The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter
andiroberts.com
andiroberts.com
> The most important conversations are not always the ones that appear on the agenda. They are the ones that happen before the formal session begins, in the ten minutes after it ends, in the corridor while people are putting on their coats. These are not peripheral to the group’s work. They are often where the group’s actual thinking takes place.
This is a core belief. One, in fact, that at my last workplace, we understood well and designed for. After client meetings, we would walk clients slowly back though the kitchen and pause for a while there, splitting up into informal chats, before seeing them out of the door. Afterwards, we would quickly compare notes on all the things they said on the way out. These things were often the most important steers for the project.
That's why so many posts on HN always include the same pattern, 'productivity.' I clicked thinking it would be about the social physics of conversation, like how to engage people socially or avoid hurting them, but instead it drifts into the concept of 'productivity.'
But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were
It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs.
But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business.
Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law.
Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.
I think we've all had a lot of experiences like this. When people try to explain that 'good atmosphere' and 'friendly communities' lead to better output, and then try to force that into their own metrics, that's when all the problems start. That's what you mentioned and what I often call Goodhart's law.
And on top of that, there seems to be a desire for recognition and prestige. People want to be seen as the one who explained this concept.
Thanks for sharing
People aren't stupid. They can tell the difference between genuine communication and small talk, and there's a gap between field work and theory.
In practice, people usually trust someone who's 'reliable,' but management discourse believes that these things can be quantified, modeled, reported, and managed. Honestly, I see that as a religion.
What exactly is a 'good atmosphere'? Survey scores? Team comparisons? Manager evaluations? This is exactly Goodhart's law. The moment a measurement becomes a target, the thing you originally wanted to measure becomes distorted.
That's why I think the idea that productivity can be measured and exists in human relationships is an illusion.
And honestly, I think pushing everything toward productivity actually makes things worse.
Of course, you might think differently. Maybe discovering better metrics, better values, and better modeling could change things. I think that's possible. But I'm not sure if it's actually achievable.
Productivity is the reason that only 2% the population works in agriculture and the only way we can afford to maintain a space station.
Of course there are MBA grifters who are pumping out articles about how you can measure and optimize human relationships and of course, most of these are bunk. But that doesn’t mean that productivity doesn’t exist or isn’t useful or isn’t worth thinking about how to optimize.
One thing I’ve noticed is some people are very chatty over text and some people really aren’t. So I make good friends with people who like to make a little small talk on text, tell me about their weekend.
Some teams tried to set up optional social hours but they feel forced. The two managers always show up and it becomes really sweaty.
Maybe set up personal office hours once a week? It would be nice if some new pattern emerged that providers like Slack or Google could build into their remote work products.
Something that replicates the vibe of sitting in an area where you can overhear coworkers. Like an always-on proximity chat, but with a way to mask your sweatpants/picking your nose/getting up to flip laundry.
Because of all the negative feedback, they spent millions more during COVID to put up cubes and prepare for a post COVID world. 5 years on and the RTO policy is you have to be in the office 4 days a week. Its like a library now - people come in, work, go home. Very little interaction. People are silent on the elevators. I've heard some groups getting together and having impromptu chats or having more traditional lunch groups, but for the vast majority of people? They're not interested. Its like being in the office is more a formality for some. Rather a place to network, chat other people up and use it as a good way to keep tabs on your own mental health.
I was telling a guy I play hockey with how this new reality is kind of weird. He said he worked in Germany for 8 years and said this is how Germans have done it forever. Would be interesting to hear if this is actually true, or just his experience.
One of my previous companies talked so much in the random channel we had a second one made with our name on it (literally).
And I feel like our team had better cohesion and got a whole lot of work done, in part due to it.
Being okay with talking to your coworkers about nothing makes it easier to talk to them about something, at least in my experience, and every company I’ve worked at that had that.
Further, at companies that DIDN’T behave that way (sample size one), talking to coworkers about anything and or nothing was a HUGE, stressful chore that always felt like a problem and like I was stepping on people’s time.
There is no such thing as "social physics"
That being said, August Comte came up with the name back in the 19th century before settling on “Sociology”
Not saying they don't have a place, just that we over lean on artificially controlling and "steering" or manipulating our way with others and that IMO is what limits the creativity we are claiming to be after.
Absent this, we can backslide very quickly, or stagnate.
Or sometimes grow until market conditions no longer favor us, when underlying limits are surfaced by well positioned rivals.
A few additional elements from my experience:
- Trust within the team meaning the required competence and delivering on time.
- Team size.
- Team empowerment, imo the most important one. If the team doesn’t feel empowered for whatever reason, this will bring most of the things listed in the article to a halt.
Jokes aside I do agree with you! The little things actually build up to the big things. Trying to insist on the big things via big-things-methods, that somehow forego the little things that comprise it all, will ironically have you miss the actual big thing. (Which might not be what you're pointing at... but I am!)
There's a quote in The Wire, when an ex-cop becomes a teacher in some of the toughest schools. The principal says to the new teacher about to be thrown into the gauntlet, "You need soft eyes."
Feels similar to what you're pointing out.
Here's a nice pdf version of the sourced article 'Pentland, A. (2012) The new science of building great teams' : <https://globalioc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-New-Sci...>
That one at least tries to look valuable, e.g. they mention someone implemented their ideas and their team's productivity went up (although we don't know if more than what Hawthorne effect would've caused alone).
OTOH to be a thought-provoking piece it suffices, and the concepts it defines might turn out to be useful when you try to increase the productivity of your teams.
TFA certainly doesn't have the tone what I want from an article that talks about facts, compared to the linked/source article that talks about their own experiments, research and results, in plural first-person.