Scope creep and remote communication are two of the biggest challenges facing distributed teams, and this episode's guest deals with both daily. Sarah DeSimone made an unusual career jump from biology to book editing to IT support at a 33-office environmental consulting firm, and she's picked up a lot along the way about what makes cross-functional communication actually work.

We talk about the gap between how IT gets looped into projects (usually last) versus how it should work, why writing everything down is the single most effective scope creep prevention tool her team uses, and how tools like Teams and AI-generated meeting transcripts help teams stay aligned across offices spread from New England to New Mexico.

Sarah also shares how her company held onto culture through COVID and the "great resignation," why face time still matters even in a highly virtual company, and her take on the third-place spaces kids and communities have lost, and why that connects to how we build trust and rapport as adults.

Her closing communication advice ties directly back to the core idea of this show: the way you understand a message is not the same as the way the person next to you understands it, and building that awareness into how you communicate changes everything.

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