Communication
Epistemology And Human Fallibility
Aug 25th
I read quite a bit. I’m constantly energized by new ideas and books provide a way for me to swim in them. As I read, it’s fascinating to see interesting themes that tie different books together. I don’t recommend every book I read, but there are three books that I think are must reads.
- The Black Swan – Nicholas Taleb
- Amusing Ourselves To Death – Neil Postman
- Revising Prose – Richard Lanham
These three books are all extremely well written and all deal in one way or another with our epistemology — how we know what we know.
The Black Swan illustrates how poorly we, as humans, understand random events. We proudly predict the future, then something happens that we didn’t expect. We then rationalize that it was totally predictable, thereby returning our pride in our predictions. Knowing how much you don’t know is critical. Many of my blog entries illustrate this very theme. We delude ourselves into believing our perspective is whole when it is only partial.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a polemic on how our culture establishes its standard for truth. A cultures media for discourse affects its standard of truth. We’ve moved from an oral culture, to a written culture, to a pictorial culture. Postman’s well written polemic reveals the TV’s inadequacies as a medium of discourse.
I’ve long had a hard time watching most news programs and this book enumerated why. Recently, my mother-in-law was watching the news and one reporter made a passionate plea for the US to exit Afghanistan. People are dying for a reason that no one knows, he argued sincerely. This was then followed by: “The Rockies lost the game against the Dodgers 3-2 last night…”. *sigh*
Revising Prose is the most specialized of these three and may only interest you if you’re interested in writing. Nevertheless, it shows the horrendous nature of the “Official Style”. He revises sentences like:
“The purpose of an environmental scan is to obtain a general understanding of the external business environment we are currently in and expect to be in over the near-term”
into:
“An environment scan surveys the current and foreseeable business environment.”
Revising Prose requires us to consider how we write is an expression of how we think. Writing vaguely indicates vague thinking.
We are limited in our ability to know. We prefer to think without considering how we think. All three of these books will challenge and provide clarity on how we can swim in the world of ideas with greater clarity.
Periods and Question Marks
Aug 17th
Sometime ago I worked with someone who I occasionally meet for lunch. I found that I enjoyed the conversation so long as I ended all of my sentences with question marks. If I did so, he would talk and share a wealth of opinion. As soon as I started using periods, he started looking at his watch.
I was reminded of him this last week when I met with a cadre of sales and marketing people. People full of opinions they want to share. I decided that one way to measure someone is by the ratio of periods to question marks they use. Question marks indicate a desire to listen and share. Periods simply mean you’re talking.
Some people presume to know exactly what we need to hear and are full of periods. Some don’t have enough information yet to target their comments, and so instead of adding insight, add frustration. Others know they don’t know things and wait for questions and ask some of their own.
Of course, when I judge others like this, my first thought is to wonder about my ratio. Like when I was eating dinner at a friend’s house, and his wife said sternly to his daughter: “You’ve spilled spaghetti all over your shirt!” At which point both my friend and I looked down at our own shirts just to check before making any further comments.
So have you ever considered your ratio of question marks to periods?
Is It Their Personality or Just Circumstances?
Jul 13th
Last summer I read my first Kindle book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It’s a perfect book for the kindle since it’s over 1,000 pages, 100 of which are footnotes, vital to understanding the book, if understanding is really fully possible. While I was glad for the experience, the book is not for everyone. What is for everyone is his Commencement Address given at Kenyon college, where he discusses the way we experience our lives in contrast to the way we view others lives.
I was reminded of this speech because twice in the last week I came across different descriptions of the Fundamental Attribution Error. This essentially states that we are prone to assess the cause of action in others as coming from their personality rather than the circumstances they are in. One example last week came from Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirkey. He discusses how Generation-X was at one time described as slackers without ambition. This assessment was made during an economic slump and as the economics picked up, the Gen-Xers suddenly went to work with gusto. They are now described as having an entrepreneurial spirit. Actions (acting like a slacker vs. being industrious) are heavily dependent on the circumstances (economy). Generational observations, however, ignore circumstances and commit the Fundamental Attribution Error by assigning observed actions to some character trait in that generation. Even when subsequent predictions came to opposite conclusions (industrious vs lazy), they continue to be made.
This error applies to us at a personal level as well. When someone cuts us off on the road, we likely attribute this to them being a jerk; however, the circumstances might be that they were rushing home because their wife was going into labor. Or when you call someone you don’t know, and they are short with you. Are they just a rude person? Or was it that their two-year old just threw a tantrum right before the phone rang? Since we are unable to know most of the circumstances that affect others around us, we make judgments about their personality. We attribute their actions as coming from the core of who they are.
However, when we judge our own actions, we judge them entirely based on circumstances. We are fully aware of our own circumstances and see our actions as stemming from them. We think: “oops, I just cut that person off; I didn’t see them in the other lane” instead of what we often think about others: “What a jerk!”. We know it was just a mistake, the other driver thinks it’s our personality.
Because this error is common to all of us, knowing about it can help us pause when we make a rash judgment about another person or even an entire group of people. Instead, we can take a moment to recognize the many circumstances that are unknown to us and if we are creative, can imagine circumstances where their action might be justified. Doing this can help us feel less offended and ultimately, much happier.
[If you haven't already and have some time, I highly recommend you check out the commencement speech. It covers a deeper theme about thinking about what we think about and has a good joke at the beginning to boot. As always, let me know what you think. Also, if you are interested in what I have been reading, I keep my reading list up to-date in my Books Section]
Amplifying Noise
Jun 2nd
Yesterday, Ann and I were watching a Mexican dancing television show at a restaurant. Something about it struck me very funny and I laughed out loud. At the same time, I looked over to see a waiter and a waitress pretending to dance like they were on the show. After my laugh, they looked over at me and assumed I was laughing at them. I smiled at them and they smiled back and it was the end. There was no opportunity to clarify.
Too often we find ourselves interpreting the actions of others out of context. I have met people for the first time and decided that for whatever reason, they didn’t like me; however, after being with them a few more times, we became good friends.
Its easy for us to emphasize subtle messages in new relationships that are fake. We amplify these messages to a level of importance they shouldn’t have, and it can have a profound affect on how the relationship develops. I believe this stems from three things. First, we are constantly searching for cause and effect. Second, we see what we want to see. Third, we seek confirmation rather than negation of our conclusions.
Nicholas Taleb, author of the Black Swan, writes: “People are explanation machines.” We create completely logical explanations for the phenomena we see. We maintain this explanation until we are presented with evidence that contradicts it. Then, we create a new story for the phenomena remaining just as confident in our new answer as we were in our incorrect answer. The reality is that we don’t have enough information to come to any form of certainty in our conclusions, but we do anyway.
Every person has a view of the world that they use to interpret new data. In this way, new relationships can resemble Rorschach tests. People will interpret messages or actions differently. Some will treat an action as irrelevant, others will decide the person is being rude, someone else that they are being gracious — all based on our own expectations. Living in a country where the culture is different from your own only compounds this effect; however, as relationships grow, we learn what signals are important because we have more knowledge of the other person.
Finally, we search to confirm our conclusions. Once we have an idea in our minds, we go about collecting evidence to corroborate our original opinion rather than looking for indications that we might be wrong. In fact, we can even ignore the data that doesn’t fit with our idea and add importance to the data that does. This causes us to amplify our misconceptions.
This process happens not only with new friendships but also with all new relationships, including those with new customers. We pick up what we think are signals for good or bad and amplify what is probably just noise, giving it a level of importance that it shouldn’t have. This can lead us to make bad judgements both about the other person and about the relationship in general that can be difficult to change.
If, instead, we withhold our judgments, we don’t give more credibility to a message that is simply noise. If we find some subtle communication troubling we should search out all the possible reasons for it, giving as much deference to the other, rather than going with our initial instinct. This not only helps us recognize how little we truly know, but also starts to build a better context to interpret new information. It also keeps us from looking for confirming evidence because we admit that we simply don’t know. It is only in this way that we keep ourselves from being trapped by our own preconceptions and making mistakes that we may later regret.
There Is No Signatum Without Signum
May 11th
There is no signatum without signum” – Quote from a reading that Ann was translating to Spanish
Most of you probably read that quote with emphatic agreement, if not, then you’re probably wondering what signum and signatum are, much as we were when Ann asked me what this meant.
After doing a bit of searching, we came to understand this quote as “There are no entities of a category if the category is not named”. Here is a more concrete example: Gouda, Cheddar, and Swiss are all types of cheese. Without the word cheese, or a description there of, the group doesn’t exist. Gouda isn’t cheese, it’s just Gouda.
Categories are concepts that help us organize the world. They help us better understand the world around us by grouping common elements and making general observations about them. Many insights about the world around us stem from the creation of new categories.
This is the basis of personality tests. They create named categories with specific observations about that group. These observations, which would not otherwise exist, can improve your own ability to reflect on how people differ.
Categories can also help us see marketing opportunities better. Here is one example I recently encountered: A marketing student told a VP from Clorox that people his age weren’t interested in preventative cleaning. Instead, they cleaned when it became a problem. Upon hearing this, the VP suggested that the students were not their target market. The student disagreed, and responded by creating two new categories. Some people view things as durable; stuff that will be here for a long time and should be maintained. Slogans like “Clean it so it looks brand new” fit well with this type of person. The other category of people is one who sees things as temporary. If something gets damaged, you throw it away and get a new one. This is the consumable culture. They still might want to clean, they view cleaning as different. By re-framing the categories, he makes it easy to see how Clorox might market to this new category in a different way. Once you have defined the category, you can make enlightening observations about each of those groups that before didn’t have a way to make generalizations.
Categorization matters and this story reminded me of the quote which I find fascinating. Little did I know that the esoteric knowledge would start creating a framework to understand other concepts. I suppose that in this sense, the quote is the signum that I needed to understand the signatum of categories. 
The RapidChip Fallacy
Mar 7th
“The market is going to face this big, nasty problem and they will have no other choice but to use our product to solve it.” – Excited Entrepreneur
Most of the time, this entrepreneur is committing the same fallacy that we faced when working on a failed project called RapidChip.
This fallacy is related to, but different from the “If you build it, they will come” fallacy. This one is committed by excited technologists assuming that simply building the superior technology will draw customers. It leads to a rude awakening when, even though the technology is amazing, no one wants to buy it.
Instead of committing this fallacy, our excited entrepreneur knows that success comes from reducing a customer’s pain. Unfortunately, his excitement about his own solution creates a blindspot when regarding how the customer sees his solution. Solutions not only need to solve a customers pain, but also need to solve it in a way that the customer is expecting.
You can image an entrepreneur selling bionic feet believing he has the perfect solution to foot pain. Simply amputate the foot, and use this amazing bionic replacement. Unfortunately, this fails to consider how people think about solving foot pain (usually something other than cutting it off).
A more real world example was RapidChip. The intent was to solve a big industry problem: as transistors continue to shrink, manufacturing the silicon gets more expensive. RapidChip provided a solution. Essentially, we would manufacture half of the chip, allowing customers to customize the other half. Because the cost of manufacturing half of the chip would be shared between multiple projects, the overall cost of each project would be significantly reduced.
At first glance, this appeared like a great solution, but it overlooked the perspective of the customers. We assumed that customers would continue to create products that relied on custom chips. But this wasn’t their only choice. One option was for them to buy another companies chip; another was to make their next product applicable to a wider class of customers thereby justifying the cost. Our solution was only attractive if the customer had already decided to look for a new technique for manufacturing chips and knew that we existed when they were doing their planning. Our solution only works if multiple projects can share the bottom half, unfortunately, this means designing your chip around a specific half that already exists. This was a constraint they never had to deal with before, and so they were solving the expense problem with other solutions, or demanding we create a custom bottom half just for them, which unfortunately eliminates the entire value proposition.
This wasn’t the only reason that RapidChip failed, but once the above fallacy took root in the minds of those working on it, we failed to consider what other alternatives customers would use, nor had we considered how to convince them to accept the additional constraints of RapidChip. We didn’t seek to design the technology to be easy for customers to move to. It is easy to become so enamored with the elegance of your own solution, that you fail to consider the way a customer will see it.
Every solution introduces its own set of constraints. Just because your customer has a critical problem and you have a solution, doesn’t mean yours is the only solution. More importantly, never underestimate the ability of a man in desperation to find a solution no one else had considered.
Always, always, always consider the alternatives that a customer may already have to solving their “unsolvable” problem and be honest about the constraints that your solution imposes on your customer, and then design the solution so that the customer sees it as an obvious choice.
Further reading:
- Customer development – A process described in detail by Steven Blank
- If it walks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s a duck – A good discussion of lessons learned from a failed start-up. His paragraph with this title is related to the above.
Guest Blog: Mawy had a Yittle Yam
Feb 9th
[In response to my post on Tea Bog Beet Knee, Matthew Ritzman, a friend of mine, wrote a response that I thought worthy of more attention. Matthew and I met while he was President of the local Toastmasters club that I attended. His speeches always tied in personal stories and how they impacted him and his story below is another excellent example. Tea Bog Beet Knee was about the responsibility of the communicator to speak in a way that can be understood by his audience, this is about the other side of that coin]
The more I understand the hurdles of getting my point across the more amazed I become that any communication can happen at all. In the very best of scenarios, information is lost between the speaker and the listener.
We present our ideas and we absorb concepts, often in rapid succession. When we are the ones trying to make sense out of the senseless, there are many things we can do to help facilitate communication. One is to familiarize ourselves with the vocabulary and the ways of speaking of the other person.
My younger daughter, Josie, has developmental delays. She has a limited vocabulary, has difficulty pronouncing certain letters (she uses ‘Y’ in the place of ‘L’ and drops most of her ‘S’ sounds) and letter combinations, and speaks slowly with a very metered cadence. She seldom has the luxury of saying things in a different way, so she goes with volume and repetition. (We are actually very happy for whatever words and fragments she provides – she used to say, “EEEE, EEEE, EEEE, EEEEEEEEE” when she wanted something). We’ve found that she often says some pretty remarkable things, but we have to pay close attention and analyze her words to figure out what she’s saying.
With effort on both sides, we are often able to figure out what she’s trying to get across.
As an example, her sister, Kallan, brought home a recorder from school, and was learning, “Mary had a little lamb,” by playing it over and over. Josie, who doesn’t often string together words together came up with two complete sentences.
STOP………………. PLAY……………… THAT
STOP………………. PLAY……………… THAT
I………………………TAKE……………….EEE……………..AWAY
The long pauses between words and limited enunciation are barriers to communication, but they aren’t completely insurmountable. By understanding her patterns and the context we found the intended meaning (and the unintentional humor).
Besides merely listening to understand, another thing we can do is engage additional media. I tend to communicate best with the help of pictures. Dan Roam, in his book, _The_Back_of_the_Napkin_, discusses how drawings can break down barriers and help us identify and solve problems. He gives some useful strategies for attacking problems with pictures. Pictures can be understood in situations where language gets cumbersome.
True communication is a two way street. It really comes down to a partnership between the audience and the presenter. In fact, the best communication happens when both parties do their very best to communicate clearly as well as listening to truly understand where the other is coming from.
Cultural Inertia
Feb 2nd
Often, as a leader, you can see the long term consequences of a culture if it continues unabated. You see people taking habitual actions that lead to horrible ends and you want to encourage them to change, but changing a culture is never as simple as you’d like it to be.
Recently, I finished reading Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
While I found a good portion of the book a bit contrived, one of the more subtle themes is the nature of cultural and societal norms. As such, this book encourages an interesting thought experiment about societies, both large and small. The narrator, as the lone educated man, desires the return of the old culture and the old productivity. He remembers what America was like and wants to instill the same values, often using diatribes to try to motivate change. He wrestles with helping them understand the challenges that lie ahead, but right now they are surrounded by plenty (i.e. shops full of goods). He wants them to innovate rather than scavenge — to provide for themselves rather than taking the ease of simple consumption.
Ultimately, he changes his tack. He stops forcing school and stops giving speeches. He “invents” a bow and arrow from a tree, built by his own hand, as a game, so that when the bullets no longer fire, they will still be able to hunt. In the end, working with the culture to improve some aspects of it.
It is very difficult to change any culture. Each culture is comprised of self-reinforcing cycles. We look to others for assurance in our actions and they look to us for confidence in theirs. If you start pushing for change too hard, they stop looking to you for validation. You simply become an outlier. Don’t push enough, and nothing changes. Changing is more work than staying in the rut of the status quo.
However, the size of the group can make a dramatic difference in it’s cultural fungibility. For instance, when the group is small and the connections between them weak (like a new startup) the culture is highly influenced by the founders. The culture takes shape and continues to evolve as new employees join them. Each new employee affects the culture some, but their influence tends to be completely subsumed by the others influence on them.
Relatedly, as I mentioned earlier (“Inertia of Uncertainty”), as time passes, we, as leaders, stop noticing the things that we wish were different. As a result, when you come into an organization new, and wish to change things, you must over-communicate what you want to change and hold the line with solidarity. There is a limit to the amount of change that will be accepted, so you must pick the right battle and persist. No single speech will evoke change. The change has to be encouraged at every opportunity and violations of the change called out. This takes longer than you think it should take, but as with the narrator in Earth Abides, once it’s done, the changes persist long after your gone.
The rudeness of not following my unstated expectations
Jan 28th
Imagine the following situation: You invite an acquaintance out for a cup of coffee. They strike you as someone you might like to know better and figure this could be a good way to get to know them outside of your normal social circles. They graciously accept and you’re looking forward to it. The day arrives and you show up at the coffee shop, only to see that they’ve invited some of their other friends to come along. How do you feel?
Over the last few years, we have lived in several locations. The latest move to Mexico has been most revealing about the subtlety of human communication and connection. Each of us has been taught by our culture and more specifically by our family, a set of expectations for proper behavior.
These are the ways that we interact with one another that is considered polite and civilized. But, not surprisingly, different countries have different sets of expectation and patterns of communication.
One of my friends who lived in Germany once asked her boyfriend to be brutally honest with her. He responded that he didn’t think he could ever love her, but wanted to be friends who touch. Lesson: the Germans tend to be what Americans call “brutally honest” all the time and asking them to be “brutally honest” pushes beyond most Americans’ comprehension.
Here in Mexico, things don’t usually turn out to be this drastic, but far more subtle. It’s easy to think that when they violate our uncommunicated social expectation that they are being rude. Of course, this ignores all of the times that we have violated their unstated social expectation unawares.
Oddly, conversations about most of these things are difficult. You can’t say to your friend, “Hey, you’re not going to invite anyone else are you?”. It’s too strong, or at least it feels to strong if you’re an American. Unstated expectations tend to remain unstated without some spark to engage in learning more about what exactly is expected and being flexible on the other person when they violate your expectations — not from intent, but from ignorance. More over, even after it is stated, it is often difficult to explain why. These are things we learn from living in a society together.
These differences for what makes for polite or rude behavior show up all the time among families as well. Different families have different expectations of one another and different ways of communicating with each other. This can often come out in work situations – we each carry around our own set of expectations for how others ought to behave and can easily be offended when they don’t do so. Or worse, even assign to them a motive of malice.
Now, when I hear someone say, “That person was so rude”. I hear, “That person didn’t meet my unstated expectation of social norms”. And even though it seems to happen more often when there are major cultural differences, it happens just as often in the workplace, in families, in friendships. If there is offense, it’s good to discuss it so the other person can be aware, but it also has to be coupled with grace for them if they violate it again in the future. These types of values are not changed instantly.
So, back to the coffee shop, with you, your friends and their friends. Either you can stew, or you can remember that they may have thought it was rude to not to invite their friends. Better to simply enjoy the event for what it is, and the next time say, “I’d really like to get to know you personally. Do you think just you and I might get breakfast sometime?” – And hope for a better outcome.
Visualizing Our Mental Limitations
Jan 26th
When I saw this picture on my friend Daniel’s blog, I immediately thought it was an excellent picture of one of the themes that I write quite a bit about – our inability to both predict the future and recollect with accuracy our past. In both cases, we don’t see things as clearly as we think we do.
We see today clearly (the double-six). We remember yesterday, not horribly but sufficiently to see that it fits contiguous to where we see ourselves today. We see tomorrow with a little clarity and also how it fits with today. But as we get further away from both yesterday and tomorrow, our focus becomes increasingly less clear. What’s interesting though, is that we maintain mental models that assume we have clarity in both directions. We don’t remember things clearly, but we think that we do. We don’t really predict the future well, but we believe we do (or we wouldn’t keep doing it).
So perhaps a picture is not only worth 1000 words, but also quite a few blog entries.
[Picture provided courtesy of Daniel Solorio, a designer/photographer here in Guadalajara. Today is Daniel's birthday and so I thought it was an appropriate day to finally blog on one of his photos that I really liked. He and his roommate are in a competition to post a picture they take every day. The pictures are definitely worth looking at.]