Back in high school, one of my teachers had a favorite phrase she had to use after pretty much every test when students would come to her desk to complain about their grade. Roughly translated from Dutch: “If I’d grade your intent, you’d all be straight A students”.

To be fair, that wasn’t true for everyone, but it most definitely was for most of us.

Assume positive intent

One of the first things you’ll hear when joining a company that does most of its internal communication via digital channels, like Slack or email, is the mantra “assume positive intent”. And that makes sense, because written words lack all the non-verbal queues that you’d get in an in-person conversation. And so, they can feel harsh, unfriendly or even flat-out hostile. But especially when you’re communicating with non-native speakers, that might not be their intent at all.

Most of the time, a question really is a question, not a passive-agressive statement or judgement.

“Assume positive intent” invites you to read a message in several ways, and assume the most positive possible way. It invites you to assume that the sender of said message is not angry, mad, or frustrated unless they explicitly say so. Jen McFarland wrote a series of articles about this back in 2016.

When involved in online communication, “assume positive intent” (or API for short) is a great way of not getting into unnecessary fights all the time. It’s super valuable.

The responsibility of the sender

API is aimed at the receiver of a message. It invites the recipient to assume the sender of a message meant well. But that doesn’t excuse the sender from any and all responsibilities. On the contrary. Assuming positive intent should be a fallback for when the sender fails to clearly communicate what they mean.

So, as a sender you have the responsibility to not just type a clear message, but also consider its form, and the ways it might be interpreted by the receiver. You may need to add, remove, or change words to remove ambiguity in intent. Or, sometimes adding an emoji can make all the difference.

An example

You’ve just sent your employer a report. Their response is “I’d like to see you in my office to discuss this.”. It could be that they’re not happy with the report. It could also be that they want to discuss some of your findings. Or, they’re super happy about the report and want to congratulate you. You don’t know. Using API, you’d reach the conclusion that they didn’t say you f’d up. But that does require a lot from you as receiver of the message.

Now what if your employer had said “Well done! I’d like to discuss your findings. Can you come to my office, please?”? Wouldn’t that have been much clearer, and a lot less stressful?

It’s not all about intent

Even when you mean well, you can do, say or type things that hurt others. Unlike physical pain, hurting people with words usually isn’t visible, especially when those words are received asynchronously via written communication.

Two weeks ago I wrote about a situation where, despite assumed positive intent, the result is subpar, to say the least.

I’m not innocent either. Not long ago, during an in-person conversation I was playfully joking about an event that had happened years before. When I made the joke, I did not realize at all how sensitive that topic was to them. I consider myself lucky they had the courage to confront and educate me. It gave me the opportunity to apologize and make sure that never happens again.

It’s easy enough to imagine how much worse this would have been for them, had it been in written conversation without the obvious non-verbal queues that I was saying this as friendly banter.

So even with the best intentions, we can screw up our messages. We can screw up getting our message across to the people we talk to, work with, care about, and/or love.

Stop abusing API

When a shitty message is sent, it’s completely unfair to then turn to the recipient of said message and tell them to “just use API”. We cannot abuse “assume positive intent” to cover up the fact the sender did a poor job in their communication. No, first and foremost we have to educate the sender that what they did was not OK.

We’re not all straight A students

I really meant to ace all my tests in high school. But, I oftentimes got things wrong. Despite my positive intent, I wasn’t a straight A student, because my teachers did not grade me for intent, but for the results I produced.

And I think that’s a lesson we should all remember when we’re talking about “assume positive intent” online. We do mess up. Sometimes badly. And that’s OK. We can apologize and learn. We can grow.

Good intentions oftentimes aren’t enough. It’s the result that counts most.