I definitely want to thank you for putting all of this in clear words and introducing these abstractions.
However out of my personal experience I find the advocacy of Tell-mode to be a terrible practical advice. Especially for people who haven’t yet figured out some sort of a model on these and how to interact productively with people in their environment. I suppose a lot of my younger self social hardships came from using sort of Tell/Ask way too often and utterly failing at Guess.
There are areas where people seem to use Guess almost universally. The whole flirting thing is based on slowly converging Guesses. Noticing when someone does Guess because she just doesn’t know how to respond and helping them out [or using their confusion to sway them in a direction you want] also seems an important social skill to me.
I think Tell mode should be attempted only after you grasped some minimal level of Guess [or whatever it is the norm in your environment] if at all.
Funny thing is that someone actually did.