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In your experience what percentage of "[more/better] communication" as a diagnosis or remedy in a social context is an effective or appropriate one? I think it's uncommon these days.
One common example of this phenomena goes something like above. If you're still not picking up what I'm laying down consider the following:
More Communication the platitude, tool, and HR seminar is a lie. In contexts where More Communication is a social lubricant, language to demand conciliatory notions or more respect from the powers that be, why can't we just ask for that? Who decided we should wrap "communication" into such things? Stakes vary between context, but the mechanics of communication are important. Most people are shit at communicating, and even those who hold an unusually innovative communication super power are still shit at communicating with someone competent. We shouldn't be muddying that precise failure up with population level memes.
Napoleon didn't deploy the More Communication meme after the Battle of Aspern-Essling, did he? Maybe he did. Even so, I maintain that More Communication is too overloaded and watered down. A meme that can mean an apology is in order, the radio failed and no one sent a runner, management sucks, or no one is going to be holding the bag for the latest fuck up-- this must be a warcrime against autists. Whoever made the Communications B.A. what it is has a lot to answer for at the Hague.
I think a lot of the “more/better” thing is that it is often stuff that’s easy to recommend, has few explicit costs, and provides an easy way to avoid blame. TBH it’s a cop out, and really if someone isn’t communicating a concept properly, you can always ask. And second, because the answer is talking about the problem instead of figuring out what went wrong and how to fix it, no accountability happens and thus nothing changes.
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There's a genuine tendency to use it as an excuse, in the same way that postmortems sometimes devolve into 'our systems weren't sufficiently hardened against threats'. And there's a worse tendency to use it as a handwave, where genuine disagreements are just thrown away as insufficiently explaining or incompletely persuading people of The One Truth -- this latter option is both common to HR and to a certain browbeating political speaker.
But there is a steelman where a frustrating number of system failures occur despite the information existing, and even being recorded, but not being available or visible to the people who need it. The aviation contexts are the best-known: you get someone helping out and being interrupted half-way through and a few screws get left unturned and then everybody's dead, or where a big gradient in pilot experience leaves a first officer unwilling to challenge a pilot even if there's something clearly wrong. It pops up at smaller scales and dumber directions nonetheless. I've spent three hours in a meeting trying to figure out who owned a specific firewall, and the problem was that half of the people in the meeting didn't think we were even trying to identify the owner, but instead trying to go through the process assuming someone else owned it and they were being consulted about security ramifications. That is a thing that happens, pretty often.
But you can't just motion around More Communication if it also means just assuming people will just agree with you if you shout at them more.
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I work with a lot of process engineers and technical program managers. In many ways they are interpreters between the the computer touchers and the MBAs, lawyers, accountants etc. Also work in documentation for customer facing products and services. Poor communication causes the majority of the problems I'm encountering at work right now. Our comms team seemed like one of the most obvious places to replace people with AI. We aren't entirely sure how to do that yet, but they've already fired the people in anticipation. In the meantime software updates continue to roll out on time with zero communication to the users and no mechanism for feedback or problem reporting. In my experience many of our software developers and other tech ICs are more than happy to work hard and long on important projects, but they will have 0 communication with anyone outside their team: exectutives, HR, legal, customers, end users etc. if they can get away with it. They'll document but are generally terrible at writing for any audience other than fellow developers. I think "more communication" as a phrase is almost meaningless though. Its too vague. The volume of communications is not a slider or dial where turning it to the right makes things better. Good comms are clear, timely, digestable to their audience, and surfaced with a forcefulness related to their importance, ie critical comms should be almost impossible for the intended audience to miss.
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It might technically be the correct diagnosis but I've never been in a situation where more communication has been the solution.
The issue is almost invariably that management refuses to listen to complaints about some issue and then when shit hits the fan they hit back with the genius solution of "we need to communicate more". No, you need to actually listen more but you won't do that because the time horizon of the thing in question becoming an acute problem is too long for you to risk meaningful personal consequences. You can just move on to a different role/employer and let things implode behind you.
I've seen this both from the perspective one one of the people that is being ignored and as a consultant coming in to make sure it doesn't happen again (it will happen again).
Whenever "we need to communicate more/better" comes up I'm reminded of the final scene in burn after reading.
"We need to communicate better" is the kind of shit you trot out when no-one wants to accept accountability. It's a form of managerial corruption where everyone agrees to look away so that no-one risks getting blamed for the issue at hand or similar things in the future. It's organisational rot in the form of a conspiracy of mutual ignorance and diffused responsibility.
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"More Communication" is sometimes code for something one level deeper.
But it can also be used as an object-level good:
There's a huge gap between more communication as a means of creating/spreading knowledge and more communication as an end in itself. The phrase "More Communication" is almost always code for the latter in my experience.
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I could be an outlier but I thought I learned a decent thing or two from the communication class I took in college, years ago. None of it still strongly translated into direct applicability that I could detect at work or in my personal life, but I did find it useful to apply elsewhere.
One thing I’ve noticed about the Bay Area is because of its population size, density, competitiveness, the quick and hurried nature of things, people here tend to communicate in a fast and concise, “give me only the cliff notes” version of everything. Some of this makes sense, other times it makes me very frustrated dealing with them.
When I walk into a drug store and need to ask the pharmacist about something or I look at the back of the package of an allergy medication, I don’t want to have to have a Ph.D in biochemistry to evaluate your product to know whether it’s going to help with my illness or not. I’m completely happy to hand it off to the marketing department to speak the language of ordinary people and tell me why their product is valuable to address the symptoms I’m experiencing.
On the other hand when someone tries hitting me up to get my opinion on something and they keep cutting me off or telling me I’m over explaining things, they’ll then spend the next half an hour asking 45 follow up questions, like hitting a stoplight after every 2 seconds before hitting the gas again when if you simply shut up and let me finish for 2 damn minutes, maybe, just maybe… all your questions may end up getting addressed without you ever having to ask. Yes, I don’t like it when people drone on anymore than anyone else does, but so few people here have ever perfected the skill of listening, it can be very difficult at times. A lot of times I don’t even bother for that reason.
I’ve also detested those academics who say things like “if you can’t explain it in 5 seconds to a 5 year old, you don’t understand it.” Homie. There are concepts I haven’t been able to understand for my entire life. Same for you. And with so much of human interaction today being trained off social media feeds, I can’t even imagine how agonizing it must be to ask people to read a single page in a book.
I think choosing what and which communication to complete a task is more useful than an academic understanding. As a basic concept for people who would have never considered it as such it's probably good to cram it into the heads of all undergrads.
Follow-up questions as a KPI for active listening seems perfectly suited for the Bay Area. I wonder if this is an effect of moving away from lectures across education, or if it is more so an annoying compulsion because everyone asks AI or Google anything at any time. Who needs to listen to people with knowledge?
RE: Friday reference. I became concerned after learning they are making another. The new setting is in a gentrified neighborhood which could be funny, or it could be the old, out of touch leads are incapable of making a crass (B)lack comedy without the weight of heavy handed social commentary. One can hope it's only marketing.
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If you feel like being mean, ask them: "How long did your education take? That long, huh. Did your professors not understand the material, or are you worse at understanding things than a five-year-old?"
At best, a 5-second summary is a label that well-rounded individuals can use to find what you're talking about. At worse, it's a semantic stopsign that gets them to stop asking questions and fake understanding. It doesn't have enough information to explain anything with any complexity.
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