Repeat back.
It’s called the Fast Food Rule because it’s what they do at the drive-thru window: They repeat your order back to you to make sure they heard it right.
It’s a vital rule for every single knowledge worker (and, I might argue, every single person in modern times). We all do a crap-ton of communicating all day long. We do jaw-droppingly little verification that the messages we send are the messages that were received. And so much gets lost in translation.
If you’re worried you’ll sound stupid or that you’ll waste people’s time by clarifying and verifying, think about it this way: You might end up seeming much stupider or wasting much more of their time when what you heard doesn’t match what they said. Maybe you’ll go off and build them the wrong thing, or buy the wrong thing, or deliver the wrong message, or so on, or so on.
Just like fast food, it’s cheap. Repeat back.
