I'm OK, the bull is dead (2004)
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
Like in the article I communicate on my status in the same way. Though I am not really convinced it is some positive character trait. It seems more like a anxiety problem. With the example of the article I would find it much more normal, and useful, to say. 'I hit a bull, I am okay, the bull is not'.
But the basic idea is sound and useful.
Putting the most important fact first makes it much easier for the audience to understand the context and explanations that follow, and stop you when you're going on a tangent.
A problem that I see very often in communication is that people start out by giving long-winded context, and I'm left thinking "what is the point of telling me this?", unable to judge which of it is important and relevant to me.
If your message is short, you might just say it.
But if your message is even slightly long, you probably start with a heads up what the overall gist and point will be. "I have a question." rather than just the question. Or "Accounting just told us we have to..." and then all the stuff Accounting said and what you have do do about it.
Are those openers the most significant bit or the filler?
Definitely "I'm OK" or "You have to turn in your laptop." is absolutely the wrong way to start. It's even like going out of your way to find the worst possible choice out of all the bits in a particular situation. Random order would be better.
So maybe it's not wrong to start with the most important part, but the definition of most important part is apparently up for grabs.
Put the context first and people will assume the conclusion, stop reading, and blame all of their assumptions on you.
It's just a matter of deciding what is worse.
In e-mails, I noticed a lot of customers didn't register much beyond the first couple sentences. Or they would react to some point of curiosity or contention about the explanation without taking the steps forward or providing the information we were asking for.
In real-time conversations it meant the machines were idle during the explanation of why we were going to do the next step, when often there would be plenty of time to explain why while we were in the process. (In the days of dial-up and RAM measured in megs instead of gigs, even "open a browser and go to our website" could take a minute)
It's a huge time-saver. You want that little excerpt in a pop-up mail notification to have the call to action displayed. Especially when you need them to take ten seconds to provide some information. Seeing the call to action immediately might bump you up in their multitasking queue whereas they're more likely to sit on it if they see the opening sentence of some exposition pop up.
What I experienced and others complained about was the situation where I know we have a document about X. I can’t remember what it’s called, I thought it was “Y” but I read the whole thing and it’s not there. Now I’m clicking on random things seeing if I can find it. I don’t want to read eight people’s life stories. I’m trying to keep the details of my task in my head.
Start every page with “where are you and why should you care” and that problem starts to evaporate.
With scientists you have people who go through a lot of papers every year. No one paper stands out that much. So I can see how they’d run into the exact same problem.
----
Also, I've seen internal wikis and the issue is that they tend to go stale, and people are afraid of removing information, and some people just don't know how to use a wiki and will start using it as a message board or like a Wikipedia talk page and add stuff like "Note by Joe: I'm not sure the above is still correct since the migration to XYZ. Alice should check this part", things not deleted but crossed out with strikethrough style, because "what if it will still be useful" (they don't understand the page history concept) etc. So it becomes a dump of horrible mixture of outdated and up-to-date info, where an experienced employee will tell you "oh it's in the wiki, just check it", then you go back to them that you can't find it or you found contradictory info and they tell you "ah, of course, you should ignore the page on bla bla, we should remove it soon, for this kind of thing you need to check the other page, and even though it says on top that it's 'outdated', actually this part is still valid".
The "curse of knowledge" is also very difficult to get rid of. It's really really hard to know where the reader is coming from. And what may be obvious and over-explained for one reader may feel like not enough detail or confusing to another.
As time progresses, the most relevant topic areas for the project consume the main page, and over time specifics get pushed down to subtopics and sub-subtopics. Anything that hasn't been touched in a long time is prioritized for moving down. If something has been sitting at the bottom of the tree for a long time and looks wrong, it might be time to delete it. But in the meantime you've made it harder to find. Once a page sprouts too many links it's time to halve it and push some of them down one level. Good activity for a Thursday or Friday afternoon when you've fixed a major bug and don't want to start anything new.
The guys who need to toot their own horn want to put four links onto the main page. For some reason those scenarios live rent-free in my thoughts on Wikis. Probably because I was formulating this theory while working with one of them.
We currently just have a big list of pages in alphabetical order after a short blurb.
I'll need to figure out a new list order to implement. Hmm. Thanks for giving me something cool to think about!
"I'm ok, the car is not" would've communicated relevant information without followup. The bull is less important part.
> Like in the article I communicate on my status in the same way. Though I am not really convinced it is some positive character trait. It seems more like a anxiety problem.
I like that type of communication because it is very useful in emergency (whether actual one, or just some app at work not working).
I think it also generally produces less of an anxiety because starting with the bad can immediately make the other site start to speculate the worst
> With the example of the article I would find it much more normal, and useful, to say. 'I hit a bull, I am okay, the bull is not'.
Exactly. Much better way to say that.
"Data is safe, it's not a breach, we're being DDoSed", instead of "we're having a massive DDoS on our services affecting X y and Z, but we don't suspect any data breach or data loss".
"I'm okay, the car is not" communicates the most-relevant information, sure but at that point, Dad can start immediately getting upset about the car.
"I'm okay, the bull is not" presents Dad with a mystery, delays the onset of anger, and likely lowers the peak of anger, as the fun of unravelling an interesting and unique mystery probably takes up some of that mental energy.
In an office setting, yeah, you ideally have enough trust and safety to be able to disclose bad news without needing to worry about upsetting people (though frequently not, honestly). Families are... different. Even in "perfect" families, and especially for a situation like this, there's no "blameless postmortems", no "five whys", etc. Kid crashed the car. Kid should not have crashed the car. There's a direct line of responsibility. So being able to deflect a bit of that anger and upset is, frankly, ingenious.
From what I can see, the situation was communicated very poorly.
No, it sounds annoying and tiring to deal with that kind of riddle-speech.
If your parent has anger issues it would just result in something like "what fucking bull, what the fuck did you do?", not some riddle mystery game you think...
“Dad, I wrecked the car” is much more likely to be answered [non-verbally] with regrets about not paying for contraception.
One of the things I appreciate about Contact. When Ellie’s radio becomes mostly static she just repeats that she’s ready to launch, in a loop until they do.
Your typical schlocky movie? “CHHHZZZK is the killer! I found Sarah’s body. Don’t trust him!” “Do you think they heard me? Hopefully he is t killing them now.”
Communication breakdown feels so tired
I like the active example of your point ...
A couple years ago, I sent her a message, "I'm OK, but I think I just totaled my car. Would you please come to [location of accident]? I'm going to need a ride home."
She still freaked out, because she does, but I really did only have some bruising, and I did, in fact, total the car.
There's also the pragmatic advice given to most graduate students: read the abstract, then the conclusion, then the introduction, then the rest of the paper.
The only papers I think the conclusion is more useful than the methodology are on the social sciences and software engineering.
Did he though?
"I'm okay" is a good start, but then maybe "there has been an accident", followed by "the car is fine" or "I hit/got hit by a bull, which is now dead".
When telling a story you want to introduce the maximum meaningful uncertainty into your telling to attract the listener into listening attentively to try to resolve it.
"The bull is dead." immediately introduces clearly important information that tells the listener they need to focus, but at the same time makes it clear that more context is needed. i.e the subtext is "listen up important details to follow".
For status reporting you want to allow the listener to stop as soon as possible to free up his/her/its limited management focus "bandwidth".
"I was in an accident, but I'm fine" would fit his paradigm better. (But would make a less notable/memorable story)
But it’s India where they are pretty big on bovines in general and their mortal status in particular.
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2567290/no-more-bull.a...
It’s possibly because you live in a location where bulls wandering on the road doesn’t ever happen, and where the author lives it does happen?
If, for example, the call was instead “I’m okay, the deer is dead”, I wouldn’t find it confusing at all.
It's actual quite ironic that a blog post about emphasizing clear purposeful communication, uses a main example that is anything but.
"The bull is dead" is indeed totally meaningless and irrelevant here. Assuming nobody else was harmed, the status of the car is the next important thing here.
It's maybe a question of perspective. His ability to consider his parents' perspective might have been somewhat limited by the fact that he was 17, it was late at night and he'd just been in a car crash which resulted in the death of a bull.
I think he did a great job and it's a great story. Glad to hear he's ok, he's lucky! RIP the bull though :(
I'm criticizing the dads ability to showcase a great example of the "right information in the right detail without going into unnecessary explanations."
And I think a big part of the authors choice of example is exactly because it is "tantalizing" - it piques your curiosity because there isn't enough information to make sense of the situation.
The point of the whole piece is to just get to the point. How the bull met his fate is a story, but who cares. All dad needs to know is Raj is fine.
It could be the case that he crashed into a farm and killed a bull and now the farmer is about to kill him with a shotgun.
Which according to the author is secondary information.
The shorter the first sentence is, the sooner you can move onto the second sentence.
Neither party expected the conversation to end after "the bull is dead".
> "I'm OK, my car hit a bull."
What happened to the bull isn't the most important information; the author wants to know why his son didn't come home. Saying "the bull is dead" kind of answers that question, but only via inference ("oh, the bull must have been killed by his car"), which is why the father was initially confused.
And then "the" should be "a" because the bull hasn't been introduced yet.
Starting with "I'm okay" was the right thing to do in context: an unexpected call from a child at an ominous time of day is the context, and knowledge of their safety is therefore paramount. But following it with a riddle about bulls is useless nonsense in the same context.
Putting that aside, I didnt really appreciate this either:
>Though a bit angry
Angry at your son for being in a car accident? Was this before or after finding out the reason for the accident? Where is this context and why isn't it provided in the same structure you just outlined several paragraphs earlier?
Felt strongly enough about this that I actually took the time up write an actual literal paper letter (or maybe an email, don't remember... but paper letter , stamp, walk 20 miles uphill to post office works better for dramatic effect ) back in 2004 to ask the question.
The question was asked in the magazine and the answer by Mr. Kapur was published in the magazine.... but my google-fu cannot find the answer he had posted back then...
Unfortunately, I don't remember the answer so the cliffhanger continues.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2567061/no-bull-approa...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2567290/no-more-bull.a...
Would it hurt to communicate what happened? No, it adds important detail. Especially on a phone call, there’s much more bandwidth for explaining “I’m ok” without explicitly saying it through tone of voice. As a parent, the bull being dead is entirely irrelevant. So, “I hit a bull on the way home but I’m fine” would have done the trick without any annoying cliffhangers. Similarly for the author’s lack of explanation of what happened.
Either way, the delivery on the phone is not limited to the order of the clauses, it's also in the tone of voice. Saying "I hit a bull" while sobbing conveys something entirely different than calmly stating "I hit a bull." Over the phone the entirety of the message can be heard and the order matters less.
I don’t think the author is proposing all communication should be in this style. When you’re telling a story, sure, it’s fine to keep people in suspense. But is suspense a tool you should use to communicate to a loved one when you’ve been in an accident?
Some work communications are more like the former and some are more like the latter. But most of us default to the narrative/suspenseful style 95% of the time.
But we should be more deliberate, and in some settings use the inverted pyramid structure to eliminate suspense from our communication.
Kind of. I thought the original advice from the author's boss at the top of the article (order of "punchline" with no adjectives, then current status, then next steps, then explanation) is great advice. The problem with the author's telling of his son's story is he basically completely left out step 4, the explanation.
I think the value in the original advice is not that any of the steps is more important than the other, but doing them in that order ensures you don't try to sugarcoat or obfuscate the actual thing that happened: it forces the team to clearly acknowledge the facts without bias.
But yeah, just telling the story without explanation is missing a big part of the detail to actually understand what happened.
The Right Way to report this is something like, "I'm fine, but I got into an accident. I hit a bull and killed it." But that doesn't make nearly as captivating a headline.
It’s easy to say he said the wrong thing, but compared with a panicked phone call, it’s pretty good.
A process like this helps override the natural response to a situation. People often think they would be cool in a crisis. But panic makes you do weird things.
You don't need to know what happened. You do need to know your kid is okay.
Being so preoccupied with the "story" that you think it's more important than your kid being okay is unconscionable.
> 1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers.
> 2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project.
The facts are: I crashed the car. The status is: I'm OK.
(The real lesson here is that this methodology is not always a good idea.)
This is HN, not StackOverflow. I encourage you to act in the spirit of intellectual curiosity instead of being self-satisfied with misguided attempts at language lawyering.
Is that supposed to impress me? Some people do feng shui for a living, or sell homeopathic remedies. Just because someone does something for a living doesn't mean it has any merit. The world is chock-full of wealthy charlatans.
In any case, your opinions about specific methodologies in fields toward which you are outright dismissive... are of extremely limited value.
Effective by what standard? The titular quip is very effective click bait, and if you make your living attracting clicks then I suppose that has merit. But it fails abysmally by the standard of transmitting information clearly (which is made all the more ironic by the fact that it doesn't even follow the guidelines described in the article).
Attracting clicks and communicating clearly are fundamentally at odds because the whole point of click bait is to withhold the relevant information so that you have to click to find it. So you really do have to choose a side.
Nevertheless a nice read and the point of the piece still stands! Just think the example isn't perfect.
But, thinking back now if I were to arrive at the scene and not have known about the bull beforehand that'd be quite a shock, so I think I've changed my mind on this one!
>Thank God my son was fine, but the comment about the dead bull intrigued me. We didn't own a bull. Where was he? How did the bull die? And why was he telling me about it?
>Then he said, "The car is damaged but operable." All right. He had gotten into some type of accident, the car wasn't a total loss, and there was a dead bull (still a great puzzle).
The question was asked in the magazine and the answer by Mr. Kapur was published in the magazine.... but my google-fu cannot find the answer he had posted back then...
Unfortunately, I don't remember the answer so the cliffhanger continues.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2567061/no-bull-approa...
I read this earlier today, liked it, and had a bit of fridge logic since. Obviously it’s dumb to communicate a datapoint upfront when you don’t bring it up again at all and follow up with “details later”. But it’s still very present in my mind because “the bull is dead” is so catchy.
I’m a big fan of BLUF (bottom line upfront) when writing emails and this is an extension of that.
In life, I’m less sure. People tend to underplay their injuries when talking to others, right? So in the case of “I’m OK, I got in a car accident” “OK” could mean anything from “I’m totally fine” to “I’m going to have lifelong back problems and legal problems but I’m alive.” Meanwhile “I’m OK, my girlfriend has dumped me, want to go get a beer,” the range of possibilities is much lower.
And, if a person has decided to tell me that they are OK as the first thing, then clearly something pretty bad has happened.
So, I think I’d prefer “I got in a little fender bender, but nobody got hurt, I’m just going to be a little late.”
We tend to be like Mrs Marple when we should be more like Columbo.
The consultancy I used to work for called this Top Down Thinking but it's basically just the Barbara Minto Pyramid Principle.
This can go off the rails quickly if it collides with other groups that are not as safe and have serious issues. In these more common environments, successful people learn the delicate balance of what to say, what not to say, and what order to say it in.
Raj didn’t even tell his dad where he was.
The optimal:
“I need a lift, I’m at this address, no hurry, I’m okay, the car needs towing.”
By the way “I need a lift” is said, the other party will know you’ve crashed the cad, and that your ok.
This comes up again: Star Trek TNG S05E02 Darmok.
Something like, “Clive and James at Sleaford”.
I’ve ridden the Seaford to Wanna 4wd track on a dirt bike, so the implications of three consecutive nouns would be certain as the referent is the exact same scenario, only the names have been changed, different actors.
What you need is a good culture rather than any reporting strategy in my opinion
Whether he explains the situation about the bull or not, does not matter, the next action is to have someone pick him up. That's the only thing they can do. The bull story is just extra information.
In the status update, when my devs tell me the new api failed, my role is to check the results and figure out if we need an alternative. The product owner and scrum master do not need to know those results, in fact they can move on to the next status update. The person who can help is informed.
The challenges I face in a daily stand up are:
1. The developer trying to over explain their current situation.
2. The non devs asking questions trying to fully understand a situation that is irrelevant to them. i.e. why is the bull dead.
3. The dev keeping their mouth shut for fear of being interrogated.
That kinda shows that it isn't a good metaphor, because if the bull is irrelevant & dragging people off on a tangent it shouldn't be mentioned at all
After the first week, Bob called home and asked how things were going. John replied "Everything is okay, except the cat died." Bob says "Couldn't you be more diplomatic?" John asks "What do you mean?" Bob replies "Well, if I ask how the cat is, say the cat's on the roof" then the next time, you could tell me it died"
The next week, Bob calls, John answers and after a short discussion, Bob asks how his Grandma is doing.
John replies "She's on the roof"
1. name/age/gender
2. current problem (+ potentially relevant preexisting condition)
3. relevant clinical/laboratory findings
4. suspected cause
5. recommended actions
6. If an operation is planned: general health assessment (ASA)/allergies
7. prognosis/miscellaneous notes
We're taught to read, write, and speak yet are not taught to be understood.
Reason being this punchline-first style demands "great patience" from the reader or listener. The reason for delaying the punch-line is to make sure the proper context and information is available before the reader or listener starts inferring the reasons why.
Too many times the punchline carried enough punch to completely derail the conversation.
This is one of the things I learned moving to the UK working at an American company. Lead with the conclusion, not the problem statement.
The style I was more used to would say: "I am late because the car got hit by a bull. I stepped out, took pictures, noticed the bull was dead and someone local came to help out. The police is underway. I am fine but will be a little later. No need to worry."
Also avoid making statements on anything debatable if focusing on that will give them an excuse to ignore the rest. For example I was talking to my doctor's office asking if they could move my appointment to some time in the next two weeks rather than the 15th (8 weeks away at the time). The response I got was, "Your appointment is on the 12th." And then they stopped responding.
I think of it as the opposite of those clickbait headlines where they try to trick you into believing it applies to you or your family by leaving out details.
"Local school explodes" will get more clicks than clarifying it was empty at the time and/or giving the specific name.
My format was: --- *Question.*
I previously thought the answer was X, but X is not working.
I have tried troubleshooting steps A, B, C, D, and E, with A1, B1 (etc.) results. ---
EVERY SINGLE TIME, the sequence of replies would be, "The answer is X."
No, it isn't. I thought it was, but it doesn't work, as mentioned in the initial post.
"You need to try A." I already tried A. My results are in the initial post.
"What about B?" I also tried B. My results are in the initial post.
"C? D? E?"
:facepalm: Please read the initial post. I wrote it for a reason.
The bull is completely irrelevant. It’s a root cause of the car damage.
Should have been: “I am OK. The car is not.” and continued from there.
I prefer to open with a single sentence that captures what I want to say, longer than the title but very much self-contained, and then to elaborate on why that is. It both serves to capture the reader and to turn away readers that weren't interested anyway.
Expressing the core statement up front allows proceeding content to serve as an optional framing, if required. If the recipient already has context they can skip the cruft.
This structure is mirrored in larger org settings that use memo's. It's not a new idea, but definitely a well proven and effective one.
This is why greeks practised Rhetorics. Remarking on the practice, one philosopher said the exact same thing. He said, "You are using people's emotions to weigh in as against the facts of the case."
Way better than "IT is upgrading everyone."
As for the bull being dead, that seems like the least important piece of information from that situation.
A much better punchline is “Im ok, I got into a car accident, I hit a bull and wrecked the car”
The bottom line is that something happened at all.
You at least have to say that much along with I'm OK.
The example is actually anti-communication.
It proves this itself by being the title, a curiosity-triggering title. That is the result of too much withheld context, and it's a thing that joke writers and newspaper editors do consciously for exactly that effect.
If it were actually the best way to communicate this message, it would be a less clickbaity title. You wouldn't feel as much need for more info. "What the hell? Since when and why was your OKness even in question? BULL???"
Article isn't as bad as the title claims it will be.
When I worked for a Japanese company, we submitted weekly reports in "QCD" form (Quality, Cost, Deliverable).
I like this format better.
There is a time and place for conveying information quickly and concisely, and there is a time and a place for storytelling and human connection. Seems the latter has been lost on this child's upbringing.
The receiver of the information in this case already knew something was wrong. The most important detail came first: I'm okay. Nothing wrong with this.
Some folks might say the second most important piece of information is "the car is damaged" but really it doesn't matter. One might wonder how damaged. This detail doesn't reinforce the first piece of information. And the extent of the damage is important at that moment.
"The bull is dead" might seem unimportant, but it gets across the worst outcome from what's transpired. And in fact, it implies that the car is damaged. Maybe more relatable if you're in North America: if your child called you and says "I'm okay, but the deer is dead" that actually does a perfect job of summarizing exactly what happened. It's an unusual situation that a bull got hit by a car, but it's plausible.
When you've been in an accident, trying to explain everything over the phone often isn't the best thing to do, especially if the authorities are trying to take a statement or you're getting your vehicle towed. Arguably, it's bad parenting to dwell on really any other details besides "where are you?" or "do you need anything?"
Like I'm really struggling to think of another thing the kid could have said that would have been more efficient or would have made the outcome better. "The bull is dead" leaves you with questions but frankly none of the questions really matter, and the information that it conveys is exactly what I'd want to get across.
I hit a bull, the car is drivable but sustained damage.
The bull is dead.
There is too much BS out there. Let's save everybody's time.