Yu Tang Lee

Why is it so difficult to effectively communicate the results of your analysis to senior leadership? Why is it so easy for peer reviewers to spot the communication flaws in your work?

The shared video clip will explain the fundamental reason why, in less than 52 seconds: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxKOrRvIBEdwpKnh2Irc_-m7fmMhBKF2k9

The good news is, that while the issue is not trivial to solve, being aware of it will give you a fighting chance.

Note: The full 1 hour 21 minute lecture below by Larry McEnerney (Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program) is aimed at academic writers, but the insights into the art of functional writing and effective persuasion is useful to anyone who needs to communicate ideas and influence thinking on a regular basis. Highly recommended.

To reduce reliance on heroic individuals (there are too few).

Make the implicit explicit (this seems easy until you try to do it).

Explicts can be captured, organised and shared (implying agreement on a shared structure and language).

Expanding the pool of people that can be trained (required for scalability).

I encourage you to think about this in the context of your own professions, but will leave you with a question: Would modern medicine be where it is today in terms of scale and sophistication, if there was no shared understanding on what to call different parts of the body?

Originally posted on LinkedIn

I am optimistic about the state of the world because of the problems surfacing in the last two years rather than in spite of them. These are problems that the world would have had to face eventually (a global pandemic was inevitable, a society’s relationship with the truth was always fragile, flaws in human decision making have always existed despite individual intelligence, etc).

The cat is out of the bag, the egg is shattered. There is no reversing the arrow of time.

This optimism is grounded in a simple fact – that the first step towards solving a problem, is to acknowledge that it exists. “There is no problem” problems, are the hardest to get support to solve for, or funding to implement a solution. To paraphrase computer scientist and venture capitalist Paul Graham: people with solutions to overlooked problems are the ones likelier to make a dent in the world, yet “overlooked problems are by definition problems that people think don’t matter”.

So to those of you, the problem solvers and designers of solutions, the pioneers and settlers that can see a little further than the rest of us – please continue to be courageous; despite that there is no guarantee that you will be called upon one day (or even if your solution is the right match for the problem you were trying to solve for).

Perhaps the only consolation I can offer is Dr. Richard Hamming’s response to people thinking that great science is done by luck:

“There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn’t. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.”

References

1. Graham, P. (2008, February). Six Principles for Making New Things. Retrieved December 23, 2021, from http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
2. Hamming, R. W., & Kaiser, J. F. (1978, April 1). You and your research. Calhoun Home. Retrieved December 23, 2021, from https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/37504

 Originally posted on Linkedin

Most of us implicitly understand the power in making a distinction between the abstract and the concrete. In writing, this manifests anytime someone suggests that you should include a (concrete) example to help make your (abstract) idea clearer, or “more real” to your readers. Linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker argues that examples are so important that communicating ideas persuasively would be impossible without them.

In the field of management, some abstract ideas can become very popular, but very quickly loses all practical meaning.

I believe that some ideas can be made more real by tying it back to a single tangible concept that can best represent its core intent. You lose precision, but gain the directional accuracy required to persuade.

Let me try:

“Empowerment” is one such idea. In a business context, the core of it is that appropriate decentralised decision making is good. This lets you ask pointed questions: How many decisions are my front line staff allowed to make when they are interacting with a customer? How many decisions are my line managers allowed to make? How can I appropriately increase this while still having the right level of management control and governance? etc.

Does the abstract idea of empowerment now feel more real?

References

1. Pinker, S. (2015). The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st Century. Penguin Books.

Originally posted on Linkedin

You may have heard that the Inuit have fifty or more words to describe snow:

“We [English speakers] have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow hard packed like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable….”

Benjamin Lee Whorf, Science and Linguistics (1949)

While linguists continue to debate the finer points due to the peculiarity of the Eskimo family of languages (Inuit and Yupik being two major branches), one of the implications are clear – the ability to identify and apply meaningful distinctions is a key thing separating a specialist and a layperson in any sufficiently complex environment.

An all-inclusive word for snow is unthinkable if your life depends on being able to generate the right solutions to the different challenges created by different types of snow.

As an example from the field of business improvement, the term “pain point” is widely used (in Australia) as an all-inclusive word to identify issues that is broadly interpreted as “anything I don’t like”.

While this interpretation is helpful in interviews where the goal is to broadly capture as much raw feedback as possible, the challenge is getting from a flood of “anything I don’t like” to making meaningful distinctions: which of these pain points are actually root causes, which are only intermediate effects, which are causing undesirable effects in relation to the organisations strategic goals, which are within our span of control or influence, which are actually proposed (and potentially incorrect) solutions in disguise, etc.

It is the difference between drowning in a flood of information and successfully navigating the currents with prizes in hand.

Reference:

1. David Robson, “There really are 50 Eskimo words for ‘snow'”, New Scientist (Dec 2021). Reprint by Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html

Paraphrasing Dave Snowden: a framework is a typology (a system of dividing things into types) that allows you to look at things from different perspectives and make distinctions between those things; the purpose is so that you can think and act in different ways based on those distinctions (hopefully successfully).

I’ll illustrate with a simple “discarding things” framework from Marie Kondo, the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up:

People have trouble discarding things that they could still use (functional value), that contain helpful information (informational value), and that have sentimental ties (emotional value). When these things are hard to obtain or replace (rarity), they become even harder to part with.

In practical terms, when you have problems discarding something, making a distinction between whether the cause is because of functional value, informational value, or emotional value (and considering rarity) will let you look at it differently and come up with an appropriate solution, for example:

• If a physical object has only emotional value, storing it as a digital photo may make it easier to discard
• If it is a box full of cables with functional value but with low rarity, looking at it from a logical cost of storage versus cost of re-buying may help you make your decision.

Originally posted on Linkedin

If you have been tasked to set up a Community of Practice (referred to as Guilds in more recent Agile terminology), you could do worse than having a quick read through Pyrko, Dorfler and Eden’s 2017 paper: “Thinking together: What makes Communities of Practice work?” and reflecting on what you actually want your CoP to achieve.

As the title of the paper gives away, “thinking together” is posited as key criteria for the existence of a Community of Practice. There is a marked difference between mere knowledge distribution (e.g. regular one-way presentation of case studies, publication of newsletters, etc) versus setting up a community that actually tackles the hard task of “thinking together” to develop new knowledge and better practices.

There are actually quite a few preconditions required to achieve the former, but the paper makes clear that identifying specific real-life problems that practitioners care about is vital. This particularly resonates with me, having observed CoPs struggle to find their identity and purpose because they had attempted to tackle subject areas that are too broad, abstract or general.

Originally posted on Linkedin

The way that we view the world, the things in the world, and the relationships between those things, can be unique based on our individual (or enterprise) perspectives. In these cases, representing that view in our respective information systems may require changes to the underlying data model.

A salient quote that provides a grounding example and also proving that humour can be found where you’re least likely to expect it (i.e. a seminal 1976 computer science paper with over 12,000 citations):

It is possible that some people may view something (e.g. marriage) as an entity while other people may view it as a relationship. We think that is a decision which has to be made by the enterprise administrator. He should define what are entities and what are relationships so that the distinction is suitable for his environment.

Peter Pin-Shan Chen, The Entity-Relationship Model – Towards a Unified View of Data, 1976

I still smile every time I read that quote.

Originally posted on Linkedin