12 ms·

Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

• GCA10 5y ago
  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.
  • wly_cdgr 5y ago
    ...or just stay there since real life happens outside of work and you've found a place where you've been able to make room for that
  • lostdog 5y ago
    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?
  • patcon 5y ago
    > 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.
• actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Slightly easier to read: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1487228574608211969.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1487228574608211969.html
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    And for the discussion, I recommend Nitter: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/danluu/status/1487228574608211969 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/danluu/status/1487228574608211969
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  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.
  • paviva 5y ago
    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".
    • karaterobot 5y ago
      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!
      • capableweb 5y ago
        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/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
        • slavik81 5y ago
          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 [1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/01/short-speech/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/01/short-speech/
• indymike 5y ago
  > Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale "Nuanced communication usually doesn't work." seems more accurate. Being precise and clear is hard.
  • oblio 5y ago
    I imagine you mean concise and clear?
• dekhn 5y ago
  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).
• MereInterest 5y ago
  This is why there must be separate private and public conversations. A comment that is appropriate for exploring nuances in a small group is inappropriate for wider communication to a large audience. Social media's blurring between small group conversations and publicly broadcasted conversations removes this distinction.
  • CyanBird 5y ago
    Absolutely correct, this is also why Senate and Congress meetings out be secret and not public Public discussions quickly devolve onto messaging rather than preserving nuance which itself goes against the main intention and use of said chambers of national debate For the interested https://congressionalresearch.org/ https://congressionalresearch.org/ Citations from dozens of academics on the topic https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html
• ggm 5y ago
  In the IT industry this scenario is fantastically common: Here is a proposal. It has this HUGE upside and this SMALL downside response: because of this HUGE downside, and the TINY upside, I reject this proposal If they said "what if the upside wasn't as big as you stated but the downside is larger than you stated" at least you could discuss the evidence. But people love to leap on problems and devils-advocate them into the ground. You see this all the time in IETF mailing lists. I'm not talking about nit-picking during working group last call on a standard, thats justified. People who simply want to be contrarian, take a devils-advocate stance, leap on any stated downside and on the premise its the proof, destroy the original idea, irrespective of the relative merits pro and con. So, "we should move to Postgres because of its support of IPv6 and JSON" dies on "but the sheer amount of code we have in MySQL makes this untenable" -which is not a good argument, given the budget and willingness to incur the cost. It doesn't address the upsides of the move at all. Or "but we don't know all the places which use the old SQL forms" which is true, but presupposes we couldn't handle case-by-case the legacy calls into the old SQL binding, or find some way to uncover them. The negative case arguments used, typically are shorthand for "I don't want to think about this"
• ford 5y ago
  This kind of doublespeak/mixed messaging with nuanced private conversations but dead-simple (or worse, spun) public statements is a double-edged sword. Sure it makes sure that the x% of employees who don't get the nuance won't ask questions about it, but it prevents ambitious employees from learning how decisions are made at higher levels. Understanding how the organization makes decisions can help you make decisions in your day-to-day work. Not to mention the fact that if you one day have aspirations of leading an organization, you need to understand how decisions are made. When over-generalized public statements are made, it not only conceals this information but corrupts it and can lead people to false understandings of how things are done. Some of the best insight I've gotten about why my organization and my company makes the decisions it does have come from reading discussions from senior leaders in google doc comments. I wish I could be a fly on the wall for live meetings or private conversations. In the optimal company, employees who don't want to have to grok the nuance would be able to trust the decisions of the leads. However all decisions should be made in the open so that those who do want to go to the effort of understanding something can learn.
  • MonaroVXR 5y ago
    I love to have some insights as well, can you point me in the right direction?
• Graffur 5y ago
  Twitter threads are really awful to read through and, in this case, funny since it is a thread about communication. Nothing really useful in the thread but the conclusion caught my attention: "Azure has, of course, also lapped Google on enterprise features & sales and is a solid #2 in cloud despite starting with infrastructure that was a decade behind Google's, technically." This didn't happen because of any communication strategy from VPs to developers. It happened because MS is an enterprise company with a strong brand.
• csours 5y ago
  This is very distressing to me. When I try to communicate using examples or analogies, people often get stuck on a particular example and try to solve that example. Communication is very hard.
• darepublic 5y ago
  > Move fast and break things Quickly self promote aggressively for its own sake and product and users be damned
• pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
  Too bad for scale then.
• deltree7 5y ago
  ITT, Most HNers completely missing the nuance of Dan's post.
  • RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
    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.
• funstuff007 5y ago
  IIRC Jonn Kerry's campaign for President was plagued by too much nuance in both his and the campaign's communications. And the Romney critique as the "flipping Mormon" can also be seen as a rejection of nuance.
  • cjsplat 5y ago
    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.
  • orzig 5y ago
    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.
    • funstuff007 5y ago
      yes, but the scale of the audience size is similar.
    • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
      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.
      • guerrilla 5y ago
        I think maybe you mean misinterpret? Or maybe we need a new word: disinterpret.
        • Brian_K_White 5y ago
• steelstraw 5y ago
  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?
  • tapas73 5y ago
    It extends to other policies as well
• harryf 5y ago
  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…
  • lanstin 5y ago
    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.
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    > “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.
    • robryan 5y ago
      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.
      • BurningFrog 5y ago
        It can be. 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.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Perceiving a risk is not in and of itself a reason to warn or talk about it, whether at scale, 1-on-1, or anything in between
  • jamiek88 5y ago
    Hmmm interesting. I’ve genuinely never considered that.
• solatic 5y ago
  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?
• victorronin 5y ago
  I read it and felt kind-of bitter. 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).
  • cecilpl2 5y ago
    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.
    • Brian_K_White 5y ago
      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.
• rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
  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.
• Invictus0 5y ago
  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. https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1961/JFKWHA-032/JFKWHA-032 https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1961...
• scotty79 5y ago
  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.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  Good... article? 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.
  • guerrilla 5y ago
    > where nuance is particularly hard to convey It's not just not easy to convey there, it's not tolerated by a large part of the population there.
• GartzenDeHaes 5y ago
  I'd say, 1. Communicate intent. 2. Explain why. 3. Do not use more than 3 bullet points.
• edmcnulty101 5y ago
  I disagree. I think people are smarter than the 'elite' give them credit for. It's just easier to control people if you justify treating them like idiots.
• michaelcampbell 5y ago
  It doesn't work as a series of tweets, either.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  Small groups ensure some state between us, so we can communicate at higher levels (or sometimes wronger ones).
• infofarmer 5y ago
  Counter-examples: Harry Potter, Marvel, etc. High bandwidth, low latency (often days or less), unlimited scale (most of the planet), high retention. Nuance will be pruned at scale if inessential. It’s a feature, not a bug. The popular stories are [perceived as essential] for survival and propagation.
  • librarianscott 5y ago
    I love your counter examples. In moving beyond the famous Shannon-Weaver model of communication[1], the one with the "signal," "noise," "channel" that network folks love, researchers settled on the importance of "feedback." I would say that these popular stories that become part of "mainstream culture" spread through comedy, song, news, bars, and repeated viewings on television to reinforce and strengthen the "mainstream" understanding of what these things mean and whether nuance is important when talking about them. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon–Weaver_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon–Weaver_model
    • infofarmer 5y ago
      I would highly recommend Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. He draws heavily on Neumann, Jung, and dozens of other giants to explore information and culture. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-OKOpQlHyR4k5h https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O...
• m0llusk 5y ago
  There must be multiple levels to this. At Apple, at least for a time, there was the overriding idea that "It should Just Work." That was supposed to translate to every part of Apple products. So clicking on stuff in the Finder should just work and AirPort WiFi should just work and so on. What exactly working meant was totally context dependent, but the additional detail that minimal effort and oversight should be required was broadly understood and teams that made products that failed that test were repremanded and reorganized if their products were not outright cancelled.
• mattmaroon 5y ago
  I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them. It's not the scale that makes the nuanced communication not work, it's the scale that makes you notice it. You could have the same communications with smaller groups and you'd have the same results, you just wouldn't be as likely to get negative feedback indicating it. It's also ironic to me that someone would try nuanced communication on Twitter, a platform whose very design discourages it. You can't do nuanced communication in 280 characters, but you can do vitriol just fine. So they do the tweet storm which turns off anyone who isn't incredibly interested in what you're saying.
  • mistermann 5y ago
    > I think the problem is that people, even smart people, lack critical thinking skills or don't apply them. I agree, but I think it's more nuanced than this: smart people can regularly be observed being unable to think critically during conversations (particularly on certain topics), yet the same people can think critically writing code. Assuming this is true (it's certainly quite true), it seems to me that differences between these two contexts causes the mind to behave differently.
    • alar44 5y ago
      The major difference is the synchronicity in communication. When you write code you can sit and ponder. When someone asks you a question in a conversation, you cant just walk away, think about it, and come back 15 minutes later. It's like speed chess vs hours per side. If you have to respond instantly, you move may be good, but you might find a better one given more time.
      • mistermann 5y ago
        Agreed, but that is possible on forums, but people often can't do it there either. There is something else going on imho.
    • lanstin 5y ago
      Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college, and while they lack the clarifying reality of equations and axiom systems, the practitioners of such fields are quite good at dissecting statements and pulling out the subtleties of human language based communication. A group of upper level literature students would I think pick up on more nuance than a group of CompSci students. They are also exposed to a lot more nuance in their regular reading and work.
• Spooky23 5y ago
  This is a really great thread and really resonated with my personal journey, although at a smaller scale. I’ve transitioned within a large enterprise from leading a deep & broad engineering team with about 50 people to a vertically integrated ops/technology team with about 800 people. The “work” is challenging, but the communications is much harder than I expected. It’s difficult to actually say anything at all because nobody will perceive what you say the same way, and then the telephone game with amplify whatever insecurities or worries that folks have. The hard part about flipping from “move fast and break things” to more order is knowing when the right time is to transition. The other hard part is that the official “communications” functions live in a different vertical, and getting them involved often makes things worse. So we get stuck getting engineers and interns to communicate with people.
• jancsika 5y ago
  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?
  • Brian_K_White 5y ago
    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.
    • mistermann 5y ago
      >> 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? > You just picked a single item and acted as though it were the only consideration in the universe. Did he 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 also seems like a great example.
      • Brian_K_White 5y ago
        I'm charging that he didn't in fact "get the point he's making". He didn't make a nuanced reaction that recognizes two different truths, he stated one thing and then stated the opposite. "I'm a generous person but I just want everything for myself." is not an example of nuance. It's an example of one or the other statement simply being untrue.
        • mistermann 5y ago
          Fair enough, but you didn't just miss nuance, you inserted novel events.
• jonmc12 5y ago
  As 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.
  • MonaroVXR 5y ago
    > "As another example, Amazon teams communicate product launch requirements via a future press releases including..." Do you have a source for this, guide and maybe a book about Amazon things?
    • tudorpavel 5y ago
      Working Backwards [0] is the actual name of the book on this subject. [0] https://www.workingbackwards.com/ https://www.workingbackwards.com/
      • chillage 5y ago
        Also described in Brad Stone's book series "The Everything Store" and "Amazon Unbound"
• smarx007 5y ago
  Au contraire, academia has worked out how to reliably communicate at scale: publishing peer-reviewed articles in journals.
  • qznc 5y ago
    Are you talking about the academia where everybody complains that people only read the abstracts?
    • smarx007 5y ago
      Which scientific journal are those complaints published in? (:
      • qznc 5y ago
        Spent a few minutes searching. Didn't find complaints but there are publications around this topic: > When conducting a systematic literature review, researchers usually determine the relevance of primary studies on the basis of the title and abstract. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-008-9075-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-008-9075-7 > Results showed that abstract readability is significantly related to the online attention RAs receive https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-021-04112-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-021-04112-9
        • smarx007 5y ago
          Thank you! However, this research does not seem to imply that researchers ONLY read the abstracts. When I do a search on Google Scholar, I may download 30 PDFs, for example. Then I would go through the abstracts and sort away those that: did not claim any empirical evaluation of their results, who did something way outside of the topic I am looking for, or did something I already know about well. But once I do that, I will read the remaining ones from start to finish. The papers you linked indeed seem to confirm that a lousy abstract increases the chances of your paper hitting the bin early but I would never allow myself to derive conclusions about the relevant papers just from the abstract. Related guide: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPaper.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape... Edit: On top of that, the second study you linked talks about "Altmetric attention scores of the RAs were used to measure the online attention they received". This indicates to me that they studied public interest from the non-academics and not among the academics. Of course, articles submitted to the scientific journal are primarily aimed at the academics in that field. This abstract is an example of how I would bin the article without reading it because it seems to study something I am not interested in. But again, I would not dare comment on its results because I have not read it.
• boulos 5y ago
  Multiple people are pointing out that posting this thread on Twitter is probably a mistake and can't figure out why he would do it: Dan (currently) works at Twitter.
• jollybean 5y ago
  We need to talk more about this. That said, Organizations with professionals should be able to do nuance, at least a bit of it. But the general public at large ... you're dealing with 'lowest common denominator' which is 'issues with literacy' and harder to grasp - very limited, care, attention span, and may not even be listening to the message - and may be getting misinformation from elsewhere. Communicating clearly is a skill. A lot of marketing people I believe have missed the message on this, every day I come across a new product and can't really understand what it does, the value proposition, who it's for, etc.. while at the same time there's tons of arbitrary marketing verbiage. Words matter.
  • akomtu 5y ago
    The approach used by most famous religious books (bhagavadgita, etc.) is statements with many layers of meanings. For example, such a book might say "do to others what you want others do to yourself" and a well-meaning simpleton gets only the surface level meaning, while a more advanced reader sees the more profound meaning, which might've offended simpletons. So everyone gets exactly as much as useful for them. Metaphors are used for the same reason.
    • jollybean 5y ago
      That's a really interesting point, but there's no practical way to do this i.e. to embed multiple layers of meaning into Public Communications. The rules for Public Communications are the same as they are for branding: Consistency, Clarity, Authenticity. A simple, legitimate message, repeated consistently. "Keep Calm and Move On". "Get Vaccinated". "Wear a Mask". etc..
• Macha 5y ago
  One of the comments for the thread. > I see this for every post, e.g., when I talked about how latency hadn't improved, one of the most common responses I got was about how I don't understand the good reasons for complexity. > I literally said there are good reasons for complexity in the post It feels like this kind of half baked point scoring reply is just a risk of posting on the internet. I'm sure I've been guilty of it at times too, and I think forums like HN or Reddit encourage it. So you end up having to be overclear in a way that hurts your message. For example, in just my previous post in another thread, I was talking about how I felt IMAP and SMTP support was important for a mail provider. However, I felt that if I just left it at that, some pedant would come yell at me about how IMAP and SMTP are not secure protocols since they're plaintext. So I wrote out IMAPS and SMTPS to ward off that kind of pedantry. But I'm still at risk of someone else wanting to score points indicating that actually, IMAPS and SMTPS isn't a thing. And they'd be sort of right, IMAPS and SMTPS are colloqial terms for their corresponding protocols over TLS, but you won't find an IMAPS spec, and if you look in the IMAP RFC, IMAPS is not something that is mentioned. I don't know how you fix this.
  • CyanBird 5y ago
    Above in the thread there's a quote on Cicero which covers your issue > "But let us return to Calvus whom we have just mentioned,—an Orator who had received more literary improvements than Curio, and had a more accurate and delicate manner of speaking, which he conducted with great taste and elegance; but, (by being too minute and nice a critic upon himself,) while he was labouring to correct and refine his language, he suffered all the force and spirit of it to evaporate. In short, it was so exquisitely polished, as to charm the eye of every skilful observer; but it was little noticed by the common people in a crowded Forum, which is the proper theatre of Eloquence." Cicero tells you that you ought not worry for the pedant, and instead appeal to simpler messaging if your aim is to target larger publics, the fact that you are saying something which could be taken as "conflictive" is itself a benefit if you foreshadow the conflict "there are some whom would say not so! To them I say begone!" and so on, etcetcetc
    • oehpr 5y ago
      I'm not sure Cicero had to deal with the pedant making their tedious rebuttal directly under where he placed his message, undermining the credibility of said message. Wait am I the pedant in this situation? Ah well.
• hinkley 5y ago
  > A number of companies I know of have put velocity & reliability/safety/etc. into their values and it's failed every time. I have a 'slow is fast' mantra and it's definitely something that a lot of people misunderstand, willfully or otherwise. I've often shrugged it off as the fact that going fast is exhilarating, while the effort of 'making the change easy' starts to sound dangerously like discipline. Perhaps I've downplayed the fact that A->B can sound an awful lot like A & B.
• mathgladiator 5y ago
  This is something that I'm learning to appreciate. My recent HN traffic spike (Woe of WebSocket) had many people missing the point. I'm preparing to launch my SaaS, and I'm wondering do I start with the fun and cheeky marketing "Hey, this was designed for board games, but you can use it for so much more" OR do I pair with "Infrastructure designed for JamStack" (which is a bit of a lie). I've started writing the Amazon style press release and FAQ to help me, but I'm excited to start the train on selling a crazy new platform.
• emptybottle 5y ago
  “Nuanced communication usually doesn’t work at scale” proceeds to write a lengthy nuanced post about it
  • rPlayer6554 5y ago
    > But that's because, if I write a blog post and 5% of HN readers get it and 95% miss the point, I view that as a good outcome since was useful for 5% of people and, if you want to convey nuanced information to everyone, I think that's impossible and I don't want to lose the nuance Bruh
  • loteck 5y ago
    Ironically, this criticism is addressed as a nuance in his post.
• danielvaughn 5y ago
  This has always been kind of obvious to me. If you utter a sentence that requires any amount of interpretation to understand, then more people = more possible interpretations.
• bfung 5y ago
  I wish I found this post before commenting in other threads on HN last night.
• wallacoloo 5y ago
  regarding the apparently competing values of reliability and velocity, try propagating these goals through different mediums. code quality can absolutely be ingrained into the culture. things like TDD, when/what to integration test, and encouraging PR reviewers to enforce these requirements. you can literally just run an in-house course/training for everyone and the aggressively follow through. once you’ve got reliability deep-seated in the culture, then you can talk about velocity all you want without worrying that your teams will make confused tradeoffs. in effect, you’ve communicated the nuanced concept that “we move fast, but always within the constraints that provide for a reliable product”. most people aren’t consciously thinking about it that way (not a bad thing), but their behavior matches what you were originally wanting to convey with a nuanced message.
• andersonmvd 5y ago
  Look at how many details this guy (Carl Sagan) conveyed in his 15' speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI in a way that potentially everyone understood. I wonder if every explanation was like his, if nuance wouldn't be well communicated, even to large groups.
• loteck 5y ago
  If Dan is right (and I think he is), have a stiff drink nearby and then think about how his point applies to something complicated that is life and death, such as conveying information to the public about a rampant virus.
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I agree with your point, but it's got me thinking about how the early mask guidance was so wrong. Early in the pandemic, virtually all the major health orgs spread the message "masks for the public don't work". Of course, the real issue was that there was a valid fear that there would be a run on masks and not enough for healthcare workers. There was never any significant evidence masks for the public don't work, on the contrary there was at least some flu-based evidenced that they were beneficial, but at best you could say "we don't know". So I'm very sympathetic to the authorities trying to give simple messages, but in the end the original guidance really bit them in the ass and made a lot of people lose trust. I wonder if the simpler message could have been "don't use a mask, because it means nobody will be left to treat you when your nurse/doctor needs a mask".
    • timr 5y ago
      > There was never any significant evidence masks for the public don't work, on the contrary there was at least some flu-based evidenced that they were beneficial, but at best you could say "we don't know" We aren't supposed to make decisions on medical interventions based on "evidence that X doesn't work". Otherwise, we'd default to just doing stuff until we had evidence that it was worse than doing nothing at all. Literally every failed drug ever tested had a biologically plausible reason for starting the test, and yet we know that most drugs don't work when you take them out of the lab! Saying that there were some papers out there recommending masks is beside the point, because you can find papers recommending lots of things that don't work. Pretty much anything, in fact. We can see the double-standard at play directly with the Ivermectin debate. Public masks and Ivermectin both have an evidence base of low-quality data, with weak effect sizes and huge error bars overall, and a clear bias of the strongest reported effect toward the lowest-quality evidence. But one is evil and the other is magic, depending on your politics. To take it back to the subject of the OP, here we have two issues that are fundamentally nuanced (the evidence bases are ambigious, at best), and collapsing the range of allowable communication to "you must do X!" leads to obviously wrong outcomes no matter what you do. So maybe we shouldn't be doing anything at all? Or maybe...maybe...we could try to get answers with experiments, instead of just making things up and asserting that we're right? For whatever it's worth, I recommend this paper as a balanced, comprehensive review of mask literature (not just cloth, though that is the title). You will not find a more complete treatment of the data for public masking: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-11/working-paper-64.pdf https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2021-11/working-pa...
• Animats 5y ago
  This is an observation that goes back to at least Cicero.[1] Cicero on the primary goal of oratory: "As, therefore, the two principal qualities required in an Orator, are to be neat and clear in stating the nature of his subject, and warm and forcible in moving the passions; and as he who fires and inflames his audience, will always effect more than he who can barely inform and amuse them..." Cicero describes the problem the OP reports: "But let us return to Calvus whom we have just mentioned,—an Orator who had received more literary improvements than Curio, and had a more accurate and delicate manner of speaking, which he conducted with great taste and elegance; but, (by being too minute and nice a critic upon himself,) while he was labouring to correct and refine his language, he suffered all the force and spirit of it to evaporate. In short, it was so exquisitely polished, as to charm the eye of every skilful observer; but it was little noticed by the common people in a crowded Forum, which is the proper theatre of Eloquence." Nuanced communication not working at scale, 2100 years ago. [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9776/pg9776-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9776/pg9776-images.html
  • scrubs 5y ago
    HN has been on fire this week -- in the good way! And this whole post and quote throws another log on it.
  • throwawayarnty 5y ago
    There is something wonderfully persuasive when someone can connect a modern topic to one that has already been addressed by the ancients. It feels as if the topic, once thought unwieldy and complicated, becomes tractable and clear. Perhaps the way to handle complicated nuances situations in life is to connect them to a classic problem. I feel this strategy also works in mathematical fields.
  • orbifold 5y ago
    One of my favourite memories from school was translating parts of Cicero's words from latin. He is considered "easy" to read and translate precisely because he took great care of not using difficult or ambiguous language in his writing as well.
  • 5y ago
• dqpb 5y ago
  This is why markets are an effective protocol for multi-agent coordination.
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  It seems "group communication can't be nuanced" doesn't capture the situation he's describing at Azure. My hunch would be management saw reliability levels as a given, something that daily orders wouldn't change whereas velocity was something that daily order could change. But just as much, this is a Microsoft division. That company has historically won by having more features sooner than competitors with the problem of the whole thing being a mess being a secondary consideration. Sure, in this case, the risk is they'll push so hard the whole thing blows up - but that doesn't mean you don't push as hard as possible because it's at least perceived that if you don't that, whether you blow-up or not won't matter (see the concept of technical debt, etc).
• dehrmann 5y ago
  Reminds me of politics. Try having a nuanced public policy discussion. What's especially bad about that is it makes people identify more strongly with their respective sides and double down on more extremest ideas.
• mruniverse 5y ago
  I don't think the nuance is lost. It's just that the audience has their own agenda. They might be fully aware of the "AND" and or "BUTS", but will focus on what they want that message to really be.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Nuanced takes more effort to process. Nuanced often comes ofc as having a smell (i.e., not a good one). When most everyone else is nuanced then simple and direct sticks out.
• theshrike79 5y ago
  Whenever articles like this about communication crop up, I like to remind people of Wiio's Laws[0] - from 1978: 1. Communication usually fails, except by accident. 2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage. 3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message. 4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds. 5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be. 6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. 7. The more important the situation is, the more probable you had forgotten an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago. Just to reiterate, these laws are over 40 years old, predating any kind of social media or internet-based communication - and they're still 100% valid. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws
  • hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
    But they are not before the TV, the Telegraph, the Film, the Printing Press or the Story. I'm not sure they are 'valid' but they are interesting. I think its more of a negative take, to highlight difficulties. I don't think they are always true. For example "4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds." seems the opposite of say televisual political messaging which relies on bombardment of essentially false information to convey meaning and proposed societal behaviour.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be. This hits particularly hard for me. End of last year I was finishing a bigger group project where actual PM was AWOL. Perception, especially in corporate environments, is everything.
    • LanceH 5y ago
      Then things are interpreted through the lens of "how they are supposed to seem to be."
• urthor 5y ago
  Semi-related: The amount of complaining about "dumb management" amongst software engineers is truly out of control I find. Newsflash, usually your principal engineer and VP are a lot cleverer than you, on average. They're at the top of a process to weed out idiots and are paid a multiple of your salary. I usually start from the position of "my VP is a smart and clever person" and work backwards, ALWAYS. It seems like this attitude is exceptionally rare though.
  • lanstin 5y ago
    Also people completely dissing other groups as being a bunch of incompetent wannabes because the speaker does not appreciate the full details of their actual work conditions. I tend to join new orgs every two or three years, but in the same large companies, and so many times I have joined an “underperforming” group to help them with a “turn around” only to find the group an intelligent and heroic group dealing with crazy conditions, with fixes they all well knew but which required a persistent long term effort, that management wouldn’t agree to.
• femiagbabiaka 5y ago
  the times that I've observed nuanced comms break down at scale, it is usually because genuine conversation is not possible, for a variety of reasons ranging from the number of people who would need to be involved in said conversations to political games of power. so then it becomes the job of a million layers of middle management playing telephone to translate but nuanced communication is also a skill that can be worked on, and certain classes of misunderstandings can be mitigated. dan calls this out in his post, but ironically a major one was missed in it as well: the resulting conversation seems to be entirely about individuals capability (based on IQ and other BS) to understand messages conveyed to them, rather than about the complex organizational dynamics that might result in someone being pushed into interpreting a message as something other than what it is EDIT: I'd also note that nuanced comms are equally difficult in large orgs irregardless of the size of the group being spoken to. For example, I've had VP+ (a smaller group given that the comms are going upward rather than down the org chart) misinterpret technical findings presented to them. There's so much extra cognitive overhead inherent in interpreting messages when you're in a Machiavellian experiment (aka the modern bigco environment)
• thrower123 5y ago
  Most people are dumb, and can't keep two separate ideas in their head. This feels correct, especially in aggregate. Many of the failures of public policy in recent years stems from a failure to confront how stupid the public at large is.
• hillel 5y ago
  Or maybe just nuanced communication doesn't work with most people independent of scale.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  >Meanwhile, the only message VPs communicated was the need for high velocity. When I asked why there was no communication about the thing considered the highest risk to the business, the answer was if they sent out a mixed message that included reliability, nothing would get done. The managers obviously didn't want to use nuance. They openly state that it would then enable those who they manage to negotiate with them, which is a power dynamic they'd rather avoid. If management was sensitive to the feedback, they could intelligently guide the organization through the trade offs involved, instead of blindly charging forward into subsequent, totally avoidable, brick walls. Software isn't as simple as making gears. Gears themselves are nowhere near as easy to get right as you think, by the way. When you produce gears, there are well known trade-offs in terms of manufacturing costs, maintenance requirements, and service life. None of that is true with software. Because the best source of information is with the programmers, and the users of the software, any feedback paths between them should be encouraged, and listened to by management, not crushed to meet the quarterly goals.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  >when I joined Azure, I asked people what the biggest risk to Azure was and the dominant answer was that if we had more global outages, major customers would lose trust in us and we'd lose them forever, permanently crippling the business That's a pretty good question to ask, at any job interview. I will use this tip! (won't ask it on the first interview, but it's pretty usefull for a second or third interview)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• layer8 5y ago
  Unrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1487228574608211969.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1487228574608211969.html
• modeless 5y ago
  You can remove "at scale" and it's still true. You can possibly even remove "nuanced" as well. Try writing an email to just one person. If you put two questions in it you will only get an answer to one of them (if you're lucky). Human language is an incredibly lossy form of communication. Practically the entire field of philosophy is a consequence of this.
• caffeine 5y ago
  This is why memes are so powerful .. you can communicate a 2- or 3- part thought with a well designed meme so that eg 50 % will get it rather than just 5%
  • qznc 5y ago
    I call it "theorem-proof" style: https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/theorem_proof_slides.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/theorem_proof_slides.html Sounds more serious than "meme pics" style. :)
• edanm 5y ago
  Patrick Lencioni said this in The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. Two of his principles are: 1. Create Clarity. 2. Overcommunicate Clarity. Executives always think they are overcommunicating (they hear themselves speak many times on the same subject so it gets super repetitive for them), but teams rarely have clarity.
• rg111 5y ago
  I have seen this extensively covered in "Made to Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath. I got this recommendation from HN itself. It was a great read. If your organization is large, you create one actionable, concrete, clear message, and you stick to it, and you communicate it downwards. Seeing it in action is Microsoft is not shocking.
• freetime2 5y ago
  And lots of people will only ever hear what you said second hand. After all nuance has been intentionally stripped out and the message has been spun to serve the aims of the person interpreting it. “Journalists” do this all the time, but I’ve also seen this happen in the workplace. When I was in grade school I remember my teachers used to constantly stress the importance of primary sources. And I didn’t really understand the importance until much later in life. Why do all that work when someone else has neatly summarized it for me on wikipedia? Now I basically have a rule where I don’t allow myself to have a strong opinion on something unless I’ve gone and read up on primary sources.
• ThinkBeat 5y ago
  The irony on having this discussion on Twitter is excellent.
• sdoering 5y ago
  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.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  • wly_cdgr 5y ago
    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.
    • chubot 5y ago
      Another analogy is drumming: When you're in a small room, you can play many notes, e.g. detail on the hi-hat, snare, whatever. In a large room with big speakers, that's all lost and you're basically a backbeat ...
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't do this here.
  • logicalmonster 5y ago
    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.
    • quacked 5y ago
• hitekker 5y ago
  On a related note, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370189 has an interesting paper worth reading.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    "Fuck Nuance" http://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf http://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf (PDF)
• kijin 5y ago
  It's not just corporate communication. 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.
• bradleyjg 5y ago
  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?
  • wrs 5y ago
    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.
    • bradleyjg 5y ago
      Definitely. TANSTAAFL 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.
    • tarr11 5y ago
      I wonder if you could checksum the telephone game by having a 2-level comms. That way the VP could validate that the Director didn't make a mistake when communicating to the EMs. Eg, n-level comms are where a CEO communicates to the entire org 1-level comms are where CEO->CTO->VP->Directors->EMs->ICs 2-level comms: CEO->CTO+VPs CTO->VPs+Directors VP->Directors+EMs Director->EM+ICs
      • theptip 5y ago
        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.