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good afternoon have you ever had an idea
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probably in your head and you've wanted to put it in someone else's head chances
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are that you have and this is called communication we've all done it we've
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all done it a lot and we're going to think about it a little bit today together for me communication is an
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evergreen idea of exploration because of the ambiguity and subjectivity involved in thinking about it what one person
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thinks is good or less effective communication those opinions differ but
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this talk represents my opinion about modes of communication that we use and the genesis of this talk Springs from my
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experience working on teams that are remote teams that are co-located bits in
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between lots of different permutations and teams that worked remotely effectively and not so effectively so I
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would like to invite you to join me in exploring these observations and conclusions about modes of communication
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but first let me introduce myself my name is Eric Tilburg this is my biography written by a friend many years
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ago I worked for a company called T comm which is an architecture technology
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consultancy the company or I however work on a rails app most of my time in
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the research and development department but I also work in a few other areas as well
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technology speaking wise the company is based in Oakland California however I live and work in Durham North Carolina
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so Before we jump right in I'm going to run through the roadmap of this talk quickly and we're gonna start by commute
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by defining and adding a little bit of nuance to what the communication modes are that we're concerned with today and
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then we're also going to go through what can go wrong if we are unconscious to them or we just go with the flow about
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them we're going to use two different
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approaches to think about the communication modes and these are a more analytical approach and
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approach based on rules of thumb you might find after hearing some of this information that you think of a time
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when when you are speaking with somebody or writing to somebody and you want to change your behavior you want to change
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the way that you communicate with them so we're going to talk a little bit about transitions between communication modes and then we're gonna end with this
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click baby section which is actually the grand apotheosis the conclusion that you're all here for so these are the two
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communication modes that I'm concerned with and I think dominate what we do when we communicate and it would be
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speaking and writing we can think of a
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spectrum from the left-hand side to the right-hand side of the most spoken ly to the most written ly modes and I'm going
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to use these made up words a little bit more and I'm not going to define them yet but they will become less fuzzy as
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the talk goes on so as an example on the far left we had actually speaking to people which is clearly a spoken
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communication we've got voicemail it's also a spoken communication right it's asynchronous so it's not quite as pure
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an embodiment of what it means to speak to somebody then there's SMS which is where the story gets a little
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interesting you don't speak right this is a text-based system but my point here is
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that you treat it like you're speaking like a conversation we jumped the the gap there and we get to email which is
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clearly a written communication but it can be sort of conversational if it's a one-to-one correspondence between people
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this read me is a stand-in for a documentation in general which is clearly written and even more written ly
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than that on the far right I have a stack of books which is to represent any kind of final written document like a
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legal contract or something or the the final code that doesn't get changed this is the the embodiment of a written
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artifact in the most written ly sense we're gonna talk about two tools that I
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know I use frequently and I imagine many of the rest of us do as well slack and github and we're gonna see where do they fit in on this this spectrum so we'll
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start with github and we're gonna go to the source of all ultimate truth that we care about which is IRB we're
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gonna ask Ruby what are the features that github offers us and the answer is
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that we get issues we get pull requests we get milestones bunch more of course but my question is what's the thinking
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style involved in in these communications that we have and the
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answer is that they're all written I think that makes intuitive sense we're typing things we're writing complete sentences to each other that's the way
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it is so I'm gonna situate github here on the writing side it's a little bit
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more written lis than email but it's not quite to the level of permanency as
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documentation might be so we can jump back in to IRB and ask the question of
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our other tool that we're interested in today which is slack what features do we get here we get presents channels we get
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some sweet emojis we also get private messages for example and the question we
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have the same question what's the thinking style involved with these features and I would answer I'm sorry
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that Ruby IRB the authority would answer that it is a spoken style of communication so even though slack is
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written in terms of its medium in terms of its mode the thinking style I would
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say is a spoken kind of style and you get situated here on the closest side to
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the writing style so slack gives you some ability to get close to written style for example search is kind of
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effective and so that's a way of making it more a documentation type experience you can connect documents and things
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that also have a sense of permanency that feel like more written things as opposed to the more spoken way that I
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tend to use slack which is in terms of greetings and short conversational tidbits and we can reinterpret the
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spectrum that I have down here as the answer to a question of how easily we
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can convert what we're working with into documentation and documentation is a
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sort of central idea in this talk and I would say it's a worthwhile goal to
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strive for documentation by default or at least as close as you can get to it
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so I would say that things on the far right are pretty much already documentation things on the
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far left are probably the most challenging to convert into documentation they involve translating
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it into things further to the right now I'd like you all to think about a time
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when communication went catastrophic aliy or hilariously wrong and I'd like
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you to think about whether that time that you can think of when you're trying to give the communication whether the
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communication was spoken or written and if it might have helped you or helped the communication in general if it were
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the opposite and so I'd like you to turn to a neighbor and if you have a neighbor you know and a neighbor you don't know
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turn to the one you don't know introduce yourself give your name and I'm going to give one or two minutes in which I'd like you to discuss this question and
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then at the end of the time I'll mark the end by initiating a round of applause for our great conference
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organizers because I think we're all very excited to be here so please have
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at it thank you very much feel free to continue those conversations afterwards if you found them exciting and
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interesting now that we've all read each other with our entertaining and
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hopefully funny and possibly enlightening stories about miscommunication or imperfect
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communication we're going to move on to the what could possibly go wrong section where maybe hopefully we're all
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convinced that there is a price to pay for choosing a suboptimal communication
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mode we're gonna do this by thinking about extremes we're gonna think about what happens in a world where we write
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nothing down and what happens in a world where we say nothing to each other and that might give us an idea of how things
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can go wrong the first is if we write nothing down and the obvious answer here is that you'll have deficient
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documentation you will have people on your team repeating things repeating things over over again and the message
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getting lost or things getting forgotten and you basically will end up having to reinvent knowledge or read aside on
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decisions that could have been codified sometime along the path so you end up with a loss of information and we can
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think of this as a variant on the game of telephone which I'm gonna illustrate briefly here we can imagine that a
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technical decision is being indicated between these two teammates and so the technical decision is the
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purple broccoli flies at noon great you
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should be sure to keep track of the hats that these phones are wearing because it'll be important later we're gonna say
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that nobody wrote anything down after this communication what the issue came up again so the information was relayed
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to another teammate and we have a clarifying question because the question is are we working in alma at that time
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which is the timezone of eastern kazakhstan oh i should clarify this is a cause like broccoli flight tracking app
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in case that wasn't clear and it's well the answer is like no no let's just stick to UTC maybe it'll be easier so
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the decision is clarified on the spot but again we're writing nothing down so
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it happens a third time the communication is given and this time it's a revised communication a clarified communication and everything is
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hunky-dory right we could say it's a no problem or as they say in Kazakh called
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mu Oak but what if the first telephone I asked you access to information can be a
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function of social standing and oftentimes we or other teammates can forget to invite teammates to important
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meetings that might be relevant for them there might even be a personality type out there that frequently seems to get forgotten you might be this or you might
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know somebody who fits this description they might feel frequently out of the loop or like there's an inner circle
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they're not a part of and we can help smooth out these unfortunate social dynamics by writing more and not just
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more but in an accessible way where people know where to look to find what they're looking for now we can switch to
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if everything is written and nothing is spoken you might suffer from a feeling
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of alienation on the team and sometimes people will doubt that they're actually even working with other human beings and
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this alienation can lead to a social loss on the team now you've seen this
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image before if you were here at the keynote it's just a testament to how universally interesting and relevant it
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remains to all of us if we're just names an avatars on a screen exclusively carrying out a
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goal-oriented tasks and communications it can feel dehumanizing not only that
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if we end up writing more because we think we only want to write and don't want to speak if it gets disorganized
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writing more can even get counterproductive because I have a feeling that people have an aversion to clutter and so if you don't guard
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against this by organizing your writing better people will devalue what's inside I know I've experienced maybe you have
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to a time when you think some documentation is old or outdated because it may not be just answering the perfect
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question that you're asking but it might be more useful if there wasn't so much
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content there so you can solve these problems by speaking more so we see that
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the problem is real and we would like to dig a little deeper into the communication modes themselves and this
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is the part where we're going to talk in an analytical sort of framework about these modes we can characterize are we
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can find characteristics for our modes the two modes being written and spoken again and we can find out the goal here
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is to find out what each mode is best at conveying in terms of content I would
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argue that writing is impersonal and speaking has a known audience by
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contrast writing can be read by anyone but when you are speaking you generally know who you're talking to
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which might lead to a question in your mind which is is what I'm doing right now speaking this also ties into what we
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heard this morning from DHH which is that I am speaking in my medium but what I am conveying is a piece of writing and
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so it's not so much that I'm doing a reading as she would have put it but I'm delivering my my writing and it's even
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more complicated because there is no such document as this speech in written form but it's a written style of
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communication that I'm giving to hammer the point home even further we can
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notice that this is being recorded so it has a permanency of writing I don't actually know who my audience is not
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even in this room and certainly not whoever is watching elsewhere at other times and as the monologue this is not a
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dialogue which is an important part of spoken conversation another distinguishing thing between
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these two writing and speaking is that writing is focused on the literal
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meaning of printed words on the surface and that writing lacks contextual clues that are generally present in speaking
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these include things like body language facial expression vocal tone and one
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point to point this out is that we have this funny sign which means sarcasm in
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writing why is it so hard to convey sarcasm is right in writing that we feel the need sometimes on the Internet to
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indicate this just weird faux HTML is something or other in speaking I would
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say that if somebody has to say physically with their mouth I was being sarcastic it probably means that the joke failed
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writing can be more succinct and clear on the surface whereas speaking follows a less curated train of thought so an
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example of this is if you look at a word-for-word transcript of a conversation it can be kind of hard to
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understand what was going on unless you take away a lot of the detritus of words until you get to something that looks
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more like it was written and extreme and unfortunate example of this is if you
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look at a transcript of something that mr. Trump has said without watching the
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video or hearing the sound it is literally and this is not true for most people this is a special case at least
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for me from my understanding of it it's literally unintelligible many times to know what he was trying to say until I
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see the video I see the hand gestures I see them I hear the vocal tone that sort of thing another difference between
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writing and speaking is that writing lends itself more to permanent communication and speaking is more ephemeral so an example of this who is
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the broad generalization that literate civilizations are more powerful than those that rely on oral tradition this
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is not a value judgment or a decision of what is better or worse but a value judgment or judgment about the
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permanency of the way that they express themselves and so my conclusion here is
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that writing is better suited for technical decision making and that speaking is better suited for emotional
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caretaking we'll get back to that last one in a little bit I would also argue that these two
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encompass all communication if you take emotional caretaking to be a bit more expansive in what it covers then what we
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tend to do which again we'll get to later on we can also put axes on each of
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these and think of these axes like dials so an example would be we may want to
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communicate something that should be permanent so we're thinking okay let's write it down but maybe there's some
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unwritten context which makes us think maybe we should talk about it it's a contradiction and it's a common type of
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contradiction we find and so we can't find an answer that will be a cure-all for that particular communication but we
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can at least know the trade-offs and maybe compensate for what we lose in one communication by supplementing in
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another mode of the same or similar communication so this all is an analytical way to approach the problem
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but I would say that most people don't work analytically in day to day interactions you don't want to memorize
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that chart and think of it every time you're talking to somebody or writing to somebody so we might find rules of thumb
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to be helpful and for our rules of thumb we're gonna lean on the well-worn nomenclature of code smells and we're
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going to adapt it to communication so a code smell in case you're unfamiliar is a characteristic in code that indicates
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a deeper problem code smells were popularized by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler in the late 90s these are not
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rules written in stone or even signs that you have a bug or a technical problem that will cause things to fail
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but again an indicator of some potential sub-optimal aspects shall we say so
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we're going to talk about communication aromas and I'm gonna start with the good news which is that we are better at communicating than coding see for
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example the first question that I asked we have been communicating since we were but babies we learned everything we need
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to know in kindergarten it's true so what my goal here is to do is to optimize what we already do by instinct
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and social training and I just got a little bit better at it and see how it can make a difference in our work
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product and in our lives in general another proviso I have to offer before I go into the communication neuromas is
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that like code smells these communication aromas rely on judgment
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so when you're communicating with someone you should definitely take into account your audience their relative
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position of power their authority perceived or actual and their comfort level and your comfort level
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so my advice here relies on trust and without trust the proper mode of
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communication could drastically change from what I am proposing you might want to consider switching to here so with
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that we're gonna talk about these seven questions that you can answer and and that might lead you into one direction
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or another so the first two will take them in small bunches the first two
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might point you to writing and these are directly about documentation the first
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one being if you think decisions are being made that's a great opportunity to establish a new document a new piece of
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documentation further to that if you are informing somebody or if somebody's informing you for example that's a great
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opportunity to update documentation you can make it more clear more complete more accessible and findable that sort
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of thing you can ask the question are things ambiguous and this might lead you
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to want to speak instead of writing and ambiguity might come in the form of you
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not understanding someone's question where they're coming from you think there is an important missing piece of
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shared context between the two of you in that case you may want to talk first establish where you're at relative to
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each other and then proceed either continue to speak or maybe to establish some some documentary evidence and
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artifacts the next two have to do with repetition which true to what it is I've
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already spoken about and whether you or your until acuter feels something so
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repeated verbal communications are very common and further nuance on repetition is to ask yourself why you're saying it
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again if it's for if it's pure repetition meaning that you're simply conveying Documenta Bowl information to
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somebody then maybe pointing them to Docs makes sense and it doesn't need to
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be repeated but there might be an emotional function that you're unaware of in the so called repetition so you
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have to be careful of that and this is an instance where you might want to speak even though the information is repeated
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for example you might be welcoming a new team member and they may ask you a question the answer to which is clearly in the docs it still might be worth your
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while it probably is to talk to them about it and Express by doing that you
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express that you value their opinion their their knowledge all that good stuff and it may be hard to recognize
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for number five that is if you or they feel something and this depends on your emotional maturity but some other
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questions ancillary questions you can ask about if you feel something or if they feel something which might lead you to want to speak instead of writing is
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if egos are at play or if power dynamics are in sharp relief of each other or if
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there are questions about career advancement or stagnation touchy things like this we can also ask if either
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party is taking notes and if so that is a sign the note taking is itself writing
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but what's going on here is you're giving a spoken communication they're writing it but they're not writing it like prose they're writing it like notes
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which means it's probably only going to be intelligible to them if if them truly I know my notes are barely intelligible
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to me shortly after I write them and then those notes should be edited perhaps and then it turns into real
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writing well you could cut out a few of those middle steps and just write the thing start with a written thing let the
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other person respond with questions clarifications that sort of stuff and then proceed from there and then the
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final communication aroma is ask yourself if you're teaching or if you
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feel like you were being taught for example and this I would like to differentiate am i teaching from am i informing I consider informing to be
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giving information or knowledge that is particular to your situation whether your product situation your company's
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situation your code base to the situation teaching is more this generic knowledge that people as they gain
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experience in a broad field for example might get it a large scale under their
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belt sort of way so when you think you're teaching or you think teaching is going on it's to me very important I
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think to ask the question of the learning style my personal preferred learning style is to speak not to write so that's why I give this optional thing
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if you think that the person you're talking to prefers to read something then perhaps that communication should go on in writing otherwise I'm gonna be spoken
00:22:30.520
so we've now gone through the communication aromas and we can think about if you are finding yourself in a
00:22:36.320
communication with somebody and you think there's a better way I'm writing but I want to be talking or I'm talking
00:22:41.390
and I want to be writing it can be a little awkward - mmm what may be perceived as abruptly stop a
00:22:47.390
conversation and reroute it in a different mode so especially that comes as a surprise to the person you're
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talking to so we're gonna go through a little bit of how you can do that gracefully and respectfully in this
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transition section the first is that we are going to move if you're in a spoken
00:23:04.580
conversation and you want to write something the first thing to do is simply to ask and in asking what you can
00:23:10.700
do you can do your your friend your colleague a favor by offering to write first its whoever writes the first thing
00:23:17.420
is taking the first step out of the comfort zone of the what was a spoken conversation the result of that writing
00:23:24.670
should be an issue in github or equivalent tool you might use and something that you can refer to and
00:23:32.180
build on as you go now before I go to the next slide I'm gonna warn you it has a lot of words on it don't read it
00:23:37.370
perhaps you can't read it might be too small so just as well this is a spoken
00:23:43.100
style discussion in slack and so I would call this yes a spoken discussion not a
00:23:48.590
written one and as it's going it's getting deeper and deeper into technical weeds but if we look at this bottom section we can see that my colleague is
00:23:57.320
offering to write something in a github issue in a response from which we can
00:24:02.990
take the conversation forward and so that was a very gracious thing that he did to offer to reiterate what he's
00:24:08.180
saying here in writing not only that we have the documentation here that resulted from this which includes a link
00:24:14.900
back to slack which is kind of a technologically unique thing we can do here where we can tie our speaking to
00:24:21.050
our writing together into a more complete set of what might maybe someday become documentation type material let's
00:24:30.110
imagine that you're in a written conversation with somebody and you want to take it to speaking
00:24:37.610
in these cases you might want to ask for a meeting but you should be careful about asking for a meeting and give a
00:24:42.710
reason for the meeting it can be a little frightening especially if there are power or position dynamics at play when somebody says let's just meet and
00:24:49.489
you have no idea why you may have to be vague about it but that's okay better to give a vagaries and then no reason at all
00:24:55.580
this is an example in a written format and github where we're doing a pull
00:25:01.279
request review I think and my colleague here is talking about some of the things that he wants to expand upon with with
00:25:07.610
the code and I don't really know what's going on here on a technical level because this is a code base in Kotlin
00:25:13.070
and I'm not that familiar with Kotlin so I detect a teaching or learning opportunity for me and I asked him hey
00:25:19.279
can I pick it back with you and pair and I can ask my questions as we go because I feel that I don't think document
00:25:25.809
documented evidence or artifacts of this interaction are going to be necessary
00:25:30.830
and again my preferred learning style is is to talk hence the pairing session a
00:25:38.080
funny thing about going from writing to speaking is that you may want to go take it back to writing again if after the
00:25:44.419
conversation you find there are things that came out of the conversation that are worth documenting it's definitely
00:25:50.600
worth considering bring it back to writing for posterity sake all right now
00:25:56.720
we've eaten our vegetables do you all want to click on the click bait good ok
00:26:03.700
wasn't this talk supposed to be about remote work yes it is about remote work thank you for reminding me first we're
00:26:10.609
gonna review a little bit of what we've looked at we've looked at this hyper analytical way it was not very useful in
00:26:17.090
day-to-day life we've looked at this way of communication aromas which may be a little bit more useful but it's a laundry list of questions which I don't
00:26:23.179
know about you but I can't really go around talking to people thinking of these seven things as vistas at that and
00:26:28.700
so on that's that's mental work and maybe a bit more mental work than I am eager to do so the answer that I would
00:26:36.619
offer is that you pretend you're remote if you are remote you embrace your remoteness and if you're not remote you
00:26:42.799
pretend you're remote and you respect those who are remote it's a single mental shortcut that gives a lot of the
00:26:48.619
benefits of of what we've been talking about for free there are dangers with embracing
00:26:55.489
remoteness though and there are certain directions that it might push you in that taken to extremes if we don't guard
00:27:01.369
against it can be unhealthy and can make remote work live up to that unfortunate stereotype that a lot of people you know
00:27:08.359
might deride it for so we'll need to compensate for these excessive so the
00:27:14.359
first thing that remote will push you to do is to write more that's been kind of a thread through what I've been saying is that writing more is good but it's
00:27:20.389
not unequivocally good we have to compensate by organizing our writing
00:27:25.489
being better about that and that is a hard task a second thing that remote
00:27:30.739
gives you is it gives you more access to a public chat and a tool like slack for
00:27:35.989
example is the way that you get this public chatting you can think of an example of a message you might send to your team in slack would you stand up at
00:27:42.950
your desk and shout that same message in the office probably not somehow it's less obtrusive if you're just in your
00:27:49.549
chat box and people can read it or ignore it engage with it or not so this technology gives you a a nice middle
00:27:58.099
ground in what might be considered the formality spectrum where you can give a communication without being too
00:28:04.099
obnoxious in either direction however when we're doing chatting in
00:28:12.259
slack or something like this we need to avoid private messages which doesn't mean don't do private messages but what
00:28:18.469
I try to do is always ask myself why if I want to send a message in private why can't it be public to the team or to the
00:28:24.589
company or whoever is in the slack instance so I try to default to public and I find that the private messages I
00:28:30.619
send are quite rare and you know that it it doesn't get in the way the fact that
00:28:36.799
I have more publicly readable by more people in the company that I might otherwise if we were all in the same
00:28:42.889
place so this is an example which if you can read is is a spoken conversation
00:28:48.820
that contains no content it's all just people being nice and good to each other
00:28:53.889
in the morning and another nice thing that slag and gives you is this threading option that under I think each
00:29:01.190
of these messages there is a thread they usually involve one or two people so it gives you a
00:29:07.049
semi-private feel without actual privacy and in this instance I'd say that's a good thing because it lets other people
00:29:12.899
see what you're doing and they can jump in if they want to or not if they don't but it gives you this one-on-one
00:29:18.119
connection while still maintaining the the public room so even though there's
00:29:24.239
very little technical information here in these spoken slack greetings I would say this is basically my colleagues
00:29:30.090
shaking hands and saying how do you do and I think we all know what that means
00:29:36.529
everything we do in our work in our relationships with other people professional and not is or should be in
00:29:43.529
the service of love the code that we write the products that we create expresses love for our customers and
00:29:51.149
users for our teammates and for ourselves as well and the the ironic the
00:29:56.909
unfortunate perhaps thing about this is that the permanent communication the documentation and the code itself that
00:30:02.820
we talk about is less important than the ephemeral less permanent communication
00:30:08.340
and so these documents and technical discussion and decision-making that that
00:30:13.590
we can preserve as artifacts in all this it's all just a means to an end it might feel like an end because it is a lot of
00:30:19.799
work but it's the means to the end and the end is more directly expressed verbally and perhaps unfortunately
00:30:26.489
ephemerally and that's where we return emotional caretaking this is the higher
00:30:32.940
need for all of us and it's hard to talk about it directly and easily and this
00:30:39.450
talk itself as an example of insufficient attention spade to emotional caretaking I spent far more
00:30:45.899
time talking about technical things documentation blah blah blah these means to an end that I am here on emotional
00:30:51.480
caretaking so my goal here is that thoughtfully choosing your mode of communication well
00:30:57.629
it doesn't do the emotional caretaking for you it gives you a shot it opens up your awareness of your communication
00:31:04.169
modes and how you're using it so that you can use that knowledge and be more purposeful about when you emotionally
00:31:10.980
take care of each other and yourselves thoughtfully you're choosing your modo communication is one way
00:31:17.400
to manipulate your brain into being more open honest and loving so with this talk
00:31:22.500
I hope that I have opened the door but that's all I've done is I've opened the door we all have to do the work and this
00:31:28.470
is not sweaty work this is work of conscientiousness to walk through the door I'm trying to make us all aware of
00:31:36.150
a choice that we always have when we're dealing with other people so I'll end on a final question would you please raise
00:31:43.080
your hand if you are tired of Comic Sans