Looking back, I work(ed) in a lot of environments where leadership tried to be nuanced. Or at least tried to communicate two or three equally important things.
Thinking about the outcomes of these with this explanation in mind does explain a lot.
Just not sure if this is a case of Confirmation Bias or a genuinely helpful way of looking at corporate communications.
Probably need more examples/data to better understand if he is on to something.
Nonetheless do I think it is a good framework as clearly communicating one thing and dropping the nuances would probably increase the likelihood that the content is being parsed as intended.
Jokes aside it's not that nuance doesn't work at scale. It's that many people whose experience is mainly with short-range communication fail to realize or underappreciate that you need different techniques to communicate nuance from a large distance than they are accustomed to using up close. Think about painting.
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 props and showmanship, and his key slogans like "build the wall" let people visualize any outcome they wanted. A bad communicator who tried to use nuance with the immigration stuff might have said something like "We're going to deploy a network of physical barriers in denser urban areas and utilize digital surveillance and personnel in more rural areas to reduce illegal immigration along the border." Technically more accurate, but that doesn't paint the same kind of mental picture that can easily be conveyed by "build the wall" in a speech or debate.
I tend to ignore "official news" and got most of my Donald Trump speeches as highlights and clips filtered through my largely left-wing circle of friends and family. From what I saw, he was a complete buffoon.
Then one day my fiancee's father was watching a long-form "debate" or something that included Trump. I was astonished at how personable and clear his communication style was, and understood why so many people were so taken by his campaign's ideas and rhetoric.
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.
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.)
Fine, sometimes I can be bothered to go to Wikipedia:
> Propaganda is a modern Latin word, ablative singular feminine of the gerundive form of propagare, meaning 'to spread' or 'to propagate', thus propaganda means for that which is to be propagated.[4] Originally this word derived from a new administrative body of the Catholic Church (congregation) created in 1622 as part of the Counter-Reformation, called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), or informally simply Propaganda.[3][5] Its activity was aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries.[3]
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 of whether it's worth staying long enough (and being bold enough) to get drawn into the nuanced underground dialogue, too. Sometimes yes. Sometimes that's quite exciting and makes the job more interesting and more durable.
Other times, it's just too hard to wiggle into that circle. Or that circle has its own evasions and power struggles. In those cases, it's easier to meet the basic formal requirements of the job, enjoy the extra time to have a rich life outside of work -- and think hard about what kind of next job would be better.
I was thinking the same thing. The VPs might be messaging "speed" company wide, but what are the saying to their direct reports? Do the directors hear a more nuanced message that balances reliability, and then try to implement a reasonable balance within their teams, or does the entire division single-track on speed and forget about everything else?
> They exist in quiet and sometimes quite intricate underground conversations.
YES. Nailed it.
In my understand, it's broadcast that is weak at communicating nuance. But if you can figure out how to "tell stories" that propagate via conversation, then your capacity to communicate nuance is GREATLY increased. People will only take in so many bits of information, when they don't feel participant in the making.
I put "tell stories" in scare-quotes because imho they're not truly "told" and they're not truly "stories", at least not in the linear sense. It's more like they're "planted", and they're more like network stories than anything else. To tell them is more like building as escape room than writing a one-pager.
Post on any internet forum about some minor drawbacks of Technology X, and the comments will instantly split between those who feel personally offended and must defend the sanctity of X, and those who take the post as proof that X must not be used at all. People love to think in black & white. People don't like to parse "A if (B and (C or not-D))". It takes much training and discipline to overcome the instinct for simplification.
You can clarify yourself and correct any misunderstandings if you're in a small group that shares a lot of context, but this quickly becomes impossible as the group gets larger. Even competent statesmen struggle to convey "A if B else C" in their speeches.
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 scale so why isn’t the answer—-don’t require scaled comms?
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
An additional benefit of 2-level comms is that you get send some slightly-irrelevant information, but it's clear you aren't expected to read it. This gives you a passive awareness of some of the other stuff that's going on in the organisation, and who you can ask about it.
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).
The term of art for this practice is “skip-level 1:1s”. It’s not ubiquitous but many think it’s a good idea, particularly when stepping into a new role/org. Obviously it can end up being a lot of meetings so it’s typically on a quarterly or less cadence.
Because of the branching factor it’s not feasible to do this for every bit of comms.
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.
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.
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.
This is how OKRs and Salesforce's V2MOM are supposed to work... the CEO does his, then the EVPs do theirs showing how they will contribute to the CEOs, etc.
In practice this is almost never done at scale because having them sequentially ordered means that they must be done pretty quickly and there are too many political turf battles to let them be done quicklty.
I don’t disagree, but an important distinction relative to the OP is that political communication is in an overtly adversarial environment. It’s a whole other ballgame.
I suspect "overtly adversarial environment" applies to a large chunk of all communication. Perhaps even most. People will willfully interpret any communication to suit their own agendas.
I think interpret was accurate already. I will definitely interpret something differently from someone else without either of us necessarily being guilty of active perversion.
Then you're "interpreting differently" = misinterpret. Everyone interprets everything to understand it at all but you misinterpret it when you understand it differently than intended. And maybe you disinterpret when you do so intentionally.
I don't think nuance was the issue for Romney and the "flipping" issue.
Romney was a pretty successful Governor of a liberal state. He needed to appeal to nationwide Republicans in the primary so he slid a lot further to the right. Then he was up against a reasonably popular Democratic president, so he slid back to the middle.
The only nuance was that he tried to muddy the sloshing to make it look like he wasn't changing his positions.
Does that explain the level of nuance around public health policy?
Covid policy for example. Some countries take into account natural immunity (more nuance). Others don't and simply require everyone to be vaccinated regardless (less nuance). Some recommend or even require kids to get the Covid vaccine (less nuance - everyone take it), other countries recommend against (more nuance - some should, some shouldn't). They all have access to the same data. Is this simply reflective of a different approach in communication? Or a different level of confidence or respect for the population to grok nuance?
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 paragraph.
I’ve done a lot of organising events for engineers inside companies where there are like 500+ engineers. You need email, slack, calendar invites and more to get people paying attention. And often they’re paying more attention to LinkedIn than what’s happening on the “inside” … you can run campaigns on LinkedIn that target your own people…
> “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.
There is some merit to that approach though. For example, I moved IT support requests from a messaging system to an actual ticketing system. The number of requests actually dropped because if they aren't getting help instantly they'll actually try something rather than just giving up immediately and calling IT. Many many issues just went away because if you have to wait a bit all the braindead "click the button" or "turn on your monitor" issues go away.
There is a distinction between "I said it once, and I'm not obligated to say it again", and "I said it once, and therefore I can assume that everyone knows it". The difference is in whether you need everyone to know it (accountable for the result), or only need to CYA (accountable for your job).
This is more of a response to people not paying attention. If all this time is being spent on email and chat and meetings it gets frustrating continually covering the same ground where it is obvious not much attention was paid the first time.
These dynamics are why centralized release orgs or enfoced code review/merge blockers are so powerful. People ignore all the email till it is explaining why the thing they want right now can’t be given to the, unless they do steps a and b. Not sure there is a public health equivalent. If you are trying to move 100% of a dev org to stricter standards, say due to some new security discovery, you benefit from this centralized approach.
Of course, the real skill is in delivering a simplified message. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When you appreciate the nuance, how do you decide what to strip away?
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 graphic design (bolding one key sentence or whatever).
* Break up a giant nuanced email into sections.
* If something is critical, make it visual: a picture, explainer video, or an infographic can be really useful for something key.
This is harder than it looks. A quote attributed to Mark Twain is "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." It's a lot easier to go overboard than to distill what needs to be conveyed into the core elements.
I've frequently seen bullet points being treated exactly the way the author describes AND being treated: A reader will seize on a particular bullet and treat it in isolation, as if the other points didn't exist, nuance shredded. They're still useful but unmagical.
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!
I don't think it's a joke, it's a correction of attribution. The quote seems to have been attributed to a lot of people, but earliest mention of similar message is indeed from Blaise Pascal, see https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
Quote Investigator is a gem. There's another page[1] on a similar quote:
> If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.
~ Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in The Operative Miller 23
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I'd read every comment on the page, but when I got down to your bullet points, don't know why but my eyes glazed over and I stopped reading anything, and just started scrolling quickly down the page. Then I realized the irony of this happening in a thread about ignoring bullet points!
Sometimes the other party will happily oblige with your request, but only after a totally vacuous phone call that serves absolutely no purpose other than (i) signalling how much effort the other party is spending on you (ii) punishing you with synchronous communication so as to limit your potential request rate.
Wonderful! On reflection a bit on these, I also wonder if it’s a type of demand for payment from the other party too - a ‘give me an ego boost/social capital payment, and I’ll pay attention to your request’ type thing. A bribe with your time and discomfort maybe?
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.
> ...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.
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.)
Perhaps those people have just read too many emails in the past that ended up being a waste of their time? Over time they learned to glance at things and predict what the rest of the email is going to say.
Think about those download websites where you have to find the download link in the middle of all the ads that are masquerading as download buttons. There's a lot of information on those pages, but people become really adept at spotting the real download button. The rest of the information gets ignored.
I think this is why some people insist on verbal communication when you're trying to teach them something. If they get a text guide then they will gloss over things and skip steps leading to failure. With verbal communication you're effectively there to keep them at least mildly focused so that they don't gloss over things.
> If they get a text guide then they will gloss over things and skip steps leading to failure.
I find this to be very true when learning new programming techniques. Most learning resources start from a significantly more basic starting point than most learners are at, so I'm liable to skip until I start seeing things I don't already know how to guess. The problem is that there are often important subtleties buried amidst the obvious knowledge.
> Perhaps those people have just read too many emails in the past that ended up being a waste of their time?
I am sure that's often the case but I still find it rude and dismissive.
In the end it doesn't really matter for me as long as I can get my point/request across in a sentence or two (and cover my ass with an "optional" details section).
You're absolutely right that voice or face-to-face is essential for certain communication.
I’m not trying to out myself as an unnuanced consumer of communication, but I literally did just that reading the parent comment. I wonder what is the percentage of the HN audience that did that
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.
imagine times where you replied to emails partially
It will be hard for someone that always replies to the first thing only to empathize with this but: This has literally never happened to me. As in, I have never replied partially to something in an email. You will get an answer to each of your items. Granted, you may not get the answer you were looking for but I will answer each and every one, even if it's just a "I will have to look into this one and get back to you" so that the other 6 items can get answered right away.
Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not the other way around?
I don't think this is practically much different then answering one thing. If you give one answer and 3 "I'll get back to you on that"'s-- this creates a promise of a future asynchronous answer, which is only as good as your word. People often have too many tasks, so to get those remaining items on your queue, they'll have to ask you again.
As the recipient, it's more challenging to receive the future promise of an answer with no SLA.
I would be to differ. To me, there is a large difference between just ignoring 6 out of 7 questions I asked you or you telling me that you do not know the answer right now but will get back to me.
I agree that if there's no explicitly stated SLA and no implicit SLA given the relationship history between the two of us (e.g. I might know you're usually going to get back to me within 24 hours on such items), then this is practically the same.
I do not operate under such circumstances though. If I tell you that I will get back to you, then I will get back to you within a reasonable time frame and you will know from our previous interactions that I'm good for it in most cases and that it's totally OK for you to ask again after a day because I might have forgotten. I'm not perfect.
Since this was an example answer only, it is also possible that for one of your 7 questions the answer will simply be that I cannot get that answer to you within any reasonable amount of time at this point because of other priorities I have and that you should find someone else or I might point you towards someone else. In any case, you will have all of your 7 points answered. I won't just ignore them.
The difference is as a sender I would know that you parsed each of my questions, understood them and decided to either not answer them now or just never answer them. Replying to one is ambiguous, if it was actually important it just leads to having to follow up again, restating everything that wasn't acknowledged.
I also never said that I will answer your questions right away. Just that I will answer all 7 of them once I do reply. The opportunity cost of looking at my email inbox might be way too high at a particular moment and so I might not even see your message for a full day to begin with. Same w/ a slack message. I might not see your particular message for some time or I might see it and decide that it's not a message I can deal with on the side while in a meeting and mark it for later consumption e.g. for when the meeting ends early etc.
FWIW I've so far never seen anyone try to 'use' my thoroughness to create a denial of service attack against me. If that ever did happen, I would definitely change my stance. But it won't be to answer the first question each time. It would be to stop talking to them. Like I ignore any "Hi, can I ask you a question?" messages. Even some directors have tried that and just gotten ignored (first time someone does it, I will let them know they can just ask away. Second time they get ignored until they learn).
Have you ever faced a volume of questions that you could not reasonably answer to the degree of thoroughness you prefer? How did you deal with it? I mean, you mention at least one tactic in the sibling thread, but what I don’t understand is your apparent unwillingness to attenuate your thoroughness based on circumstances. Probably I am taking you too literally, but am curious, is your position absolute?
(I too appreciate thoroughness, but also believe that for some things in business “worse is better”. IE 90% thoroughness might cost 1/10th as much as 99% thoroughness, it’s certainly possible to over-index on the quality of the answers one provides)
You asked
> Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not the other way around?
“Answers questions thoroughly” is a behavior, not part of a person’s identity. If someone gives you a partial answer, that may be optimal behavior for the circumstances, you don’t know, that’s where the empathy comes in. Of course empathy should be mutual, but you can’t be blocked on that to obtain a favorable business outcome. Empathy is a tool in your toolbox.
Yes I have had that problem and still have it from time to time. Like you said, I mentioned one way to deal with it in the sibling thread. What has also happened in some cases is that I had to de-prioritize other things that I had on my plate because the questions were more important at that time.
Maybe it's not entirely clear what I mean with thoroughness here. I am talking about not just ignoring someone's questions. It doesn't mean that if you "ask" me to answer 7 questions that will each take a day of work to answer that I will be "thorough and do those 7 things immediately to get you your answer". I will simply ensure that I read all your 7 questions and tell you that each will take me about a day to answer as it would require certain checks and that I do not have the time for that at the moment. However, if your questions are so urgent vs. the other things I have on my plate, you are welcome to talk to my boss/my product owner/etc on getting your items prioritized higher. I have a finite amount of time per day that I do work and while the exact amount can vary from time to time I will not start working 80 hour weeks or start ignoring your questions.
A major factor in this is a lack of willingness to take the time to understand something, possibly rooted in a meta-failure: not understanding that it takes time to understand things! There's various motivating forces that impel us to race along to the next thing instead of taking a little bit to absorb something, think about it, or discuss it.
I’m rapidly approaching the “email singularity” where it would take me more time to answer one email than the average time between incoming emails.
If I receive an email and it’s something I can quickly answer on my phone while waiting for the bus etc., I’ll do so and you’ll get a quick answer. If the email requires me to sit down and compose a long response (or worse, read a paper, or find and run some code) the email gets put on a priority queue to deal with during dedicated email-answering time.
If I receive an email with multiple questions, and one of them I can answer quickly, I might fire off a partial answer (under the theory that a partial answer now is preferable to a complete answer much later).
I had this recently with something I wanted to order online. I asked two questions, the second was answered, the first was ignored. So I had to send a second email to ask the first question again.
I'm really curious if it's a symptom of limited modern attention spans, or if you'd find the same issue in vintage hand-written letters.
IMO, there's two things that make this harder than it should be:
1. People tend to skim and a question could be lost even in a two-sentence paragraph.
2. Email's structure means people tend to reply "at the tip" and branching conversations are difficult to understand.
Contributing to this latter problem are:
a. SMTP (to/cc are too flexible, each message is it's own "thing")
b. POP (deep conversations are just a stack of messages some people may not have the "original" and can't easily reply higher up the tree without breaking client threading)
c. Email client visualization of message threads are generally bad. I haven't seen a single client do this well. Outlook can, but out of the box has a very "flat" view.
---
So, people tend to read at the bottom and if someone missed something early in a thread you have no chance of getting it addressed a few messages in.
IMO something more akin to newsgroups or even reddit/HN tree-view threads could be a better fit for business discussions, but I haven't seen anybody try it.
I've definitely been that person to ask four bulleted questions in an e-mail and then send a reply asking where the answers for the other three are after I get a response that only addresses one of them.
Those are good, but the big overarching rules are:
1) Assume no prior knowledge of a situation.
2) Provide some context for intent, objectives etc..
3) Greatly simplify the thrust of the message and initially provided only the most highly relevant details.
If you do that - then 'everything else is a detail' - meaning, if someone has a basic understanding of what the situation is, they can go into detail as needed.
If context is not provided, people have no idea what is going on and their professionalism, conscientiousness and curiosity is wasted.
I like the AMZN approach but I'll gather it could be done in a different way.
I wouldn't dream of sending an email of more than a few sentences without breaking into sections. In longer messages I will also use highlighter to emphasize 1-3 key sentences and move supporting details to an appendix, footnotes, or links.
But there are some people you can't get through to, no matter what.
I started to follow this approach [1] 5 years ago and it is amazing how much clearer my own thoughts in communication have become.
1. Subjects with keywords. The subject clearly states the purpose of the email, and specifically, what you want them to do with your note. Keywords: ACTION, SIGN, INFO, DECISION, REQUEST, COORD
2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Lead your emails with a short, staccato statement that declares the purpose of the email and action required. The BLUF should quickly answer the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. An effective BLUF distills the most important information for the reader.
3. Be economical. Short emails are more effective than long ones, so try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient doesn’t have to scroll. Use active voice, so it’s clear who is doing the action. If an email requires more explanation, you should list background information after the BLUF as bullet points so that recipients can quickly grasp your message. Link to attachments rather than attaching files. This will likely provide the most recent version of a file. Also, the site will verify that the recipient has the right security credentials to see the file, and you don’t inadvertently send a file to someone who isn’t permitted to view it.
Somewhat agree. If something is so long that it requires bolding or graphic design to bring out the main point, then it's probably better off shortening it or adding a TL;DR at the top.
When ever I am working on some large project that involves others, I spend a lot of time searching for the slogans that capture the weighted average of the nuanced meaning. Simple and almost all applicable.
Discrete sections, bullet points, infographics, and a touch of graphic design: that's PowerPoint. The advice I always get for PowerPoint is to delete everything in the slightly smaller font that "nobody reads anyway," so I think you're still limited to the amount of nuance you can fit into a few bullet points, unless those infographics are doing an awful lot of work.
On one hand, yeah, may be nuanced message doesn't work at scale. However, when saying literally two things (vs one) became nuanced. I wound understand if it was a speech talking about a dozen of different things and their interplay... These were literally two things - create a solid product and let's move forward fast. That's it.
Also, why the hell whole hierarchy of middle management exist in such case? The only reason for it to exist is exactly ability to execute at scale (when things which are coming from the top are propagated properly).
But if those two things (velocity and reliability) are at opposing ends of an engineering spectrum, then different teams will make different decisions about how best to trade one off for the other, and then the org as a whole is unfocused.
The problem is the thinking that there is some fixed bucket of speed and a fixed bucket of robustness ingredients and a fixed bucket of product output. That the only way to get any reliability is to displace some speed, or that if you want to move ahead at all you have to throw reliability out entirely.
When in fact these things, and 100 other goals and considerations like being green or hiring fairly or paying interns better etc... merely influence each other a little and don't preclude each other except at absurd hyperbolic extremes.
The different goals DO influence each other. But the output product can in fact have a whole bunch of both speed and reliability, probably at the expense of yet another dimension like cost, but actually the same applies there too, you can possibly have all 3, at least to some degree, if the leadership is insightful enough to figure out a way like employing underutilized people or geography, or gamification or crowdsourcing or alternative incentives, whatever.
Pay more or sacrifice in one dimension to get more in another is merely the obvious and easy way, not the only way dictated by some zero sum law of conservation.
Most HNers don't even read the article they comment on. In this case only a dozen tweets. But I still don't think half of them read through it given the comments I see.
Napoleon was said to favor a tactic wherein he would bring in a lowly lieutenant to hear his orders, and repeat them back in their own words.
If the lieutenant could figure it out, then Napoleon could relay orders to his generals (who would in turn send orders to their subordinates and so on) with confidence that the meaning would not be lost on the battlefield.
While I won't disagree with the argument, I think the conclusion is flawed. If one must focus on velocity, and reliability is in opposition to velocity, then how much should one focus on one versus the other? It is not well defined, but that is ok. Since we are speaking to humans, not robots, reliability is not therefore completely disregarded--it becomes implicit, and deprioritized, but it is obviously still present to some lesser degree.
A good counterexample to the article would be Amazon's success with its leadership principles--much has been written about this, and I feel no need to repeat it here--or JFK's speech urging America to the moon, in which he spent significant time discussing the tradeoffs and sacrifices required to pursue the lunar landing, and in the end did not unilaterally decide to pursue the mission so much as he proposed a conversation about it and asked Americans to discuss the nuances and decide together. Nuance is possible at scale; it is a sad sign of the times that some now believe it is no longer possible.
If you haven't listened to JFK's speech, I strongly urge you to take a listen, and compare his measured, collegial tone to the tone of our politicians today.
I think 'communicate' is the wrong word when you address large group of people. You can't meaningfully communicate in that case.
You just produce content and the people are just consuming the content in whatevre way they please. Large percentage of people won't consume it in the way you wish.
Because of the disconnect what you want is way less important fir the result than what they want.
It's ironic that he's communicating this on Twitter, a medium where nuance is particularly hard to convey, and where the audience is especially prone to missing it. I'm sure that's not lost on him.
One thing to note: the part about it being less of a problem when people misunderstand an article on HN than if they misunderstand a business communication made me think of (one time) when the CEO of our company defined a new strategy based on an article on Product Lead Growth he'd read. Or rather evidently misread, since he neglected the most important parts. My conclusion is that these things are interrelated, and mistakes can compound.
I really do think that reading comprehension is one of those things everybody (especially STEM people) assume they're good at, but usually they're actually just terrible at it, and supremely confident about that. The same goes with clear writing, which (to me) is even harder.
I keep most of my points extremely simple and avoid complex language unless I'm with a group of people whom I trust to understand subtlety. If you look at the history of my comments, you can see people often completely misunderstand what I say, often attributing the opposite opinion to the one I hold (or stated; I often don't state my personal opinion).
278 comments
[ 23.4 ms ] story [ 5439 ms ] threadThinking about the outcomes of these with this explanation in mind does explain a lot.
Just not sure if this is a case of Confirmation Bias or a genuinely helpful way of looking at corporate communications.
Probably need more examples/data to better understand if he is on to something.
Nonetheless do I think it is a good framework as clearly communicating one thing and dropping the nuances would probably increase the likelihood that the content is being parsed as intended.
In a large room with big speakers, that's all lost and you're basically a backbeat ...
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 props and showmanship, and his key slogans like "build the wall" let people visualize any outcome they wanted. A bad communicator who tried to use nuance with the immigration stuff might have said something like "We're going to deploy a network of physical barriers in denser urban areas and utilize digital surveillance and personnel in more rural areas to reduce illegal immigration along the border." Technically more accurate, but that doesn't paint the same kind of mental picture that can easily be conveyed by "build the wall" in a speech or debate.
Then one day my fiancee's father was watching a long-form "debate" or something that included Trump. I was astonished at how personable and clear his communication style was, and understood why so many people were so taken by his campaign's ideas and rhetoric.
* 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
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.
> Propaganda is a modern Latin word, ablative singular feminine of the gerundive form of propagare, meaning 'to spread' or 'to propagate', thus propaganda means for that which is to be propagated.[4] Originally this word derived from a new administrative body of the Catholic Church (congregation) created in 1622 as part of the Counter-Reformation, called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), or informally simply Propaganda.[3][5] Its activity was aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries.[3]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
Behold the cognate is true.
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 of whether it's worth staying long enough (and being bold enough) to get drawn into the nuanced underground dialogue, too. Sometimes yes. Sometimes that's quite exciting and makes the job more interesting and more durable.
Other times, it's just too hard to wiggle into that circle. Or that circle has its own evasions and power struggles. In those cases, it's easier to meet the basic formal requirements of the job, enjoy the extra time to have a rich life outside of work -- and think hard about what kind of next job would be better.
YES. Nailed it.
In my understand, it's broadcast that is weak at communicating nuance. But if you can figure out how to "tell stories" that propagate via conversation, then your capacity to communicate nuance is GREATLY increased. People will only take in so many bits of information, when they don't feel participant in the making.
I put "tell stories" in scare-quotes because imho they're not truly "told" and they're not truly "stories", at least not in the linear sense. It's more like they're "planted", and they're more like network stories than anything else. To tell them is more like building as escape room than writing a one-pager.
Post on any internet forum about some minor drawbacks of Technology X, and the comments will instantly split between those who feel personally offended and must defend the sanctity of X, and those who take the post as proof that X must not be used at all. People love to think in black & white. People don't like to parse "A if (B and (C or not-D))". It takes much training and discipline to overcome the instinct for simplification.
You can clarify yourself and correct any misunderstandings if you're in a small group that shares a lot of context, but this quickly becomes impossible as the group gets larger. Even competent statesmen struggle to convey "A if B else C" in their speeches.
Yes, nuanced comms don’t scale so why isn’t the answer—-don’t require scaled comms?
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.
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
Because of the branching factor it’s not feasible to do this for every bit of comms.
I do wonder if flat is an overreaction though. Intuitively I’d expect a mixed strategy to be most effective.
Edit: reflecting more, most claimed flat companies aren’t. So maybe they are pursuing mixed strategies and comm’ing out a simplified message.
but i wonder why non-scaled communication (if we can also call it that) works in the military?
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
In practice this is almost never done at scale because having them sequentially ordered means that they must be done pretty quickly and there are too many political turf battles to let them be done quicklty.
And the Romney critique as the "flipping Mormon" can also be seen as a rejection of nuance.
Romney was a pretty successful Governor of a liberal state. He needed to appeal to nationwide Republicans in the primary so he slid a lot further to the right. Then he was up against a reasonably popular Democratic president, so he slid back to the middle.
The only nuance was that he tried to muddy the sloshing to make it look like he wasn't changing his positions.
https://nitter.kavin.rocks/danluu/status/1487228574608211969
Covid policy for example. Some countries take into account natural immunity (more nuance). Others don't and simply require everyone to be vaccinated regardless (less nuance). Some recommend or even require kids to get the Covid vaccine (less nuance - everyone take it), other countries recommend against (more nuance - some should, some shouldn't). They all have access to the same data. Is this simply reflective of a different approach in communication? Or a different level of confidence or respect for the population to grok nuance?
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 paragraph.
I’ve done a lot of organising events for engineers inside companies where there are like 500+ engineers. You need email, slack, calendar invites and more to get people paying attention. And often they’re paying more attention to LinkedIn than what’s happening on the “inside” … you can run campaigns on LinkedIn that target your own people…
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.
But I think it's also often a mistaken "theory of mind" with some nerds who can't grasp that what's obvious for them is not obvious to everyone else.
I’ve genuinely never considered that.
When you appreciate the nuance, how do you decide what to strip away?
* Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey.
* Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graphic design (bolding one key sentence or whatever).
* Break up a giant nuanced email into sections.
* If something is critical, make it visual: a picture, explainer video, or an infographic can be really useful for something key.
This is harder than it looks. A quote attributed to Mark Twain is "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." It's a lot easier to go overboard than to distill what needs to be conveyed into the core elements.
> If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.
~ Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in The Operative Miller 23
[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/01/short-speech/
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.
That's a necessary part of having more than one goal. If they weren't in conflict, you'd only have one goal.
Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an email. The first one is the only one to get answered.
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.
(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).
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.
Near as I can tell, we’ve all been deluding ourselves about our own human natures too. Nearly everyone is exhausted and on the edge of burnout.
It causes predictable behaviors in everyone. Trying harder to make it not true just makes the inevitable reckoning worse.
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.
Think about those download websites where you have to find the download link in the middle of all the ads that are masquerading as download buttons. There's a lot of information on those pages, but people become really adept at spotting the real download button. The rest of the information gets ignored.
I think this is why some people insist on verbal communication when you're trying to teach them something. If they get a text guide then they will gloss over things and skip steps leading to failure. With verbal communication you're effectively there to keep them at least mildly focused so that they don't gloss over things.
I find this to be very true when learning new programming techniques. Most learning resources start from a significantly more basic starting point than most learners are at, so I'm liable to skip until I start seeing things I don't already know how to guess. The problem is that there are often important subtleties buried amidst the obvious knowledge.
I am sure that's often the case but I still find it rude and dismissive.
In the end it doesn't really matter for me as long as I can get my point/request across in a sentence or two (and cover my ass with an "optional" details section).
You're absolutely right that voice or face-to-face is essential for certain communication.
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.
Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not the other way around?
As the recipient, it's more challenging to receive the future promise of an answer with no SLA.
I agree that if there's no explicitly stated SLA and no implicit SLA given the relationship history between the two of us (e.g. I might know you're usually going to get back to me within 24 hours on such items), then this is practically the same.
I do not operate under such circumstances though. If I tell you that I will get back to you, then I will get back to you within a reasonable time frame and you will know from our previous interactions that I'm good for it in most cases and that it's totally OK for you to ask again after a day because I might have forgotten. I'm not perfect.
Since this was an example answer only, it is also possible that for one of your 7 questions the answer will simply be that I cannot get that answer to you within any reasonable amount of time at this point because of other priorities I have and that you should find someone else or I might point you towards someone else. In any case, you will have all of your 7 points answered. I won't just ignore them.
I also never said that I will answer your questions right away. Just that I will answer all 7 of them once I do reply. The opportunity cost of looking at my email inbox might be way too high at a particular moment and so I might not even see your message for a full day to begin with. Same w/ a slack message. I might not see your particular message for some time or I might see it and decide that it's not a message I can deal with on the side while in a meeting and mark it for later consumption e.g. for when the meeting ends early etc.
FWIW I've so far never seen anyone try to 'use' my thoroughness to create a denial of service attack against me. If that ever did happen, I would definitely change my stance. But it won't be to answer the first question each time. It would be to stop talking to them. Like I ignore any "Hi, can I ask you a question?" messages. Even some directors have tried that and just gotten ignored (first time someone does it, I will let them know they can just ask away. Second time they get ignored until they learn).
(I too appreciate thoroughness, but also believe that for some things in business “worse is better”. IE 90% thoroughness might cost 1/10th as much as 99% thoroughness, it’s certainly possible to over-index on the quality of the answers one provides)
You asked
> Why do the thorough people always have to empathize and not the other way around?
“Answers questions thoroughly” is a behavior, not part of a person’s identity. If someone gives you a partial answer, that may be optimal behavior for the circumstances, you don’t know, that’s where the empathy comes in. Of course empathy should be mutual, but you can’t be blocked on that to obtain a favorable business outcome. Empathy is a tool in your toolbox.
Maybe it's not entirely clear what I mean with thoroughness here. I am talking about not just ignoring someone's questions. It doesn't mean that if you "ask" me to answer 7 questions that will each take a day of work to answer that I will be "thorough and do those 7 things immediately to get you your answer". I will simply ensure that I read all your 7 questions and tell you that each will take me about a day to answer as it would require certain checks and that I do not have the time for that at the moment. However, if your questions are so urgent vs. the other things I have on my plate, you are welcome to talk to my boss/my product owner/etc on getting your items prioritized higher. I have a finite amount of time per day that I do work and while the exact amount can vary from time to time I will not start working 80 hour weeks or start ignoring your questions.
If I receive an email and it’s something I can quickly answer on my phone while waiting for the bus etc., I’ll do so and you’ll get a quick answer. If the email requires me to sit down and compose a long response (or worse, read a paper, or find and run some code) the email gets put on a priority queue to deal with during dedicated email-answering time.
If I receive an email with multiple questions, and one of them I can answer quickly, I might fire off a partial answer (under the theory that a partial answer now is preferable to a complete answer much later).
I had this recently with something I wanted to order online. I asked two questions, the second was answered, the first was ignored. So I had to send a second email to ask the first question again.
I'm really curious if it's a symptom of limited modern attention spans, or if you'd find the same issue in vintage hand-written letters.
1. People tend to skim and a question could be lost even in a two-sentence paragraph.
2. Email's structure means people tend to reply "at the tip" and branching conversations are difficult to understand.
Contributing to this latter problem are:
a. SMTP (to/cc are too flexible, each message is it's own "thing")
b. POP (deep conversations are just a stack of messages some people may not have the "original" and can't easily reply higher up the tree without breaking client threading)
c. Email client visualization of message threads are generally bad. I haven't seen a single client do this well. Outlook can, but out of the box has a very "flat" view.
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So, people tend to read at the bottom and if someone missed something early in a thread you have no chance of getting it addressed a few messages in.
IMO something more akin to newsgroups or even reddit/HN tree-view threads could be a better fit for business discussions, but I haven't seen anybody try it.
- Don't pick the first bullet point, pick the best :)
1) Assume no prior knowledge of a situation.
2) Provide some context for intent, objectives etc..
3) Greatly simplify the thrust of the message and initially provided only the most highly relevant details.
If you do that - then 'everything else is a detail' - meaning, if someone has a basic understanding of what the situation is, they can go into detail as needed.
If context is not provided, people have no idea what is going on and their professionalism, conscientiousness and curiosity is wasted.
I like the AMZN approach but I'll gather it could be done in a different way.
But there are some people you can't get through to, no matter what.
Help your readers triage. They already get too many emails.
1. Subjects with keywords. The subject clearly states the purpose of the email, and specifically, what you want them to do with your note. Keywords: ACTION, SIGN, INFO, DECISION, REQUEST, COORD
2. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). Lead your emails with a short, staccato statement that declares the purpose of the email and action required. The BLUF should quickly answer the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why. An effective BLUF distills the most important information for the reader.
3. Be economical. Short emails are more effective than long ones, so try to fit all content in one pane, so the recipient doesn’t have to scroll. Use active voice, so it’s clear who is doing the action. If an email requires more explanation, you should list background information after the BLUF as bullet points so that recipients can quickly grasp your message. Link to attachments rather than attaching files. This will likely provide the most recent version of a file. Also, the site will verify that the recipient has the right security credentials to see the file, and you don’t inadvertently send a file to someone who isn’t permitted to view it.
===
[1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...
When this happens it screams corporate communication / fluff piece to me, and I generally skip it entirely.
What would help more is if we didn’t get so much pointless information in our mailbox.
On one hand, yeah, may be nuanced message doesn't work at scale. However, when saying literally two things (vs one) became nuanced. I wound understand if it was a speech talking about a dozen of different things and their interplay... These were literally two things - create a solid product and let's move forward fast. That's it.
Also, why the hell whole hierarchy of middle management exist in such case? The only reason for it to exist is exactly ability to execute at scale (when things which are coming from the top are propagated properly).
When in fact these things, and 100 other goals and considerations like being green or hiring fairly or paying interns better etc... merely influence each other a little and don't preclude each other except at absurd hyperbolic extremes.
The different goals DO influence each other. But the output product can in fact have a whole bunch of both speed and reliability, probably at the expense of yet another dimension like cost, but actually the same applies there too, you can possibly have all 3, at least to some degree, if the leadership is insightful enough to figure out a way like employing underutilized people or geography, or gamification or crowdsourcing or alternative incentives, whatever.
Pay more or sacrifice in one dimension to get more in another is merely the obvious and easy way, not the only way dictated by some zero sum law of conservation.
If the lieutenant could figure it out, then Napoleon could relay orders to his generals (who would in turn send orders to their subordinates and so on) with confidence that the meaning would not be lost on the battlefield.
A good counterexample to the article would be Amazon's success with its leadership principles--much has been written about this, and I feel no need to repeat it here--or JFK's speech urging America to the moon, in which he spent significant time discussing the tradeoffs and sacrifices required to pursue the lunar landing, and in the end did not unilaterally decide to pursue the mission so much as he proposed a conversation about it and asked Americans to discuss the nuances and decide together. Nuance is possible at scale; it is a sad sign of the times that some now believe it is no longer possible.
If you haven't listened to JFK's speech, I strongly urge you to take a listen, and compare his measured, collegial tone to the tone of our politicians today.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1961...
"Nuanced communication usually doesn't work." seems more accurate. Being precise and clear is hard.
You just produce content and the people are just consuming the content in whatevre way they please. Large percentage of people won't consume it in the way you wish.
Because of the disconnect what you want is way less important fir the result than what they want.
It's ironic that he's communicating this on Twitter, a medium where nuance is particularly hard to convey, and where the audience is especially prone to missing it. I'm sure that's not lost on him.
One thing to note: the part about it being less of a problem when people misunderstand an article on HN than if they misunderstand a business communication made me think of (one time) when the CEO of our company defined a new strategy based on an article on Product Lead Growth he'd read. Or rather evidently misread, since he neglected the most important parts. My conclusion is that these things are interrelated, and mistakes can compound.
I really do think that reading comprehension is one of those things everybody (especially STEM people) assume they're good at, but usually they're actually just terrible at it, and supremely confident about that. The same goes with clear writing, which (to me) is even harder.
It's not just not easy to convey there, it's not tolerated by a large part of the population there.
1. Communicate intent.
2. Explain why.
3. Do not use more than 3 bullet points.
It's just easier to control people if you justify treating them like idiots.