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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

#61

Post by zozbot234 »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #40
wly_cdgr wrote: post #3

Quoted post unavailable.

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.

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.)

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#62

Post by wrs »

blondin wrote: post #39
wrs wrote: post #11

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 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?

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#63

Post by sebastos »

wrs wrote: post #11
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.

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#64

Post by jodrellblank »

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.

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.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#65

Post by sa46 »

wrs wrote: post #11
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.

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

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#66

Post by wrs »

tarr11 wrote: post #28
wrs wrote: post #11

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

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).

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#68

Post by Brian_K_White »

karaterobot wrote: post #43
paviva wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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!

That was not an example of dropping nuance.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#69

Post by bmurphy1976 »

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…

Here ya go: https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#70

Post by mpalczewski »

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.

Frequently the cause is too many bullet points.
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