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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

#101

Post by lazide »

jodrellblank wrote: post #64
mcguire wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 en…

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#102

Post by mistermann »

mattmaroon wrote: post #56

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 tr…

> 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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#103

Post by 88913527 »

mcguire wrote: post #52
logicalmonster wrote: post #18

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 graph…

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.

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#104

Post by mistermann »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #74
jancsika wrote: post #67

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?

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.

>> 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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#106

Post by whatshisface »

BurningFrog wrote: post #53
harryf wrote: post #13

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 para…

> “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.

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#107

Post by pas »

travisjungroth wrote: post #47
logicalmonster wrote: post #18

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 graph…

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.

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#108

Post by bjornsing »

mattmaroon wrote: post #56

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 tr…

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#110

Post by dheera »

crispyambulance wrote: post #80
mcguire wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ...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…

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.)
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