The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#2Great post, lots to learn for me but also reassure for some parts i like to advocate for in communication that now have scientific backing. That's great!
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#3[dead]
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#4The weak ties were strong all along.
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#5This is a great post. I've been advocating this for over a decade.
> The most important conversations are not always the ones that appear on the agenda. They are the ones that happen before the formal session begins, in the ten minutes after it ends, in the corridor while people are putting on their coats. These are not peripheral to the group’s work. They are often where the group’s actual thinking takes place.
This is a core belief. One, in fact, that at my last workplace, we understood well and designed for. After client meetings, we would walk clients slowly back though the kitchen and pause for a while there, splitting up into informal chats, before seeing them out of the door. Afterwards, we would quickly compare notes on all the things they said on the way out. These things were often the most important steers for the project.
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#6So bad article. It is waay too long and it is just repeating ~3 claims without even looking like the author is interested in their truthness.
Here's a nice pdf version of the sourced article 'Pentland, A. (2012) The new science of building great teams' : https://globalioc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-New-Sci...>
That one at least tries to look valuable, e.g. they mention someone implemented their ideas and their team's productivity went up (although we don't know if more than what Hawthorne effect would've caused alone).
OTOH to be a thought-provoking piece it suffices, and the concepts it defines might turn out to be useful when you try to increase the productivity of your teams.
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#7What I find most difficult about Western concepts is 'productivity.' They attach so many things to this fictional concept. It's about designing things to produce a large volume of output.
That's why so many posts on HN always include the same pattern, 'productivity.' I clicked thinking it would be about the social physics of conversation, like how to engage people socially or avoid hurting them, but instead it drifts into the concept of 'productivity.'
But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#8'social physics of conversation'? Were social dynamics of conversations meant?
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#9What I find most difficult about Western concepts is 'productivity.' They attach so many things to this fictional concept. It's about designing things to produce a large volume of output. That's why so many posts on HN always include the same pattern, 'productivity.' I clicked thinking it would be about the social physics of conversation, like how to engage people socially or avoid hurting them, but instead it drifts…
> But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were
It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs.
But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business.
Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law.
Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.
Re: The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
#10'social physics of conversation'? Were social dynamics of conversations meant?
No physics werw involved in this article. But I guess it makes it appear more "sciency"