The mistake I made when I was younger was thinking that good communication was about being able to clearly and concisely convey the information in your head into another head.
I eventually learned that this was necessary but not sufficient, because "the right way" to communicate varies significantly based on social / political / cultural / emotional / institutional dynamics.
As a young man I simply didn't understand enough of those dynamics to be able to model the when and the why of communication (meta-communication?), even if I was good at the idea transmission part.
Life experience helps immensely here.
This is why I think startups or small groups of people are still able to outcompete bigger incumbents. So many people worry “if I share my great idea, someone will steal it and implement it!”
Far more often I’ve found it to be the case that I catch myself wondering if it would be less work to start a competitor to my current company based on my idea rather than continue attempting to translate it, broadcast it, and massage it into some form that convinces a critical mass of coworkers of its value such that it eventually turns into action.
At least by starting my own company, I’ll know pretty quickly whether it was actually a good idea or not.
For sure. The overhead for communication is much lower. It’s possible to emulate this to some extent at a large company (I worked at AWS previously) by keeping teams small (6-10 people) while keeping team scope large (full lifecycle of an entire product family or vertical). For this to be successful I believe you need to give the team autonomy to decide what product and features to build, and room to fail without repercussions to allow for experimentation and calculated risk taking.
This is more about how communication works. Communicating ideas and intentions is always about shaping the words that leave your mouth in such a way the other side understands the thing you intended them to understand.
Inexperienced communicators will say what makes sense to them and be surprised when someone else in a completely different frame of mind doesn't pull the same meaning from those words. Wanting people to understand you and shaping what you say in such a way they get it is not a bad thing. You would also talk differently to your kid, than say to your co-worker. This requires to a certain degree that you can see things from their perspective. Now surely you could use this for manipulative reasons if you are a soul-less bastard, but that doesn't say anything about about the practise.
And the way I like to look at it is that we should try to have a good grip on ourselves first, because this is what we can affect ourselves — how you start into a communication will greatly affect the reaction of the others anyways.
Especially in IT it is not rare that the answer to clarifying questions muddies the water even more, because explaining a thing often requires knowledge of other technical concepts.
I work in an educational context nowadays and the people entering my door might be anything between totally clueless and domain experts, and just by looking you won't necessarily notice who is which, so indeed you need to figure this out in a small exchange. Bad communicators would skip that step and talk the same to both beginners and domain experts until they maybe get the clue, but if you're unlucky by that point the communication has already ended.
consider this conversation actually happened, this video is just a recreation of it.
Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
Not all of them are so extreme but the idea is the same.
https://www.afr.com/politics/disaster-from-oil-spill-averted...
The details may have not been exactly correct, but the point still stands and your nerd sniping is not useful here, especially with the haughtiness mixed in.
Go alpha somewhere else.
The reason I wrote what I wrote is because the need to consider more of the communicative context is something inherent to all communication, not just to (bad) workplaces. Most people would profit from recognizing this, even outside work, e.g. in a relationship.
For context, I’m someone who has big blind spots in this area and trying to figure out how to overcome them. Typically, I just develop a set of internal “rules” or principles and then run everything through those rules/decision tree. I’ve been able to overcome a LOT of previous blind spots in this way.
The challenge is that few people are willing and/or able to articulate the principles involved. When I find a book or person who can and will explain the principles and patterns, I’m golden. If not, I’m lost at sea.
Any resources you could recommend would be greatly appreciated!
I later studied philosophy and had a look on more formal preconditions of communications, e.g. foundational models of communication, for which a good starting point is probably this wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication
I found Niklas Luhmanns system theory extremely helpful as well, as it describes very well why we tend to fall back into different communicative modes once our social frame of reference changes (e.g. relationship vs friends vs family) and how we speak and act is tied to the function we voluntarily or involuntarily assumed within that relationship.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't go around overanalyzing everything, I just think human communication is extremely fascinating and complex and there is so many ways to look at it.
One of the first stories describes almost the exact situation from the top comment in this thread, where someone with a great idea in an organization needed to communicate the idea to the rest of the team.
I'm usually not a fan of self help type books, but I think stuff like this is good to listen to here and there:
https://www.amazon.com/Think-Faster-Talk-Smarter-Successfull...
And then when things don't work out they think it is about the facts (and granted: often it is) and not about the communications.
Institutional politics means it matters what you propose in front of whom in which order and in which way. This is especially true if you are not surrounded by idealists but by oportunists.