51–60 of 279 posts
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.
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…
Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an email. The first one is the only one to get answered.
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 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.
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 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.
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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 pro…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
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.