You Hear the Song. Your Team Only Hears Tapping.

You Hear the Song. Your Team Only Hears Tapping.

Boardroom, nine people, bad coffee and a projector that refused to switch on. Before my part of the agenda, I asked the CEO to play a game with me.

"Think of a song everybody knows. Don't say it. Tap it out on the table with your fingers."

Tap. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

When he stopped, I asked him how many of the eight people around the table he thought had recognised it. He took two seconds: "Six. Well, five."

Zero.

And he shot back, eyebrows in orbit: "But it was so obvious!" Of course it was. In his head. In there the whole orchestra was playing: the lyrics, the chorus, even the singer's voice. The rest of us heard a man knocking on a table.

Two weeks earlier, that same CEO had presented the year's strategy to three hundred people. And he walked out convinced that had been obvious too.

That was the day I stopped believing my own clarity.

The experiment they should run on your first day as an executive

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton set up exactly that game for her doctoral research at Stanford. The tappers predicted that around half of their listeners would name the tune. One in forty did. And let's be honest: she ran it with students, not with executive committees. Nobody has measured this in your boardroom.

But I have run that game dozens of times in front of senior leaders. The suits change. The head doesn't.

I'm telling you this because the point isn't the anecdote, it's the mechanism. When you speak, you don't hear your words: you hear your words plus everything sitting behind them. Three years of context. Tuesday's meeting. The numbers you saw yesterday. The intention you said it with. The other person only receives the outside signal.

You're watching the film with subtitles, score and director's commentary. They're watching it with the sound off.

You don't communicate what you say. You communicate what the other person can repeat.

Why your brain always signs off a favourable report

There are three traps, and all three have names attached.

One: the illusion of transparency (Gilovich, Savitsky and Medvec, 1998). We assume our inner state shows on the outside. It doesn't. You feel emphatic inside; from the third row you look lukewarm. Conviction doesn't travel by itself — you have to build it on the surface.

Two: the curse of knowledge (Camerer, Loewenstein and Weber, 1989). Once you know something, you can no longer simulate not knowing it. It works like cooking: you serve the dish with the whole recipe in your head, but your guest only tastes what's on the plate. If the seasoning is in the recipe and not on the plate, it doesn't exist. Your strategy behaves the same way. Whatever lives in your head and not in your sentence does not exist.

Three: confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998). You remember the nods and forget the poker faces. Every board approval goes straight into the "I explained it well" column, even when they signed for seven other reasons.

Then add the hierarchy tax, for which I have no study but twenty years of rooms: the higher you sit, the more expensive it becomes for anyone to correct you.

"Come on, Agustín! My team always says yes, so I must be explaining myself brilliantly."

Or you're the one who signs the payroll.

Even physics is against you. Your own voice reaches you partly through the bone of your skull, with a free bass boost nobody else hears. You don't even hear yourself the way they hear you.

What you say, and what can be repeated back

None of those sentences is a lie. All of them are politeness. The problem is that from the outside, politeness and doubt sound exactly the same.

Five orders for your next meeting

1. Announce the title before you start tapping. First sentence: what I'm deciding, what I need from you, by when. Mechanism: your audience builds its mental map live; with no frame up front, every sentence you drop floats with nowhere to land.
2. One idea per meeting, not five interwoven. Mechanism: you think in a web and speak in single file. The listener can follow one or two threads at most; the rest falls by the roadside.
3. Translate your passwords. If a word takes three years inside the company to understand, it isn't vocabulary — it's a password. Mechanism: jargon saves you two seconds and costs your listener the whole sentence.
4. Ask for the echo, not the nod. Replace "does that make sense?" with "what are you taking away from this?". Mechanism: the first question only collects good manners; the second hands you back the signal that actually arrived.
5. Measure instead of remembering. Record yourself, count, compare. Mechanism: your memory isn't a set of minutes, it's your defence lawyer — it files the nods and loses the poker faces.

The next-24-hours exercise

Walk out of your next meeting and, within 24 hours, write down on paper the decision and the task split exactly as you believe they landed. Keep the paper.

Then message three attendees separately — separately is the operative word — with a single question: "In one sentence: what did we decide and who does what?"

Count how many of the three answers match your paper. Zero, one, two or three. That number fits on a sticky note, and it's your baseline.

If you score three, congratulations: you're the exception and this article wasn't for you. If you score zero, welcome to the club — open bar, distinguished membership. I've scored zero. In front of an audience. And I had rehearsed.

This isn't about speaking prettily

The World Economic Forum asked 803 companies which skills will grow in importance between 2023 and 2027. 53.1% named leadership and social influence; 52.3% named empathy and active listening (Future of Jobs Report 2023, reported by Statista). More than half the market betting on the same thing, and you're still trusting your own ear.

Organisations are already building the instruments. Among HR professionals who use AI in performance management, the most cited use — 57% — is helping managers give more complete, actionable feedback (SHRM, January 2024, n=2,366, reported by Statista). Translation: feedback is ceasing to depend on somebody's memory.

And here's the contrast that holds all of this together. Some people transmit and some people verify. The transmitter leaves the meeting relaxed. The verifier leaves with data. Only one of the two improves, and it isn't the relaxed one.

Clarity isn't something you feel. It's something you check.

Stop tapping

You have the room. You have the voice. You have the one question that changes everything: "What are you taking away from this?"

What you don't have — and never will — is other people's ears. That can't be guessed. It has to be asked for, measured and corrected.

Today is the best day to stop knocking on the table and start singing. Get to work, and make this a better world.

Find your communication blind spot with Mi.Coach

Dr. Agustín Rosa CEO & Founder, Mi.Coach