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?
I choose to believe this is an _incredible_ joke about missing nuance.
Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
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Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#72As 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.
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#73Nuance 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.
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.
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#74I 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.
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#75Quoted post unavailable.
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…
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.
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#76Au contraire, academia has worked out how to reliably communicate at scale: publishing peer-reviewed articles in journals.
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#77Earlier 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'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).
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#78Earlier 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.
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
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.
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#79I 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?
I choose to believe this is an _incredible_ joke about missing nuance.
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". :)
Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale
#80Nuance 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.
> ...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.