Extract the kernel.

As I’ve served longer in an executive role, I’ve started to notice recurring communication challenges between executives and the folks they work with. The most frequent issue I see is when a literal communicator insists on engaging in the details with a less literal executive.I call the remedy, “extracting the kernel.”

For example, imagine a team is presenting about their upcoming timeline, and the CTO asks, “Can’t you just use ChatGPT to solve that instead of building a custom model?” From the...