Even with the clearest communication, perfectly aligned incentives, and great relationships it is common to come out of an interaction with different ideas of the next steps to take. I’ve realized this lately and I’m making a point of closing out every interaction with a restatement of what I believe to be the next steps for everyone involved. Without this you cannot reliably move forward and definitely cannot have accountability – if someone doesn’t know exactly what the next steps are then how can they be expected to do them?