Great 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!
The real treasure was the weak ties we made along the way.
Jokes aside I do agree with you! The little things actually build up to the big things. Trying to insist on the big things via big-things-methods, that somehow forego the little things that comprise it all, will ironically have you miss the actual big thing. (Which might not be what you're pointing at... but I am!)
This 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.
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.
This is a confusing comment. There is no repetition in the article, and it goes over examples of workplaces that implemented these ideas. It’s basically a shorter version of the paper.
What 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
> 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.
“Social Physics” is Alex Pentland’s term for this kind of analysis. He’s been using it for a decade or two https://a.co/d/0jcnmbap it’s almost a trademark at this point. Most people (including me when I was working on this stuff) refer to it as human dynamics
That being said, August Comte came up with the name back in the 19th century before settling on “Sociology”
I’ve had a very similar experience to what has been described.
A few additional elements from my experience:
- Trust within the team meaning the required competence and delivering on time.
- Team size.
- Team empowerment, imo the most important one. If the team doesn’t feel empowered for whatever reason, this will bring most of the things listed in the article to a halt.
You can structure meetings to drop performative theater and rigid ineffective communication patterns, so that less artificial "informal" conversations at the water cooler are needed.
Not saying they don't have a place, just that we over lean on artificially controlling and "steering" or manipulating our way with others and that IMO is what limits the creativity we are claiming to be after.
Our internal voices are often very different. A core feature of not only functioning teams but also democracies is that room exists for a strong diversity of these to be expressed (& heard) freely & frequently.
Absent this, we can backslide very quickly, or stagnate.
Or sometimes grow until market conditions no longer favor us, when underlying limits are surfaced by well positioned rivals.
21 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadJokes aside I do agree with you! The little things actually build up to the big things. Trying to insist on the big things via big-things-methods, that somehow forego the little things that comprise it all, will ironically have you miss the actual big thing. (Which might not be what you're pointing at... but I am!)
> 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.
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.
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
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.
That being said, August Comte came up with the name back in the 19th century before settling on “Sociology”
A few additional elements from my experience:
- Trust within the team meaning the required competence and delivering on time.
- Team size.
- Team empowerment, imo the most important one. If the team doesn’t feel empowered for whatever reason, this will bring most of the things listed in the article to a halt.
Not saying they don't have a place, just that we over lean on artificially controlling and "steering" or manipulating our way with others and that IMO is what limits the creativity we are claiming to be after.
Absent this, we can backslide very quickly, or stagnate.
Or sometimes grow until market conditions no longer favor us, when underlying limits are surfaced by well positioned rivals.