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Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

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Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#11

Post by wrs »

bradleyjg wrote: post #8

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 s…

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#12

Post by steelstraw »

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?

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#13

Post by harryf »

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…

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#14

Post by orzig »

funstuff007 wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#16

Post by solatic »

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-Exupéry

When you appreciate the nuance, how do you decide what to strip away?

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#17

Post by wly_cdgr »

GCA10 wrote: post #5

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…

...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

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#18

Post by logicalmonster »

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#19

Post by victorronin »

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).

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