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Ambiguity in Communication is Both a Feature and a Bug
Summary:
In 1984, Eisenberg proposed that ambiguity in communication is important and influential.
This idea suggests that being too clear can limit interpretation and hinder coalition-building. Ambiguity can be used to evade accountability, but it is also a general principle of communication.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
It's Eisenberg in 1984 in communication monographs or something. It's this great rambling paper and this idea has been massively influential to me, but he's basically arguing that it would seem like the point of communication should be clarity, To be as clear as possible. For me to say, I mean this and you do know exactly what I mean and that's the goal and ambiguity is therefore a bad thing. He argues that actually no ambiguity is a really important thing and other people have expanded on this. Now the way I think about this is like a blend of Eisenberg and then other people who've come a bit later, but that in a lot of ways if you're trying to get let's say a coalition, you don't Want to say this is exactly what our goal is and this is what we're trying to do. You want to use vague terms so that a bunch of people can sort of map whatever they think that the goal is onto and say that's consistent. It also leads to a reduction in accountability because after you do something and someone says, you said you were going to do this and you say, nah-ah listen to what I said, it's consistent With what I did because what I said was ambiguous. So it's pernicious in a way too. It's used nefariously in a lot of ways by let's say politicians and other kinds of leaders to avoid accountability, but it's also just a general principle of communication I think.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring or positive reinforcement. One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.
Never Split the Difference
Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
The Factors That Hinder Knowledge Transfer Are Often Structural
Summary:
Barriers to knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing are often structural, rather than merely the result of skill set limitations.
Lessons can be transferred through storytelling, lessons with direction reviews and debriefs, analysis and research, and by allocating workload strategically. Placing the workload at the top, instead of burdening lower-level employees with excessive reading, is crucial.
It is essential to identify the structural barriers causing the hindrance and address them.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And if something is learnt at one end of the state, I need to transfer that to the other. Now you can do that with story, but you can also do that with lessons without direction reviews and debriefs. You can do that through analysis and research. And you can do that by putting the workload where it should be, you know, up at the top, rather than on the poor people down below expected to read 160 documents a year about everything Because they're going to remember that really, they're going to remember that, not in my experience. So what we have to do is take those really important lessons and then think, well, what are the structures that are causing that to happen?
Speaker 2
And now we've already kind of hindered around this. What are the barriers to knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing? And is it just the skill set of listening and conversation? Is that the biggest barrier?
Speaker 1
I think a lot of the barriers that we deal with are structural.
Organizational Structures That Enable Knowledge Flow With Stuart French
Because You Need to Know Podcast ™
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