Yet another Friday in the books… and another Human Prowess Letter in your hands! In a world where machines are constantly getting better at nearly every single thing, the one thing that will stay irreplaceable is human excellence itself. That is human prowess. It is a constant effort that we are striving towards, and you are reading this because you are striving for it too. Let's get into it.
This summer we have decided to run a four-letter series on communication. Communication is passed around as a buzzword, but we are using it in the sense of it being the most visible and underestimated expression of human prowess. Over the next two months and four letters of June and July, we will navigate from diagnosis to a potential solution, first analyzing what has happened to the standard, what science says about what we lose when we go strictly digital, the importance of trust, and finally what excellence looks like in practice. What lies below is Letter One, and we have dubbed this The Signal Series.
So how will you communicate?
This is framed as a question intentionally, because it already assumes the answer to a more basic one. The reality is we are always communicating, and we always will be. It is what we do as humans better than anything else we create. We can build tools that process language, and yet those tools have not learned what language is actually for. So this is not about whether you will communicate. The question is how, and the method you choose.
Here it is, clean and simple:
Excellent communication builds trust, and people will risk their potential on those they believe they can trust.
What does it mean to risk potential? Every single one of your opportunities, your investments, and your choices carries potential. With that potential comes the possibility of gain and the possibility of loss. The biggest advancements in your personal life, your professional life, and in your relationships are the ones that require someone to take a real risk on you. And of course, we want people to take risks on us. We want to prove we have the capacity and the skills to do what they need done. But if someone does not trust you, they are not going to take that risk. And if we are not communicating with excellence as the foundation that trust is built upon, we will not earn it.
A quick disclaimer before going further on what we are not saying: communication is not some golden ticket. It can really only surface what is already there. It does not take something and turn it into something it is not. It does not go from nothing to something. This will not solve character flaws or errors in your own personal craft. If there is work to be done in those areas, go do that work. Excellent communication is most effective when the substance is real, because it will build consistency and reputation. It makes what is already good and deserving of excellence legible to the people who need to see it and hear it.
So what does excellent communication actually look like?
Researchers and practitioners converge on a few core traits: clarity, so the person never has to translate you; timeliness, which signals respect; empathy, which is the ability to speak to where someone actually is rather than your own assumption; conciseness, because brevity is a form of generosity; and consistency, which is what builds a proper reputation (Mayfield and Mayfield, Leadership Quarterly, 2023).
These are simple, not easy, and are often referred to as soft skills. We would push back on that. A review of fifty years of leadership communication research across 260 studies and multiple disciplines found that how a leader communicates directly shapes how they are perceived, determines whether they are selected for more senior roles, and influences how their followers perform (Mayfield and Mayfield, Leadership Quarterly, 2023). This research is about as close to a verdict as social science can get. How you communicate determines whether people believe in your capacity before they have ever seen the evidence of it, and it directly implicates how they perform and act around you.
A completely separate body of workplace research found that leaders who communicate with clarity and intention are able to boost team productivity by up to 72 percent (Pathwise, 2026). When people understand their priorities, they are no longer wasting time seeking clarification, avoiding duplicated effort, and they are able to make faster decisions. When communication is ineffective, those costs accumulate silently every single day. Research by Gartner places poor communication as responsible for 70 percent of corporate errors, citing the lack of clear and structured messaging as the driver of misunderstandings and operational inefficiencies (Gartner, cited in Kapable, 2026).
Now let us get into the nitty-gritty. In person communication will always beat over the phone, and over the phone will always beat texting through a screen.
For those familiar with communication research, there is a famous statistic that 93 percent of communication is nonverbal. There is some truth behind that number, but the truth is more interesting than the number itself. In 1967, psychologist Albert Mehrabian ran two studies focused specifically on how people communicate emotional attitude, the feeling behind a message, not just what is being said. What he found was that when the verbal and nonverbal signals in a message conflict with one another, people automatically trust facial expression and tone of voice far more than the words themselves, weighting facial expression at 55 percent, tone of voice at 38 percent, and the actual words at just 7 percent (Mehrabian and Ferris, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1967, Vol. 31, No. 3, 248 to 252; Mehrabian and Wiener, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1967, Vol. 6, No. 1, 109 to 114). It is important to note that these findings applied specifically to the communication of feelings and attitudes, not to all communication. But that is exactly what makes it important for our purposes. Most of the communication that actually matters, the conversation where a decision gets made, the moment where someone decides to trust you, that communication is rarely purely informational. It is emotional. It is relational. And when the emotional channel is removed, as it is every time you replace a conversation with a text or a meeting with an email, you are communicating with a fraction of your full instrument. In person contact builds trust in ways that digital communication simply cannot replicate (Jarvenpaa and Leidner, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 1998).
This creates significant tension for us, because to communicate in person means spending time, and time is the only resource any of us have 100 percent control over. Every single thing in life wants it. Your work, your people, your own recovery and rest. It is no secret that AI can now do in seconds what used to take an hour. It can respond to your emails, script presentations, draft proposals, and handle your digital communication entirely. There is value in that. We use these tools. We are, in fact, heavy adopters. This very newsletter benefits from research that would have taken days, done in hours.
But there is a cost that does not show up in this efficiency calculation, and it is directly why these letters will remain handwritten for the rest of time. Nearly every person writing a newsletter today will tell you that you have to use AI to streamline your writing process. Human Prowess is taking a different stance.
A 2024 systematic review in Smart Learning Environments found that over-reliance on AI dialogue systems can actually impair critical thinking, decision-making, and analytical ability (George and Wooden, 2023). Scholars call this cognitive offloading. When the tool does the thinking, the person loses the muscle they used to do it. A separate study synthesizing evidence across twenty peer-reviewed papers found that while AI writing tools improve efficiency, there is a consistent reduction in creativity and independent thinking across the literature (Deep and Chen, 2025, cited in ScienceDirect, 2026). Real communication is where you get the reps, whether it is digital, written, or in person. So the question is not about whether you should use the tools. It is really about which hills you will die on. Which conversations are worth your full instrument? Which relationships and moments deserve a phone call over an email, or to be had in person? Which moments call for the handwritten note instead of the typed reply? These choices compound over months and years, and they are what build a reputation that can earn a risk.
Here is the exchange as it actually stands, and we promise we are close to the bottom, so stick with us.
You can have lower quality communication at higher output. Let AI script the presentation, respond to the inbox, draft the proposal. Fast and scalable.
Or you can sacrifice your time to get the reps in. Craft the email with intention. Show up to the room. Write the handwritten note. Sit in the discomfort of a line not landing the way you wanted it to, and figure out why. This is slower and harder, but it compounds.
The best thing is that every time you communicate, at work, at home, on the go, you have the power to make that choice. Excellence is not given. It is sought after and earned. It is built in the moments where you are intentionally acting in a way that cultivates your relationships and your reputation.
Three things you can do this week:
One: Before your next significant conversation, decide whether the medium matches the moment. If the answer is no, upgrade it and use your full instrument.
Two: Pick one piece of written communication this week and spend twice as long on it, and be twice as intentional as you normally would. See what changes.
Three: Sit down and critically evaluate how you would like to be perceived. As the pendulum swings back away from artificial intelligence in relationships, being intentional is what people will notice.
This letter does not reach you by accident. Human Prowess is a private newsletter growing the way good things do, hand to hand, between people who are serious about the work. If someone came to mind while you were reading, the kind of person who would value this the way you do, send it their way. Some things are better passed hand to hand.
See you in two weeks.
Jaron and Graham
From the minds we pulled from:
Mehrabian, A., and Ferris, S. R. (1967). Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 31(3), 248 to 252.
Mehrabian, A., and Wiener, M. (1967). Decoding of Inconsistent Communications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 6(1), 109 to 114.
Mayfield, J., and Mayfield, M. (2023). Fifty Years of Research on Leader Communication: What We Know and Where We Are Going. Leadership Quarterly. ScienceDirect.
Jarvenpaa, S. L., and Leidner, D. E. (1998). Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3(4).
George, A. S., and Wooden, O. (2023). Managing the AI Takeover: Over-Reliance on AI Dialogue Systems and Its Effects on Cognitive Abilities. Smart Learning Environments, 11(28). Springer Open.
Deep, S., and Chen, C. (2025). Pedagogical Benefits and Challenges of AI-Assisted Writing Tools. Cited in ScienceDirect, 2026.
Gartner Research. Poor Communication and Corporate Errors. Cited in Kapable Leadership Communication Statistics, 2026.
Vinh Giang. Communication and the Power of the Pause. Stage Academy and public keynote work, multiple platforms.