Hacker News Reader

Comment by pzs | Hacker News Reader

And what was the rest of your response? How could you get effective change based on this understanding?

I think it is implied that they showed people what the change would look like and that it did not threaten their jobs.

The easier solution to is remove them.

It's always easier to assume that the fault lies with the listener rather than the speaker. That doesn't mean it's the most effective bias to hold.

If the speaker can convince the listener they should find a job where they don't need to speak as part of the job description. Dishwashers and janitors give pletnly of job stability for people like those.

I was too abstract. I meant that when a message is misunderstood by a large enough chunk of the audience it's the speaker's fault for not knowing their audience and their needs.

To be clear, you demonstrated the bias I was referring to by casting doubt on the intelligence or job-worthiness of the listeners rather than recognizing what I said about effectiveness being improved if you can get your message to more people.

Sure, and the best optimization of any bottleneck is to cut the feature, doing nothing is O(1) after all.

As you can imagine, it's a solution that kills the product (or the company) in the long term.

A company is like a rose bush, keeping it civilised means constant aggressive prunning.

Surely the bush itself cannot be responsible for its own pruning, that would be a conflict of interest. Anyway, it's always best to start pruning at the top.

At the tips actually.

What if the top's singing "Feed Me, Seymour!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNHrzZUascE

But the point would be to change their job so that they can produce more value? Otherwise nothing is won. It's supposedly hard to convince people that they will have a fit in the new organisation if they have been doing things the same way for ten years; or that there is magically other valuable things to do when their job becomes more efficient.

I think my problem is that the people that have little enough imagination that they cannot see what their job might look like after are maybe better replaced?

Fear cuts in before the rational mind can process, and it conditions subsequent actions - including the ability to visualise and appropriately weight potential positive outcomes. You need to apply energy to boot people out of the local minimum they've fallen into so that they can end up in the right place.

It doesn't really matter how well you can imagine your job afterwards, if the powers that be are more likely than not primarily imagining reduced labor costs.

Guess you'll have to illustrate the vision to them, probably using pictures. Like slides in a presentation.

In the US where healthcare is tied to employment, the possibility of being replaced can literally be life or death.

Especially with efficiency culture where labor is often the first to be cut in the name of profit.

The fear is perfectly rational because managerial and C levels have made it clear that the person does not matter in the slightest. It would be foolish to outright trust management and is often how people are taken advantage of.

Here is a fun book for you, if you want: "Who Moved my Cheese?"[1] An HR person shared it with me in the dot.com era as things were exploding around us and I found it pretty informative. Basically it seems humans see "bad outcomes" as more likely than "good outcomes". It could be an evolved survival trait or it could just be a tendency to be pessimists, but even WHEN you explain how someone's job will exist/improve/change with the change, they will not actually fully believe you.

For reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand, I tend to be pretty analytic about this sort of thing and until my role started including the need to help people understand change it had not occurred to me that fear would overwhelm some folks rationality. But once you can see it, it is really clear that that is where their head is and the anxiety is consuming them.

[1] "Who Moved my Cheese" by Dr. Spencer Johnson -- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CR6AM4/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com