"Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink." -- Martin Lomasney

In a business context, I try to route substantive communications through email (or, if internal, through systems like Slack). There's nothing like a searchable corpus to minimize ambiguity, commemorate who said what, and when, and in response to which questions.

Likewise, there's a certain kind of project counterparty who inevitably tries to drive substantive communications through phone calls -- specializing in the dreaded dozen-person multi-time-zone conference call, featuring the ever-popular ten-minute parade of welcome tones, "who just joined?", and mystery attendees. These email-avoiders are the ones for whom calls are a tacit means of trying to project power, and ambiguity is a project management feature, not a bug, bound up with their own personal risk management strategy.

You probably know the type: when asked a detailed question by email that requires a specific and accountable response, they reply "Let's set up a call. -- Sent from my iPhone".

N.B. I like iPhones just fine, but please, turn off that sig.

Yeah, especially embarrassing if you work in tech and can't be arsed to turn off the email signature ads for your hip new mail client. I really don't like that many mobile email apps do this by default now. If your email app is significantly better than mobile outlook, I'll tell people about it myself.

I get the frustration, but there are many situations where a searchable corpus of your deliberation process is a liability. This is especially true if there there are multiple stakeholders with varying positions.

That said, there is typically no intelligence behind 95% of conference calls with more than 5 parties.

Fortunately I'm not involved in anything shady that would make records of that kind a liability. Good thing, too; I've got terrible auditory memory, half the time things I hear just go poof into the ether 30 seconds later without lodging anywhere in my brain.

The ephemeral nature of a voice call is not only an advantage for questionable activities.

You can defuse a potential conflict by voice call because the medium allows airing of issues in a more candid fashion, and allows more rapid convergence onto common ground compared to text based communication.

I think that bad news is best communicated along channels that allow some kind of non-verbal perception (on a phone call largely by judging the nature and length of the silences). Face to face is best, but synchronous voice communication is a second best.

Not sure how common this is outside of the valley, but Google Hangouts and other video conferencing solutions work pretty well too. Maybe not so much Hangouts because the video quality is terrible, but it + chromebox for meetings is so much cheaper than previous solutions which required 8u of rack space for a video processor and server that it's totally worth it.

That can be a good thing! As noxious as a conference call is, a drawn out mailing list battle is far worse.

Those situations are so common at Microsoft that they put a button in Outlook specifically to mute those threads.

> Fortunately I'm not involved in anything shady that would make records of that kind a liability.

Be careful with "nothing to hide" arguments. All else aside, sometimes it's nice to voice a frustrated opinion about a person without creating a permanent record.

Note that more and more phone systems record every call.