Enabling Joy, Engaging Excellence – the people and task dimensions of our project. What holds them together? Really, it’s more **about what’s keeping us in touch with ideas, with plans, with predictions, with expectations**…to put it plainly – what’s holding us together as a joy enabled, excellence engaged team. **Communication, of course**. Now you’re probably thinking, ‘of course’! but also thinking, “gee, communication is one of those big topics that is hard to get our arms around.” I agree, but here’s my approach. We are going to look at the purposes of communication – not the styles, not the scripts, not the sentences – all of which deserve attention also. I’ve found that I can classify most project communication in one of four buckets: need to learn, need to decide, need to team, need to know what’s next. I have four terms for that. Dialogue communication leads to learning. Discussions lead to decisions. Getting clear on Alignment leads to teaming. And a good drumbeat cues what’s next. Let’s take a first look at what these look and sound like.