion. Trust, responsibility, and mutual agreements have to deepen for the team to work as one unit.

ASK YOUR TEAM: Will we only know what works after we try something? If yes, live in the uncertainty, take a speculative mindset, and communicate openly through messy dialogue.

Chaotic problems can’t be solved yet, because nobody knows what to do first. Maybe the team is tackling something beyond its capabilities and everyone is scared or frustrated. Maybe something ruptured: a blowup or a conflict past reason, and nobody can think straight. Or maybe, like AI governance or climate change, things are moving toward outcomes nobody wants, and nobody knows how to stop it. Companies that live in chaotic problem spaces attract curious but often reactive communicators.

On your team, it might be a missed launch that turns into two leads blaming each other. A third person goes quiet. Someone proposes a process fix and nobody hears it. It feels like there is no oxygen in the room. The failure mode is not recognizing that the team is frozen, performing, or rescuing. I’ve written about this in communicating under pressure and proposed how teams a new understanding of accountability as a feedback loop.

If you find yourself in chaos, the first move is to get some distance and regulate yourself. With perspective, you can see how you got sucked in, notice how it feels, and decide what to do next.

ASK YOUR TEAM: Are we equipped to solve this? How do we frame it so it’s less chaotic? Can we move it into Complex, Complicated, or even Clear territory, so we know what to do next?

Conclusion

Know what kind of problem you’re solving, and you’ll know how to talk about it. Here’s my hot take, since you’re asking: Clear and Complicated problems both have a fix. Somebody finds it, explains it, and the team moves. Those are the communication skills most of us were trained for. They’re the ones I’ve been teaching for the past decade.

Complex problems are different. There’s no fix to find. There’s a pattern to find, and the only way to find it is together by diving in, and trusting the people that you are with. That’s the future of work, because it’s the kind of work AI can’t do.

Final three thoughts: