James Stanier:

The key is that you engage with your daily activities mindfully in a way that keeps your weekly update in mind. What I mean by this is that you are always on the lookout for:

• Direct experiences that you have had that would be valuable to share with the team. This could be anything from conversations with customers to shareable summaries of closed-door meetings such as executive reviews.
• Events that can be celebrated, such as a big project shipping, a long-standing bug being resolved, or performance improvements that have been rolled out.
• Things that could be improved, such as an incident that happened, an inefficient process that is causing friction, or data that highlights a problem that needs to be fixed (e.g. a drop in performance or an unexpected increase in infrastructure costs).
• Events that are happening in the near future that you want to remind people about.

I was having an after-work chat with Simon a while ago. We were discussing how we can cultivate a more resilient culture at work, specifically enhancing the capacity of individuals to constructively handle feedback.

He mentioned that he’d been reading Thanks for the Feedback which emphasises that, contrary to popular advice, it’s better to focus on helping people get better at receiving feedback rather than giving it.

This reminded me of a design principle in software engineering called the “Robustness principle” or “Postel’s law”. This principle guides how software systems should be designed to communicate with each other.

It’s often summarised as: “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”.

It felt like when it came to feedback and people working better together we were talking about the same thing, i.e. Postel’s law for people.

This makes me wonder what other software design principles might be useful when applied to people.

Product development is a team sport mostly carried out through meetings and conversations.

Two practical things you can try to help create clarity and reduce chaos in particularly complex conversations:

1. Consolidate progress with a series of summaries.
2. Crystallise outcomes in writing.

These might seem obvious, but they don’t happen as often as I’d hoped.

Consolidate progress with a series of summaries

Do you find yourself in meetings with multiple people discussing complex topics?

Does a series of tangents and related issues emerge as the conversation progresses?

In the end, are you unsure of where things are at?

Are you confident that you understand the situation but are uncertain if it’s the same for others?

Taking complex, meandering conversations and providing clear, structured summaries throughout is incredibly valuable ¹.

I think of each summary as incrementally locking in consensus or taking a collective step up the ladder of inference, as described in Crucial Conversations.

Sometimes the state of play seems obvious, and therefore it feels unnecessary to summarise. I suggest pushing through this feeling and doing it anyway to ensure alignment and avoid pluralistic ignorance.

Crystallise outcomes in writing

As soon as you leave the conversation, you are immediately misaligned again ².

You can reduce this misalignment by sharing a written conversation summary including decisions and actions.

Given the volume of conversations leaders tend to be in, capturing the outcomes becomes essential for rebooting context later or remembering which decisions were made and why.

Tom Geraghty:

If we only remember one thing, we should make it the “Platinum Rule” – Treat others as they want to be treated. That means delivering feedback in a way that the recipient prefers, not the way we prefer to deliver it, or even the way we would prefer to receive it.

Plus a bunch more advice.

Dan Rockwell:

Smart people have lousy meetings. Keeping meetings on track is like organizing a barrel of hummingbirds.

I especially like the “fill in the blank statements” strategy.

Noah Brier:

Lumpers think splitters are neurotics, and splitters think lumpers are careless.

Peter Seibel:

A feedback process 100% aimed at professional growth would, I suspect, be totally divorced from promotions and compensation bumps. Not because those things should be unrelated to professional growth but because truly reflecting on how you can do better and being open to feedback from your peers and managers is already tremendously difficult; when you are also worrying about whether or not you’re going to get that promotion or raise you were hoping for, it’s probably impossible.

Lots more in there on feedback, biannual reviews, titles, promotions, and the role of management.

Clear and candid.

The Curse of Knowledge describes the cognitive bias or limitation that makes it very difficult for humans to imagine what it would be like not to possess a piece of information, and hence to properly put themselves in the shoes of somebody with less knowledge than them.

…

The first, and most important, is to overcommunicate. What exactly is meant by overcommunicating? To me, it is two things: (1) repeat your key messages a lot more often than seems reasonable or comfortable; and (2) when in doubt about whether your audience has a particular piece of important context, always err on the side of providing that context.

Overcommunication may seem inefficient but when it comes to communication, robustness is far more important than efficiency. Remember that the costs are asymmetric: communicate too much and you pay the cost of small amounts of wasted time, but communicate too little and it could lead to major disasters.

Lara Hogan:

So, when a fraught issue arises, how can we help our organization move forward in a way that actually builds rather than breaks trust? Over time, and after many communication mistakes, I honed a four-part template, covering the following

Denise Yu:

Assume that every student you interact with has limited information, but infinite intelligence. That places the onus squarely on the shoulders of the mentor to make sure that their explanations make sense — which, given the inherent imbalance of power between a teacher and a learner, is a fine way to distribute the extra emotional labor.

Grant Fritchey:

Finally, to increase communication, especially if the message is vital, use the three-way handshake. Tell your message to someone using whatever medium you’re using. Then, have that person tell you your message back (in their own words of course, no copy and paste). You then repeat that message back to them. Assuming everyone has it right, you’ve just completed a three-way handshake.

A look at negotiation and how to avoid the pitfalls associated with debate.

the research is clear: Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning.

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The only realm in which humans are an unimpeachable source of truth is that of their own feelings and experiences.