[HN Gopher] Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
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Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
Author : tagolli
Score : 280 points
Date : 2022-01-29 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| jonmc12 wrote:
| As another example, Amazon teams communicate product launch
| requirements via a future press releases including a FAQ (per
| description in the book "Working Backwards"). Its a communication
| intended for the masses with a built-in disambiguation addendum.
|
| Our natural languages uses incremental inquiry to disambiguate
| context as opposed to using strong protocol. In "Working
| Backwards", it's the communicator's job to solicit questions from
| co-workers via pain-staking detailed reviews in meetings ("Bezos
| scrutinizes every single sentence"). I think of it like
| constructing a representative survey of ambiguity, and then
| putting answers in the FAQ that help increase clarity. The more
| detailed and representative your survey, the more helpful your
| questions/answers will be to communicate nuance.
|
| With regard to disambiguating through protocol, Organizations
| evolve jargon to increment protocol, which probably increases
| semantic alignment somewhat as group size scales. If you read
| about the history of language, the Rebus principle created
| protocols of formal alphabets; protocols like grammar gave us
| formal writing rules. Protocols like TCPIP let our computers
| talk. Protocol creates more rigid commitments for communication,
| but also increases potential semantic alignment. As a thought
| experiment, if we learned to dynamically and deliberately develop
| jargons en masse, it might create the channels to disambiguate
| context and communicate nuance at scale.
| andersonmvd wrote:
| Look at how many details this guy (Carl Sagan) conveyed in his
| 15' speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI in a way
| that potentially everyone understood. I wonder if every
| explanation was like his, if nuance wouldn't be well
| communicated, even to large groups.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Napoleon was said to favor a tactic wherein he would bring in a
| lowly lieutenant to hear his orders, and repeat them back in
| their own words.
|
| If the lieutenant could figure it out, then Napoleon could relay
| orders to his generals (who would in turn send orders to their
| subordinates and so on) with confidence that the meaning would
| not be lost on the battlefield.
| hinkley wrote:
| > A number of companies I know of have put velocity &
| reliability/safety/etc. into their values and it's failed every
| time.
|
| I have a 'slow is fast' mantra and it's definitely something that
| a lot of people misunderstand, willfully or otherwise.
|
| I've often shrugged it off as the fact that going fast is
| exhilarating, while the effort of 'making the change easy' starts
| to sound dangerously like discipline. Perhaps I've downplayed the
| fact that A->B can sound an awful lot like A & B.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| This is a really great thread and really resonated with my
| personal journey, although at a smaller scale. I've transitioned
| within a large enterprise from leading a deep & broad engineering
| team with about 50 people to a vertically integrated
| ops/technology team with about 800 people.
|
| The "work" is challenging, but the communications is much harder
| than I expected. It's difficult to actually say anything at all
| because nobody will perceive what you say the same way, and then
| the telephone game with amplify whatever insecurities or worries
| that folks have.
|
| The hard part about flipping from "move fast and break things" to
| more order is knowing when the right time is to transition. The
| other hard part is that the official "communications" functions
| live in a different vertical, and getting them involved often
| makes things worse. So we get stuck getting engineers and interns
| to communicate with people.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| While I won't disagree with the argument, I think the conclusion
| is flawed. If one must focus on velocity, and reliability is in
| opposition to velocity, then _how much_ should one focus on one
| versus the other? It is not well defined, but that is ok. Since
| we are speaking to humans, not robots, reliability is not
| therefore completely disregarded--it becomes implicit, and
| deprioritized, but it is obviously still present to some lesser
| degree.
|
| A good counterexample to the article would be Amazon's success
| with its leadership principles--much has been written about this,
| and I feel no need to repeat it here--or JFK's speech urging
| America to the moon, in which he spent significant time
| discussing the tradeoffs and sacrifices required to pursue the
| lunar landing, and in the end did not unilaterally decide to
| pursue the mission so much as he proposed a conversation about it
| and asked Americans to discuss the nuances and decide together.
| Nuance is possible at scale; it is a sad sign of the times that
| some now believe it is no longer possible.
|
| If you haven't listened to JFK's speech, I strongly urge you to
| take a listen, and compare his measured, collegial tone to the
| tone of our politicians today.
|
| https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1961...
| loteck wrote:
| If Dan is right (and I think he is), have a stiff drink nearby
| and then think about how his point applies to something
| complicated that is life and death, such as conveying information
| to the public about a rampant virus.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| To me it was eye-opening to see just how bad people were at
| _understanding_ what they were told in the clear, simplified
| language of public statements regarding COVID.
|
| I don't just mean "lay people", I mean the relatively well-
| educated HN crowd and even some medical professionals
| misunderstood what was said. Across the entire group, literally
| every part of what was publicly said by government agencies was
| misinterpreted in some way and turned into an argument.
|
| For example, the "We don't recommend the general public wear
| masks at this time" was consistently misinterpreted to mean
| "Masks don't work", which is not what was said at all. The more
| _nuanced_ and complex statement has too many parts to it, and
| just like Dan Luu said, the second you have an AND or an OR,
| (or IF, THEN, BUT, etc...) people will just blank and see some
| random subset of the logical statement.
|
| The full nuanced statement was: "The CURRENT scientific
| evidence that is available does not support (OR deny!) that
| mask wearing by (specifically) the general public is (cost)
| effective enough to legally mandate. ALSO, at THIS TIME there
| is insufficient supply of masks, AND UNTIL supply can be
| increased the masks should be prioritised for health workers
| (that are trained to wear them properly)."
|
| (This of course implies that once evidence is available to
| support the efficacy of public mask wearing AND the supply
| problems are solved, the recommendation may change.)
|
| Something like 50% of the people listening to that
| misunderstood it. And then when the recommendation changed,
| they _lost their minds_. "I don't even know what to believe
| any more! They keep saying different things!" was a common
| response.
|
| People got especially confused by the "current scientific
| evidence does not support", because to them that sounds like
| "scientists say it doesn't work". That's not what that says _at
| all_ , it's just a statement to say that not enough studies
| have been done at all to say anything one way or another
| confidently.
|
| This kind of precise speech as heard from scientists is
| ironically _less_ effective than simpler but technically
| incorrect statements!
|
| For developers: One issue I've had with Agile techniques is
| that that same people that just can't wrap their heads around
| government agencies changing their recommendations to fit the
| changing scenarios of an unfolding event like a pandemic also
| work in large enterprises and are unable to comprehend a plan
| changing. Ever. Not even once. Everything has to be known
| ahead, forever, and be set in stone and never change in any
| way. It's "just too confusing", a sentence I've heard verbatim
| more than once.
| csours wrote:
| Among other things, we are suffering from a "righteousness"
| arms race - whatever opinion or tendency we have, we have to
| find a righteous and moral reason for that feeling, because
| someone will find a moral reason for the opposite view.
|
| Speaking down from a moral high ground obviously does not
| motivate everyone to do what we want, but it does motivate
| everyone ... a) it makes those who agree feel good for
| following the agreed rules b) it makes those who disagree feel
| like their human experience is invalid and motivates them to
| find a counter argument that feels just as strong (I HAVE to
| fight to protect my RIGHTS)
|
| Obviously this is not the only thing that's going on. Every
| crisis is someone's opportunity.
| ggm wrote:
| In the IT industry this scenario is fantastically common:
|
| _Here is a proposal. It has this HUGE upside and this SMALL
| downside_
|
| response: _because of this HUGE downside, and the TINY upside, I
| reject this proposal_
|
| If they said "what if the upside wasn't as big as you stated but
| the downside is larger than you stated" at least you could
| discuss the evidence. But people love to leap on problems and
| devils-advocate them into the ground.
|
| You see this all the time in IETF mailing lists. I'm not talking
| about nit-picking during working group last call on a standard,
| thats justified. People who simply want to be contrarian, take a
| devils-advocate stance, leap on any stated downside and on the
| premise its the proof, destroy the original idea, irrespective of
| the relative merits pro and con.
|
| So, "we should move to Postgres because of its support of IPv6
| and JSON" dies on "but the sheer amount of code we have in MySQL
| makes this untenable" -which is not a good argument, given the
| budget and willingness to incur the cost. It doesn't address the
| upsides of the move at all. Or "but we don't know all the places
| which use the old SQL forms" which is true, but presupposes we
| couldn't handle case-by-case the legacy calls into the old SQL
| binding, or find some way to uncover them.
|
| The negative case arguments used, typically are shorthand for "I
| don't want to think about this"
| funstuff007 wrote:
| IIRC Jonn Kerry's campaign for President was plagued by too much
| nuance in both his and the campaign's communications.
|
| And the Romney critique as the "flipping Mormon" can also be seen
| as a rejection of nuance.
| cjsplat wrote:
| I don't think nuance was the issue for Romney and the
| "flipping" issue.
|
| Romney was a pretty successful Governor of a liberal state. He
| needed to appeal to nationwide Republicans in the primary so he
| slid a lot further to the right. Then he was up against a
| reasonably popular Democratic president, so he slid back to the
| middle.
|
| The only nuance was that he tried to muddy the sloshing to make
| it look like he wasn't changing his positions.
| orzig wrote:
| I don't disagree, but an important distinction relative to the
| OP is that political communication is in an overtly adversarial
| environment. It's a whole other ballgame.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I suspect "overtly adversarial environment" applies to a
| large chunk of all communication. Perhaps even most. People
| will willfully interpret any communication to suit their own
| agendas.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think maybe you mean misinterpret? Or maybe we need a new
| word: disinterpret.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I think interpret was accurate already. I will definitely
| interpret something differently from someone else without
| either of us necessarily being guilty of active
| perversion.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Then you're "interpreting differently" = misinterpret.
| Everyone interprets everything to understand it at all
| but you misinterpret it when you understand it
| differently than intended. And maybe you disinterpret
| when you do so intentionally.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Incorrect.
| funstuff007 wrote:
| yes, but the scale of the audience size is similar.
| indymike wrote:
| > Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
|
| "Nuanced communication usually doesn't work." seems more
| accurate. Being precise and clear is hard.
| oblio wrote:
| I imagine you mean concise and clear?
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Slightly easier to read:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1487228574608211969.html
| dqpb wrote:
| This is why markets are an effective protocol for multi-agent
| coordination.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| It doesn't work as a series of tweets, either.
| steelstraw wrote:
| Does that explain the level of nuance around public health
| policy?
|
| Covid policy for example. Some countries take into account
| natural immunity (more nuance). Others don't and simply require
| everyone to be vaccinated regardless (less nuance). Some
| recommend or even require kids to get the Covid vaccine (less
| nuance - everyone take it), other countries recommend against
| (more nuance - some should, some shouldn't). They all have access
| to the same data. Is this simply reflective of a different
| approach in communication? Or a different level of confidence or
| respect for the population to grok nuance?
| tapas73 wrote:
| It extends to other policies as well
| harryf wrote:
| We live in an attention economy, both outside and inside
| companies. The rules that apply to B2C marketing largely apply
| inside companies as well.
|
| Despite that we still have people that assume "I sent an email
| and I'm important therefore everyone got the message". Try
| running those emails through some tool like Mailchimp and you'll
| probably find less than 40% even opened the email, let alone read
| beyond the first paragraph.
|
| I've done a lot of organising events for engineers inside
| companies where there are like 500+ engineers. You need email,
| slack, calendar invites and more to get people paying attention.
| And often they're paying more attention to LinkedIn than what's
| happening on the "inside" ... you can run campaigns on LinkedIn
| that target your own people...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > "I sent an email and I'm important therefore everyone got the
| message"
|
| I see a similar flaw in programmers. "I said it once, and
| therefore everyone has it memorized", as if people are
| computers who store every utterance in a file system.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I met someone who did that all the time. Turns out it was a
| learned behavior from having gotten pushed aside for coming
| across as too nit-picky one too many times. They turned in to
| the kind of person that would let other people make mistakes
| and just watch - and believe it or not, it worked for them!
| In their environment, that was a bad lesson well-learned.
| alar44 wrote:
| There is some merit to that approach though. For example, I
| moved IT support requests from a messaging system to an
| actual ticketing system. The number of requests actually
| dropped because if they aren't getting help instantly
| they'll actually try something rather than just giving up
| immediately and calling IT. Many many issues just went away
| because if you have to wait a bit all the braindead "click
| the button" or "turn on your monitor" issues go away.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Au contraire, academia has worked out how to reliably communicate
| at scale: publishing peer-reviewed articles in journals.
| qznc wrote:
| Are you talking about the academia where everybody complains
| that people only read the abstracts?
| jpeloquin wrote:
| The use of 7-9 year training periods (5 years PhD + 2-4 years
| postdoc) means a journal article's author and their scientific
| readership have a lot of shared knowledge and culture, which
| probably increases the reliability of communication. I agree
| that pre-publication feedback from peers also helps.
| ford wrote:
| This kind of doublespeak/mixed messaging with nuanced private
| conversations but dead-simple (or worse, spun) public statements
| is a double-edged sword.
|
| Sure it makes sure that the x% of employees who don't get the
| nuance won't ask questions about it, but it prevents ambitious
| employees from learning how decisions are made at higher levels.
|
| Understanding how the organization makes decisions can help you
| make decisions in your day-to-day work. Not to mention the fact
| that if you one day have aspirations of leading an organization,
| you need to understand how decisions are made. When over-
| generalized public statements are made, it not only conceals this
| information but corrupts it and can lead people to false
| understandings of how things are done.
|
| Some of the best insight I've gotten about why my organization
| and my company makes the decisions it does have come from reading
| discussions from senior leaders in google doc comments. I wish I
| could be a fly on the wall for live meetings or private
| conversations.
|
| In the optimal company, employees who don't want to have to grok
| the nuance would be able to trust the decisions of the leads.
| However all decisions should be made in the open so that those
| who do want to go to the effort of understanding something can
| learn.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Small groups ensure some state between us, so we can communicate
| at higher levels (or sometimes wronger ones).
| Graffur wrote:
| Twitter threads are really awful to read through and, in this
| case, funny since it is a thread about communication.
|
| Nothing really useful in the thread but the conclusion caught my
| attention: "Azure has, of course, also lapped Google on
| enterprise features & sales and is a solid #2 in cloud despite
| starting with infrastructure that was a decade behind Google's,
| technically."
|
| This didn't happen because of any communication strategy from VPs
| to developers. It happened because MS is an enterprise company
| with a strong brand.
| bfung wrote:
| I wish I found this post before commenting in other threads on HN
| last night.
| Animats wrote:
| This is an observation that goes back to at least Cicero.[1]
|
| Cicero on the primary goal of oratory:
|
| _" As, therefore, the two principal qualities required in an
| Orator, are to be neat and clear in stating the nature of his
| subject, and warm and forcible in moving the passions; and as he
| who fires and inflames his audience, will always effect more than
| he who can barely inform and amuse them..."_
|
| Cicero describes the problem the OP reports:
|
| _" But let us return to Calvus whom we have just mentioned,--an
| Orator who had received more literary improvements than Curio,
| and had a more accurate and delicate manner of speaking, which he
| conducted with great taste and elegance; but, (by being too
| minute and nice a critic upon himself,) while he was labouring to
| correct and refine his language, he suffered all the force and
| spirit of it to evaporate. In short, it was so exquisitely
| polished, as to charm the eye of every skilful observer; but it
| was little noticed by the common people in a crowded Forum, which
| is the proper theatre of Eloquence."_
|
| Nuanced communication not working at scale, 2100 years ago.
|
| [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9776/pg9776-images.html
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| That's an interesting quotation, but it doesn't sound like the
| problem with Curio's was too much nuance. If anything, very
| plain (albeit clear) speech has a lack of nuance.
| csours wrote:
| This is very distressing to me. When I try to communicate using
| examples or analogies, people often get stuck on a particular
| example and try to solve that example.
|
| Communication is very hard.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Perceiving a risk is not in and of itself a reason to warn or
| talk about it, whether at scale, 1-on-1, or anything in between
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| I'd say,
|
| 1. Communicate intent.
|
| 2. Explain why.
|
| 3. Do not use more than 3 bullet points.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It seems "group communication can't be nuanced" doesn't capture
| the situation he's describing at Azure. My hunch would be
| management saw reliability levels as a given, something that
| daily orders wouldn't change whereas velocity was something that
| daily order could change.
|
| But just as much, this is a Microsoft division. That company has
| historically won by having more features sooner than competitors
| with the problem of the whole thing being a mess being a
| secondary consideration. Sure, in this case, the risk is they'll
| push so hard the whole thing blows up - but that doesn't mean you
| don't push as hard as possible because it's at least perceived
| that if you don't that, whether you blow-up or not won't matter
| (see the concept of technical debt, etc).
| solatic wrote:
| Of course, the real skill is in delivering a simplified message.
| "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add,
| but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-
| Exupery
|
| When you appreciate the nuance, how do you decide what to strip
| away?
| dehrmann wrote:
| Reminds me of politics. Try having a nuanced public policy
| discussion. What's especially bad about that is it makes people
| identify more strongly with their respective sides and double
| down on more extremest ideas.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I think 'communicate' is the wrong word when you address large
| group of people. You can't meaningfully communicate in that case.
|
| You just produce content and the people are just consuming the
| content in whatevre way they please. Large percentage of people
| won't consume it in the way you wish.
|
| Because of the disconnect what you want is way less important fir
| the result than what they want.
| boulos wrote:
| Multiple people are pointing out that posting this thread on
| Twitter is probably a mistake and can't figure out why he would
| do it: Dan (currently) works at Twitter.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| This is something that I'm learning to appreciate. My recent HN
| traffic spike (Woe of WebSocket) had many people missing the
| point.
|
| I'm preparing to launch my SaaS, and I'm wondering do I start
| with the fun and cheeky marketing "Hey, this was designed for
| board games, but you can use it for so much more" OR do I pair
| with "Infrastructure designed for JamStack" (which is a bit of a
| lie).
|
| I've started writing the Amazon style press release and FAQ to
| help me, but I'm excited to start the train on selling a crazy
| new platform.
| emptybottle wrote:
| "Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale" _proceeds
| to write a lengthy nuanced post about it_
| loteck wrote:
| Ironically, this criticism is addressed as a nuance in his
| post.
| jollybean wrote:
| We need to talk more about this.
|
| That said, Organizations with professionals should be able to do
| nuance, at least a bit of it.
|
| But the general public at large ... you're dealing with 'lowest
| common denominator' which is 'issues with literacy' and harder to
| grasp - very limited, care, attention span, and may not even be
| listening to the message - and may be getting misinformation from
| elsewhere.
|
| Communicating clearly is a skill.
|
| A lot of marketing people I believe have missed the message on
| this, every day I come across a new product and can't really
| understand what it does, the value proposition, who it's for,
| etc.. while at the same time there's tons of arbitrary marketing
| verbiage. Words matter.
| akomtu wrote:
| The approach used by most famous religious books (bhagavadgita,
| etc.) is statements with many layers of meanings. For example,
| such a book might say "do to others what you want others do to
| yourself" and a well-meaning simpleton gets only the surface
| level meaning, while a more advanced reader sees the more
| profound meaning, which might've offended simpletons. So
| everyone gets exactly as much as useful for them. Metaphors are
| used for the same reason.
| sdoering wrote:
| Looking back, I work(ed) in a lot of environments where
| leadership tried to be nuanced. Or at least tried to communicate
| two or three equally important things.
|
| Thinking about the outcomes of these with this explanation in
| mind does explain a lot.
|
| Just not sure if this is a case of Confirmation Bias or a
| genuinely helpful way of looking at corporate communications.
|
| Probably need more examples/data to better understand if he is on
| to something.
|
| Nonetheless do I think it is a good framework as clearly
| communicating one thing and dropping the nuances would probably
| increase the likelihood that the content is being parsed as
| intended.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| logicalmonster wrote:
| I don't want to get political here, but strictly speaking on
| communication, Donald Trump was one of the best political
| communicators in recent history for the ideas he wanted to
| emphasize to a large audience.
|
| He kept his concepts very simple, he didn't use complex
| language that might confuse or alienate his audience, he used
| funny and memorable nicknames to keep your attention, he kept
| things visual with a lot of props and showmanship, and his key
| slogans like "build the wall" let people visualize any outcome
| they wanted. A bad communicator who tried to use nuance with
| the immigration stuff might have said something like "We're
| going to deploy a network of physical barriers in denser urban
| areas and utilize digital surveillance and personnel in more
| rural areas to reduce illegal immigration along the border."
| Technically more accurate, but that doesn't paint the same kind
| of mental picture that can easily be conveyed by "build the
| wall" in a speech or debate.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| The fact that there was (and is) such a market for these
| over-simplified ideas, though, has implications beyond Trump
| himself. I can think of a few (not mutually exclusive)
| possibilities:
|
| * People have always wanted politics to be conveyed in this
| way, but previous politicians either didn't have the skills
| or the desire to pander to that style of messaging.
|
| * People's capacity for processing nuance has been saturated
| by all the complexity of modern life, or by our decreasing
| attention spans (which is perhaps caused by a culture of
| instant gratification and companies mass-producing engines
| which turn dopamine into ad revenue).
|
| * People still have capacity for nuance generally, but don't
| think it is worth investing that capacity on something like
| politics, either due to the feeling that current problems are
| too hard to solve, or that the system doesn't reflect their
| interests anyway.
|
| * Political polarization and the game theory of plurality
| voting means that politics has devolved into two tribes that
| see everything as a zero-sum game, so applying nuance is seen
| as a dangerous weakness.
|
| Personally I can't help thinking that the thesis of Future
| Shock[0] seems to match the reality around us quite well.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
| quacked wrote:
| I tend to ignore "official news" and got most of my Donald
| Trump speeches as highlights and clips filtered through my
| largely left-wing circle of friends and family. From what I
| saw, he was a complete buffoon.
|
| Then one day my fiancee's father was watching a long-form
| "debate" or something that included Trump. I was astonished
| at how personable and clear his communication style was, and
| understood why so many people were so taken by his campaign's
| ideas and rhetoric.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| No yeah, I agree. I was just joking around since DT is a
| master of large scale nuance-free communication
| mcguire wrote:
| In other words, he didn't attempt nuance.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Jokes aside it's not that nuance doesn't work at scale. It's
| that many people whose experience is mainly with short-range
| communication fail to realize or underappreciate that you need
| different techniques to communicate nuance from a large
| distance than they are accustomed to using up close. Think
| about painting.
| chubot wrote:
| Another analogy is drumming: When you're in a small room, you
| can play many notes, e.g. detail on the hi-hat, snare,
| whatever.
|
| In a large room with big speakers, that's all lost and you're
| basically a backbeat ...
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Really I was expecting a Goebbels reference by now.
|
| Sadly, "Well, we're all human, and humans are complicated"
| doesn't propagate. "Kill the $X" does.
|
| Just look at recent memes. It's terrifying. They defy even
| logic, yet they work.
|
| I wonder if "propaganda" and "propagate" have similar word
| roots.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Why "wonder" when you could just look it up? When people are
| so intellectually lazy these days, it's no "wonder" that
| nuances get lost! (Though maybe you were just going for a
| joke. Poe's law is a bitch, y'know.)
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Fine, sometimes I can be bothered to go to Wikipedia:
|
| > Propaganda is a modern Latin word, ablative singular
| feminine of the gerundive form of propagare, meaning 'to
| spread' or 'to propagate', thus propaganda means for that
| which is to be propagated.[4] Originally this word derived
| from a new administrative body of the Catholic Church
| (congregation) created in 1622 as part of the Counter-
| Reformation, called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide
| (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), or informally
| simply Propaganda.[3][5] Its activity was aimed at
| "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic
| countries.[3]
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
|
| Behold the cognate is true.
| MereInterest wrote:
| This is why there must be separate private and public
| conversations. A comment that is appropriate for exploring
| nuances in a small group is inappropriate for wider communication
| to a large audience. Social media's blurring between small group
| conversations and publicly broadcasted conversations removes this
| distinction.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Dan Luu is right that public messaging -- and company-wide
| internal messaging -- tends to be bone simple and incomplete.
|
| What's interesting is that the nuances don't completely fade out
| of site. They exist in quiet and sometimes quite intricate
| underground conversations. I've joined organizations where it was
| howlingly clear that the official messaging was not the way the
| company really ran.
|
| That invites the question of whether it's worth staying long
| enough (and being bold enough) to get drawn into the nuanced
| underground dialogue, too. Sometimes yes. Sometimes that's quite
| exciting and makes the job more interesting and more durable.
|
| Other times, it's just too hard to wiggle into that circle. Or
| that circle has its own evasions and power struggles. In those
| cases, it's easier to meet the basic formal requirements of the
| job, enjoy the extra time to have a rich life outside of work --
| and think hard about what kind of next job would be better.
| lostdog wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. The VPs might be messaging
| "speed" company wide, but what are the saying to their direct
| reports? Do the directors hear a more nuanced message that
| balances reliability, and then try to implement a reasonable
| balance within their teams, or does the entire division single-
| track on speed and forget about everything else?
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| ...or just stay there since real life happens outside of work
| and you've found a place where you've been able to make room
| for that
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small
| part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes
| glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just
| skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance
| communications can be the following.
|
| * Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you
| want to convey.
|
| * Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graphic
| design (bolding one key sentence or whatever).
|
| * Break up a giant nuanced email into sections.
|
| * If something is critical, make it visual: a picture, explainer
| video, or an infographic can be really useful for something key.
|
| This is harder than it looks. A quote attributed to Mark Twain is
| "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long
| one instead." It's a lot easier to go overboard than to distill
| what needs to be conveyed into the core elements.
| Groxx wrote:
| And your very first line of text should say _who it is for_ ,
| and _why they should care_.
|
| Help your readers triage. They already get too many emails.
| hirundo wrote:
| I've frequently seen bullet points being treated exactly the
| way the author describes AND being treated: A reader will seize
| on a particular bullet and treat it in isolation, as if the
| other points didn't exist, nuance shredded. They're still
| useful but unmagical.
| civilized wrote:
| I wouldn't dream of sending an email of more than a few
| sentences without breaking into sections. In longer messages I
| will also use highlighter to emphasize 1-3 key sentences and
| move supporting details to an appendix, footnotes, or links.
|
| But there are some people you can't get through to, no matter
| what.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| I started to follow this approach [1] 5 years ago and it is
| amazing how much clearer my own thoughts in communication have
| become.
|
| 1. Subjects with keywords. The subject clearly states the
| purpose of the email, and specifically, what you want them to
| do with your note. Keywords: ACTION, SIGN, INFO, DECISION,
| REQUEST, COORD
|
| 2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Lead your emails with a short,
| staccato statement that declares the purpose of the email and
| action required. The BLUF should quickly answer the five W's:
| who, what, where, when, and why. An effective BLUF distills the
| most important information for the reader.
|
| 3. Be economical. Short emails are more effective than long
| ones, so try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient
| doesn't have to scroll. Use active voice, so it's clear who is
| doing the action. If an email requires more explanation, you
| should list background information after the BLUF as bullet
| points so that recipients can quickly grasp your message. Link
| to attachments rather than attaching files. This will likely
| provide the most recent version of a file. Also, the site will
| verify that the recipient has the right security credentials to
| see the file, and you don't inadvertently send a file to
| someone who isn't permitted to view it.
|
| ===
|
| [1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-
| pre...
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Appropriately, this doesn't address the essence of the tweets.
| With two goals, people will use one as an excuse for the other.
| They're receiving the communication. Lists and graphics won't
| change that.
| pas wrote:
| Isn't OKRs and other systems supposed to solve this?
|
| Don't communicate weightless, measureless, abstract fluff.
| Give clear goals, a utility function to combine them,
| deadlines or other time incentives (discounting or bonuses
| for being early), gather feedback, align with personal
| affinity, break down responsibility between groups (SREs,
| infra and platform teams provide the reliability, others
| build on that).
|
| Set budgets and fix the constraints, draw up the solution
| space and let the people work.
|
| It's not a mystery.
| paviva wrote:
| The quote is from Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue
| que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus
| courte", "I made this one [the letter] longer, since I didn't
| have the leisure to make it shorter".
| karaterobot wrote:
| In the spirit of generosity, I'll assume that was a very sly
| joke, and not an ironic misunderstanding of the point of the
| comment and the original post. Nice, I see what you did
| there!
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't think it's a joke, it's a correction of
| attribution. The quote seems to have been attributed to a
| lot of people, but earliest mention of similar message is
| indeed from Blaise Pascal, see
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
| slavik81 wrote:
| Quote Investigator is a gem. There's another page[1] on a
| similar quote:
|
| > If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two
| weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes
| me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires
| no preparation at all. I am ready now.
|
| ~ Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in _The Operative Miller 23_
|
| [1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/01/short-
| speech/
| [deleted]
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| That was not an example of dropping nuance.
| mcguire wrote:
| How much do you want to bet most people will read your first
| bullet point, ignore the rest, and drop all the nuance?
|
| Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an
| email. The first one is the only one to get answered.
| soneca wrote:
| I agree, but I don't think is necessarily the "first" bullet
| point or question that gets attention. It's the one the
| reader cares most (positively or negatively), or it's easier
| to understand/answer.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| This is so often said, and so _bloody ridiculous_ a state of
| affairs for the _information technology industry_.
|
| How hard would it be to have a shared todo list where the
| team can put every blocking question which needs answering,
| and everyone who needs to answer can either do that or
| delegate the decision or approve skipping it? (And I don't
| mean a sluggish Jira / Electron / Teams / helpdesk which
| needs 50,000 fields entered to raise a ticket, either).
|
| I suspect it isn't done because nobody can usefully make all
| the decisions which other people want to push off onto other
| people, it would take inhuman amounts of time and attention.
| And that part of the reason "answering only the first
| question" happens is to drop most questions on the floor,
| with the idea that important ones will be raised again, as a
| way to filter out the huge number of unimportant questions.
| And as a way to deal with the fact that answering one
| question can change all subsequent questions - if the answer
| is "that's waiting on finance approval" then it might be
| about to have a budget cut, or be cancelled, or be delayed
| until a new financial year, and answering other questions is
| a waste of time.
|
| Still, for when the other questions are needed, it should be
| something computer people, programmers, IT specialists, can
| have machines keep track of without absolutely awful
| interfaces - and maybe involving automated email and replies
| if needed, like forum posts and newsgroups have had for
| decades.
| lazide wrote:
| You can't solve a lack of executive function/decision
| making capacity (which is what we're referring to) by
| making more work/queuing up bullshit work. It will result
| in everyone just ignoring anything that smells like coming
| from such a system.
|
| Since (almost) no one wants to admit they don't have enough
| decision making capacity or can't prioritize using it for
| whatever you're asking (at least now a days it seems, since
| someone will post them saying they don't care on social
| media and they'll get fired), you will often see defacto
| rate limiting or pushback in other ways.
|
| Common ways you'll see in real life:
|
| - only responding to the one item they want to respond to.
|
| - ever increasing delays in responses or 'missed emails'
| (when you try again they'll respond)
|
| - half responses which don't actually address the problem
| or answer your question (but are easy to generate).
|
| - redirection to another - hard to reach - authority even
| if not appropriate (as they aren't spending the time to
| figure out what your actual question is)
|
| - straw manning your question/request as something else
| they already have an answer to and then answering that.
|
| - adding your question/request to a backlog they aren't
| responsible for and then ignoring it forever since it's now
| 'on the list'
|
| - making up increasingly more complicated
| paperwork/procedure hoops with increasingly less pleasant
| user experiences
|
| And many more. For non-decision making backlogs/overloads,
| there are also the
|
| - 'decades long queue' method of shedding load like the old
| eastern bloc (and some healthcare systems)
|
| - 'you need a permit' (but there is no actual perform form)
|
| -'we only work during (impossible hours here)' etc.
|
| It all boils down to they can't care enough to get you want
| you want, so you either have to make them care (which will
| be met with generally well earned hostility), or find a way
| to get them to care (which may be impossible). In many
| countries, getting someone to care requires a bribe.
| XorNot wrote:
| You've sort of hit on the missing interface in both email
| and (in my experience) pull requests: I need a system to
| keep track of the list of things I want to send, but keep
| it private to me so as it's dealt with by the other party,
| the next item goes out.
|
| (for PRs its the joy of having a sequence of dependent
| changes, and needing to make sure people review them step
| by step even though the whole packet is done).
| evouga wrote:
| I'm rapidly approaching the "email singularity" where it
| would take me more time to answer one email than the average
| time between incoming emails.
|
| If I receive an email and it's something I can quickly answer
| on my phone while waiting for the bus etc., I'll do so and
| you'll get a quick answer. If the email requires me to sit
| down and compose a long response (or worse, read a paper, or
| find and run some code) the email gets put on a priority
| queue to deal with during dedicated email-answering time.
|
| If I receive an email with multiple questions, and one of
| them I can answer quickly, I might fire off a partial answer
| (under the theory that a partial answer now is preferable to
| a complete answer much later).
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > ...read your first bullet point, ignore the rest, and drop
| all the nuance?
|
| Oh hell yes, this is definitely a thing with lots of people.
| It's one of those WTF realizations that everyone who works in
| a corporate environment gets slapped in the face with really
| hard.
|
| There are certain people for which you MUST give 1, maybe 2
| sentences at a maximum, address them by name, AND, make sure
| that they're the only person in the "to:" field. Anything
| different and you risk ghosting or first-thing-only response.
|
| If there's other folks in the cc who I know may actually read
| for context, I will add a '"*** details ***"' separator after
| a few blank lines and then write up normal paragraphs. I know
| the "details" stuff will get ignored by the target, but
| that's OK. It's just there for reference and for others who
| may chime in.
| dheera wrote:
| Also I auto-filter bcc'ed e-mails and if your e-mail has a
| tracking pixel in it (e.g. from Superhuman or some such),
| it will get deprioritized because I don't believe in
| privacy invasion attempts. (Also, your tracking pixel will
| be blocked so it won't work anyway.)
| nathanwh wrote:
| I'm not trying to out myself as an unnuanced consumer of
| communication, but I literally did just that reading the
| parent comment. I wonder what is the percentage of the HN
| audience that did that
| 88913527 wrote:
| It's easier to consider this question with empathy: imagine
| times where you replied to emails partially, answering some
| (one), but not all questions. Ask yourself why you did a
| partial reply. Then, when you ask questions of others, apply
| those learnings.
|
| For me, I tend to 'jump' to the first answer that comes to
| mind, without reading the full nuance, likely because I'm
| optimizing at replying sooner, so I can move onto the next
| task, because I have many tasks I need to do. I quickly
| pattern match and move on.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| imagine times where you replied to emails partially
|
| It will be hard for someone that always replies to the
| first thing only to empathize with this but: This has
| literally never happened to me. As in, I have never replied
| partially to something in an email. You _will_ get an
| answer to each of your items. Granted, you may not get the
| answer you were looking for but I will answer each and
| every one, even if it 's just a "I will have to look into
| this one and get back to you" so that the other 6 items can
| get answered right away.
|
| Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not
| the other way around?
| 88913527 wrote:
| I don't think this is practically much different then
| answering one thing. If you give one answer and 3 "I'll
| get back to you on that"'s-- this creates a promise of a
| future asynchronous answer, which is only as good as your
| word. People often have too many tasks, so to get those
| remaining items on your queue, they'll have to ask you
| again.
|
| As the recipient, it's more challenging to receive the
| future promise of an answer with no SLA.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| I would be to differ. To me, there is a large difference
| between just ignoring 6 out of 7 questions I asked you or
| you telling me that you do not know the answer right now
| but will get back to me.
|
| I agree that if there's no explicitly stated SLA and no
| implicit SLA given the relationship history between the
| two of us (e.g. I might know you're usually going to get
| back to me within 24 hours on such items), then this is
| practically the same.
|
| I do not operate under such circumstances though. If I
| tell you that I will get back to you, then I will get
| back to you within a reasonable time frame and you will
| know from our previous interactions that I'm good for it
| in most cases and that it's totally OK for you to ask
| again after a day because I might have forgotten. I'm not
| perfect.
|
| Since this was an example answer only, it is also
| possible that for one of your 7 questions the answer will
| simply be that I cannot get that answer to you within any
| reasonable amount of time at this point because of other
| priorities I have and that you should find someone else
| or I might point you towards someone else. In any case,
| you will have all of your 7 points answered. I won't just
| ignore them.
| gkop wrote:
| What's the opportunity cost of your thoroughness?
| dirtside wrote:
| A major factor in this is a lack of willingness to take the
| time to understand something, possibly rooted in a meta-
| failure: not understanding that _it takes time to understand
| things_! There 's various motivating forces that impel us to
| race along to the next thing instead of taking a little bit
| to absorb something, think about it, or discuss it.
| evancox100 wrote:
| If you put a list of bulleted, single-sentence questions and
| clearly state at the top something like "please answer the
| below questions" you will get your answers. Just have to make
| it really explicit and obvious that you expect each one
| answered
| XorNot wrote:
| Managers, or really anybody higher then you in the
| hierarchy, will still ignore the rest of the questions.
| Remember there's no consequences that they can perceive for
| only sending you a third of an answer.
| mpalczewski wrote:
| Frequently the cause is too many bullet points.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes, it's very strange.
|
| I had this recently with something I wanted to order online.
| I asked two questions, the second was answered, the first was
| ignored. So I had to send a second email to ask the first
| question again.
|
| I'm really curious if it's a symptom of limited modern
| attention spans, or if you'd find the same issue in vintage
| hand-written letters.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| Here ya go: https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-
| military-pre...
| jollybean wrote:
| Those are good, but the big overarching rules are:
|
| 1) Assume no prior knowledge of a situation.
|
| 2) Provide some context for intent, objectives etc..
|
| 3) Greatly simplify the thrust of the message and initially
| provided only the most highly relevant details.
|
| If you do that - then 'everything else is a detail' - meaning,
| if someone has a basic understanding of what the situation is,
| they can go into detail as needed.
|
| If context is not provided, people have no idea what is going
| on and their professionalism, conscientiousness and curiosity
| is wasted.
|
| I like the AMZN approach but I'll gather it could be done in a
| different way.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| regarding the apparently competing values of reliability and
| velocity, try propagating these goals through different mediums.
| code quality can absolutely be ingrained into the culture. things
| like TDD, when/what to integration test, and encouraging PR
| reviewers to enforce these requirements. you can literally just
| run an in-house course/training for everyone and the aggressively
| follow through.
|
| once you've got reliability deep-seated in the culture, then you
| can talk about velocity all you want without worrying that your
| teams will make confused tradeoffs. in effect, you've
| communicated the nuanced concept that "we move fast, but always
| within the constraints that provide for a reliable product". most
| people aren't consciously thinking about it that way (not a bad
| thing), but their behavior matches what you were originally
| wanting to convey with a nuanced message.
| jancsika wrote:
| I get the point he's making. But still, if he didn't like the
| lack of nuance why not find somewhere to work other than
| Microsoft?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| What a great example of his point.
|
| You just picked a single item and acted as though it were the
| only consideration in the universe.
|
| Did be anywhere say that this interesting phenomenon he
| observed was the worst thing in the world and made MS
| intolerable? Did he anywhere say that this was a uniquely MS
| problem?
|
| This article was about dynamics of one-to-many communication
| with humans, not about why MS sucks.
| mistermann wrote:
| >> I get the point he's making. But still, if he didn't like
| the lack of nuance why not find somewhere to work other than
| Microsoft?
|
| > You just picked a single item _and acted as though it were
| the only consideration in the universe_. _Did he anywhere
| say_ that this interesting phenomenon he observed _was the
| worst thing in the world and made MS intolerable_? Did he
| anywhere say _that this was a uniquely MS problem_?
|
| This also seems like a great example.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I choose to believe this is an _incredible_ joke about missing
| nuance.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Now that you say it, I have to admit it's possible, but I
| guess I'm just not as generous of spirit and did not land on
| that interpretation myself. I'm going with "no way". :)
| Macha wrote:
| One of the comments for the thread.
|
| > I see this for every post, e.g., when I talked about how
| latency hadn't improved, one of the most common responses I got
| was about how I don't understand the good reasons for complexity.
|
| > I literally said there are good reasons for complexity in the
| post
|
| It feels like this kind of half baked point scoring reply is just
| a risk of posting on the internet. I'm sure I've been guilty of
| it at times too, and I think forums like HN or Reddit encourage
| it.
|
| So you end up having to be overclear in a way that hurts your
| message.
|
| For example, in just my previous post in another thread, I was
| talking about how I felt IMAP and SMTP support was important for
| a mail provider. However, I felt that if I just left it at that,
| some pedant would come yell at me about how IMAP and SMTP are not
| secure protocols since they're plaintext. So I wrote out IMAPS
| and SMTPS to ward off that kind of pedantry.
|
| But I'm still at risk of someone else wanting to score points
| indicating that actually, IMAPS and SMTPS isn't a thing. And
| they'd be sort of right, IMAPS and SMTPS are colloqial terms for
| their corresponding protocols over TLS, but you won't find an
| IMAPS spec, and if you look in the IMAP RFC, IMAPS is not
| something that is mentioned.
|
| I don't know how you fix this.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Good... article?
|
| It's ironic that he's communicating this on Twitter, a medium
| where nuance is particularly hard to convey, and where the
| audience is especially prone to missing it. I'm sure that's not
| lost on him.
|
| One thing to note: the part about it being less of a problem when
| people misunderstand an article on HN than if they misunderstand
| a business communication made me think of (one time) when the CEO
| of our company defined a new strategy based on an article on
| Product Lead Growth he'd read. Or rather evidently misread, since
| he neglected the most important parts. My conclusion is that
| these things are interrelated, and mistakes can compound.
|
| I really do think that reading comprehension is one of those
| things everybody (especially STEM people) assume they're good at,
| but usually they're actually just terrible at it, and supremely
| confident about that. The same goes with clear writing, which (to
| me) is even harder.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > where nuance is particularly hard to convey
|
| It's not just not easy to convey there, it's not tolerated by a
| large part of the population there.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| This has always been kind of obvious to me. If you utter a
| sentence that requires any amount of interpretation to
| understand, then more people = more possible interpretations.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I disagree. I think people are smarter than the 'elite' give them
| credit for.
|
| It's just easier to control people if you justify treating them
| like idiots.
| hitekker wrote:
| On a related note, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370189
| has an interesting paper worth reading.
| infofarmer wrote:
| Counter-examples: Harry Potter, Marvel, etc. High bandwidth, low
| latency (often days or less), unlimited scale (most of the
| planet), high retention.
|
| Nuance will be pruned at scale if inessential. It's a feature,
| not a bug.
|
| The popular stories are [perceived as essential] for survival and
| propagation.
| librarianscott wrote:
| I love your counter examples. In moving beyond the famous
| Shannon-Weaver model of communication[1], the one with the
| "signal," "noise," "channel" that network folks love,
| researchers settled on the importance of "feedback." I would
| say that these popular stories that become part of "mainstream
| culture" spread through comedy, song, news, bars, and repeated
| viewings on television to reinforce and strengthen the
| "mainstream" understanding of what these things mean and
| whether nuance is important when talking about them.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon-Weaver_model
| victorronin wrote:
| I read it and felt kind-of bitter.
|
| On one hand, yeah, may be nuanced message doesn't work at scale.
| However, when saying literally two things (vs one) became
| nuanced. I wound understand if it was a speech talking about a
| dozen of different things and their interplay... These were
| literally two things - create a solid product and let's move
| forward fast. That's it.
|
| Also, why the hell whole hierarchy of middle management exist in
| such case? The only reason for it to exist is exactly ability to
| execute at scale (when things which are coming from the top are
| propagated properly).
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| But if those two things (velocity and reliability) are at
| opposing ends of an engineering spectrum, then different teams
| will make different decisions about how best to trade one off
| for the other, and then the org as a whole is unfocused.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The problem is the thinking that there is some fixed bucket
| of speed and a fixed bucket of robustness ingredients and a
| fixed bucket of product output. That the only way to get any
| reliability is to displace some speed, or that if you want to
| move ahead at all you have to throw reliability out entirely.
|
| When in fact these things, and 100 other goals and
| considerations like being green or hiring fairly or paying
| interns better etc... merely influence each other a little
| and don't preclude each other except at absurd hyperbolic
| extremes.
|
| The different goals DO influence each other. But the output
| product can in fact have a whole bunch of both speed and
| reliability, probably at the expense of yet another dimension
| like cost, but actually the same applies there too, you can
| possibly have all 3, at least to some degree, if the
| leadership is insightful enough to figure out a way like
| employing underutilized people or geography, or gamification
| or crowdsourcing or alternative incentives, whatever.
|
| Pay more or sacrifice in one dimension to get more in another
| is merely the obvious and easy way, not the only way dictated
| by some zero sum law of conservation.
| dekhn wrote:
| I keep most of my points extremely simple and avoid complex
| language unless I'm with a group of people whom I trust to
| understand subtlety. If you look at the history of my comments,
| you can see people often completely misunderstand what I say,
| often attributing the opposite opinion to the one I hold (or
| stated; I often don't state my personal opinion).
| deltree7 wrote:
| ITT, Most HNers completely missing the nuance of Dan's post.
| kijin wrote:
| It's not just corporate communication.
|
| Post on any internet forum about some minor drawbacks of
| Technology X, and the comments will instantly split between those
| who feel personally offended and must defend the sanctity of X,
| and those who take the post as proof that X must not be used at
| all. People love to think in black & white. People don't like to
| parse "A if (B and (C or not-D))". It takes much training and
| discipline to overcome the instinct for simplification.
|
| You can clarify yourself and correct any misunderstandings if
| you're in a small group that shares a lot of context, but this
| quickly becomes impossible as the group gets larger. Even
| competent statesmen struggle to convey "A if B else C" in their
| speeches.
| m0llusk wrote:
| There must be multiple levels to this. At Apple, at least for a
| time, there was the overriding idea that "It should Just Work."
| That was supposed to translate to every part of Apple products.
| So clicking on stuff in the Finder should just work and AirPort
| WiFi should just work and so on. What exactly working meant was
| totally context dependent, but the additional detail that minimal
| effort and oversight should be required was broadly understood
| and teams that made products that failed that test were
| repremanded and reorganized if their products were not outright
| cancelled.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Flat orgs are very popular right now, but isn't it a huge benefit
| of a hierarchical organization with subparts that rather than the
| President of Azure getting on a VTC and telling the whole
| division that the goal is velocity he can explain to his reports
| (a small group) that they need velocity with reliability and they
| can explain to their reports (more small groups) and so on and so
| forth?
|
| Yes, nuanced comms don't scale so why isn't the answer---don't
| require scaled comms?
| wrs wrote:
| One reason is that non-scaled comms suffer from "telephone
| game". If you do it like you're saying, then go down 3-4 levels
| in the hierarchy and check what people are hearing, it will
| have mutated away from anything you originally said.
|
| Sometimes to get everyone aligned (as best you can) you have to
| give everyone the same message at the same time -- but it has
| to be a simple message.
| sebastos wrote:
| It's kind of interesting that there's some kind of
| conservation rule at work there. The amount of effort you
| have to expend must scale with the number of bits you want to
| convey correctly _and_ the number of people you successfully
| convey it to. Delegating to other people will corrupt the
| message. Large 1-to-N blasts can only convey a few bits
| before people stop reading or get confused. To perfectly
| communicate all of the information to all of the people,
| you'd have to go express it to them individually.
| tarr11 wrote:
| I wonder if you could checksum the telephone game by having a
| 2-level comms. That way the VP could validate that the
| Director didn't make a mistake when communicating to the EMs.
|
| Eg,
|
| n-level comms are where a CEO communicates to the entire org
|
| 1-level comms are where CEO->CTO->VP->Directors->EMs->ICs
|
| 2-level comms:
|
| CEO->CTO+VPs
|
| CTO->VPs+Directors
|
| VP->Directors+EMs
|
| Director->EM+ICs
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| An additional benefit of 2-level comms is that you get send
| some slightly-irrelevant information, but it's clear you
| aren't _expected_ to read it. This gives you a passive
| awareness of some of the other stuff that 's going on in
| the organisation, and who you can ask about it.
| theptip wrote:
| The term of art for this practice is "skip-level 1:1s".
| It's not ubiquitous but many think it's a good idea,
| particularly when stepping into a new role/org. Obviously
| it can end up being a lot of meetings so it's typically on
| a quarterly or less cadence.
|
| Because of the branching factor it's not feasible to do
| this for every bit of comms.
| wrs wrote:
| Yes, this glue is important. E.g., the VP dropping by the
| EM's staff meeting to give a tailored version of the
| message and do some Q&A, and the VP doing skip-level 1:1
| meetings to get the perspective as seen by the EMs. If you
| build kind of a mesh of redundant communications, you can
| better course-correct (which also means correcting the
| original message after observing its actual effect on the
| team).
| sa46 wrote:
| Mission command [1] might be useful here. The main idea is
| you state the mission and your expanded intent and each
| subordinate command does the same thing all the way down the
| chain.
|
| There's several "checksums" commonly employed in the US Army.
| The subordinate command's orders will contain the verbatim
| mission statement (typically one sentence with the five whys)
| from the both their commanding unit and the next level up.
| The order also includes the expanded intent from their
| commanding unit. Finally, a commander will require back
| briefs from subordinate commands to make sure plans align.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_command
| Graffur wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Definitely. TANSTAAFL
|
| I do wonder if flat is an overreaction though. Intuitively
| I'd expect a mixed strategy to be most effective.
|
| Edit: reflecting more, most claimed flat companies aren't. So
| maybe they are pursuing mixed strategies and comm'ing out a
| simplified message.
| blondin wrote:
| i agree with what you are pointing out.
|
| but i wonder why non-scaled communication (if we can also
| call it that) works in the military?
| wrs wrote:
| I haven't been in the military myself, and I'd be curious
| to hear perspective from someone who's been in both
| environments. I _think_ in the military there is a
| methodology where at each level you break up your goal into
| fairly independent sub-goals, communicate those sub-goals
| to sub-teams with an accompanying expectation of autonomy
| in execution, and allow them to do the same for their sub-
| teams. In a civilian situation, one doesn 't normally have
| that level of clarity available, either in the goals or in
| the org structure. And I suspect the military culture is
| also less effective when it is dealing with a goal that
| isn't clearly defined.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack
| critical thinking skills or don't apply them. It's not the scale
| that makes the nuanced communication not work, it's the scale
| that makes you notice it. You could have the same communications
| with smaller groups and you'd have the same results, you just
| wouldn't be as likely to get negative feedback indicating it.
|
| It's also ironic to me that someone would try nuanced
| communication on Twitter, a platform whose very design
| discourages it. You can't do nuanced communication in 280
| characters, but you can do vitriol just fine. So they do the
| tweet storm which turns off anyone who isn't incredibly
| interested in what you're saying.
| bjornsing wrote:
| This is my (actually quite scary) experience too. I think if we
| one day crack artificial general intelligence we'll come to the
| sad and scary realization that most people are just really good
| at hiding their lack of understanding and reasoning ability.
| mistermann wrote:
| > I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack
| critical thinking skills or don't apply them.
|
| I agree, but I think it's more nuanced than this: smart people
| can regularly be observed being unable to think critically
| during conversations (particularly on certain topics), yet the
| same people can think critically writing code. Assuming this is
| true (it's certainly quite true), it seems to me that
| differences between these two contexts causes the mind to
| behave differently.
| alar44 wrote:
| The major difference is the synchronicity in communication.
| When you write code you can sit and ponder. When someone asks
| you a question in a conversation, you cant just walk away,
| think about it, and come back 15 minutes later. It's like
| speed chess vs hours per side. If you have to respond
| instantly, you move may be good, but you might find a better
| one given more time.
| mistermann wrote:
| Agreed, but that is possible on forums, but people often
| can't do it there either. There is something else going on
| imho.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think you're half-right about the critical thinking skills,
| but the other half is shared context. The bigger the group the
| less shared context they will have. This gap doesn't
| necessarily scale linearly, but it also doesn't scale for free
| unless you're in a cult.
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