16 ms·

My experiment with clear and direct communication

37 points by KentBeck 6y ago

lukevp 6y ago
I can't help but feel that even in this "clear and direct communication" the author is continuing to look for ways to manipulate situations and people. What seems to be lacking is empathy. The communication is based upon the value add, the reaction or positioning that the author gets at the end of the interaction, rather than on collaborating with another human and trying to get both parties to a better place. A similar strategy to this "clear and direct communication" that can devolve into the same place is the concept of Radical Candor[0]. It can begin as a "helping" to awaken others to things they may have missed, and can end up being an avenue for tearing people down instead of growing them. The only difference is the intent of the speaker. Assuming the best in people and striving to have positive outcomes tends to work better. This puts you at risk of other people much like the author was previously, who seek to undercut and deceive and manipulate, but those people show their true colors pretty quick and they end up on a different tier of communication that no longer gets the privilege everyone else is afforded. A pivotal change within my own life and communication was reading about Adler's work [0]. Separation of Tasks as a concept is very applicable to interpersonal relationships at the office. I no longer struggle with trying to explain why people are rude and pushing agendas that don't make empirical sense. None of us are infallible and we all are seeking to shape our world in different ways and it's helpful to delineate what we really care about and not. Which hills to die on. [0]: https://www.radicalcandor.com/ https://www.radicalcandor.com/ [1]: https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/lessons-from-alfred-adler-the-influential-figure-in-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-youve-never-heard-of https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/lessons-from-alfred...
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  Right. It's like all of these strategies are about how he communicates but not about how he listens. Most people think they are good listeners, but I come at this from the world of training coaches. Coaching starts with being a professionally good listener which is much different than being an amateur good listener. And when you try to reach this level of listening at a professional level you start to realize the millions of ways in which you block yourself from listening. An obvious one that the author did touch on was that he recognized his prior communication as manipulative. Right! We all bring our own agenda and this is one of the ways in which we can filter what we are hearing. What has the person said that supports my agenda? What threatens it and how can I disprove that? Thinking that way doesn't allow you to realize that your judgement might be wrong. The other big ones are anxiety and need for esteem. It's like when you can't help but give advice because you are deeply desperate for validation. You're not broken, that's a very human way to be. Listening is hard and so a good starting place is to separate listening from judgement. The word I use most is curiosity. Just focus on being curious as a way to crowd out all these other feelings. Then later you can make a judgement. If you are a clear communicator and a bad listener then the result is just that you go around being clearly wrong a lot of the time.
  - woodandsteel 6y ago
    Former listening trainer here. I discovered though training a great many people that a key listening problem is that people's attention wanders away and then back, and as a consequence they miss a lot of what has been said but are not aware this has happened. I found this was common even among professional psychotherapists. Also the easiest way to improve your listening skills is reflective listening. That is where you simply say back to the person the key ideas they expressed to you.
  - 7532yahoogmail 6y ago
    A really nice assessment and description. Periodically I fall into "give advice because you are deeply desperate for validation". I'd like build on your words and summarize what I learned from still another person Dr. William Schutz, and deal best I can on honest communication v. perception. It's an interesting dilemma to me. First, assume that all I can do is observe behavior: what I see, hear, read. I cannot figure out why a person is exhibiting a behavior; guess sure. But know? No way. What's between the ears is between their ears and inaccessible to me. Second, assume the PCA (principle component analysis) of behavior is control, inclusion, openness. Read "Human Element" or get an old copy of FIRO from him or his son Ethan Schutz --- excellent stuff and perfect for the office: it's like healthcare on the battle field: pointed, focused, can-do, common sense, but not so simplistic and removed for the bigger world of medicine that it's silly or merely palliative. With that setup in mind: 1) you cannot resolve significance issues through control. More generally you cannot fix a problem along PCA axis 1 by doing something along another orthogonal axis 2. Often makes it worse. Giving advice is control behavior, which the writer says, was really about significance. Yep, that's me sometimes. It's helpful to know when I misuse one skill to badly fix something else. 2) Behaviors are goal seeking and directly connect right into feelings which hits right into self-esteem. See the book or smarter people here. This is feature rich location of being human. 3) I've worked 30+ years and spent the last 14 years working for large companies. As posters here have said, behavior comes with a zillion motivations. But from time to time I have dealt with programmers, managers, young, and, old who strongly point out they should --- more: it'd be dumb not to try! --- to manage perception on the other side because perception is reality. Now in some artificially distorted way, it does capture a truth but at the expense of omitting a lot of relevant context. But: -- As Schutz says, we know we ought to be open but in the fact that's the last thing we'll ever do because it's not safe. Openness requires safety. If I start being open I might say something to get myself fired. If my boss talks openly I might get yelled at. That's anxiety making. If a co-worker talks openly about me I might get fired. Better to keep quiet about that co-worker so he'll be quiet about me. Fear is a lot of what prevents openness. -- While words are pouring out one should not assume the speaker is open in two facets. First, the speaker may have low self awareness. If so, trying to make sense of that is doubly impossible. Two, the implied success of getting one over me by having the counterparty play to my perception requires low self-awareness my side. And among other things implies lack of choice/agency my side which is along the control axis to respond appropriately. So ... really where does the cause start and effect end. It's more nuanced. -- The insistence on perception as reality is seated, I feel, either in trauma or in that shadow of maladaptive behavior some people come with. But it's the insistence that to me, indicates the perpetrator is the most insecure of all: they don't believe they have control, or are significant, or would want to be included ... and so in the absence of choice through control ... lie to themselves and the world to get by. They're fragile and they cast the world in a fragile light too. https://thehumanelement.com/pages/firo-theory/ https://thehumanelement.com/pages/firo-theory/ https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Esteem-Management/dp/1555426123/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=human+element+schutz&qid=1591467070&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...
iandanforth 6y ago
There's an assumption here that I find fascinating. That it is possible to speak clearly and directly. The process of producing speech is the result of the direct or slightly indirect activity of billions of neurons. That activity, in turn, is the result of inputs that take into account the strength of trillions of dendritic connections which encode (in a lossy fashion) the history of a persons experience. Speech is compressive and lossy. You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech. You have a limited vocabulary whose meanings do not map one-to-one in the mind of any other person who hears you speak. So not only are there multiple limitations on the output side of the channel, there are limitations on the receiving side as well. This is why effective communication is so hard! As the sender you don't have full introspective access to the contents of your brain, so you can't even know what the full message is you're trying to send. As the receiver you're operating on a highly compressed message without a fully shared codec. So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.
- 9q9 6y ago
  7 3+4 2nd-smallest double Mersenne prime Number of continents
  - dataduck 6y ago
    What's the point you're trying to make?
    - frutiger 6y ago
      The irony is delicious.
    - tene 6y ago
      To me, it looks like a pretty clear demonstration that there really is a useful, meaningful spectrum of clarity vs indirection.
- ken 6y ago
alexandercrohde 6y ago
What a loaded article. Obviously "clear" and "direct" are both positive-spin words, indicating that the author thinks there's some value to this. As somebody who used to be incredibly blunt, and still is much blunter than average, I'll tell you that social graces, white lies, and indirectness usually serve purposes. The only time you need to be more direct is when people don't understand what you're saying (which actually happens a fair amount in business). Take for example the PIP (performance improvement plan). On the one hand, the name of it is so whitewashed you could worry the meaning might be lost. However, renaming it to the blunt title "were-probably-about-to-fire-you-documentation", though refreshingly direct, would probably be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people. Does changing the words around it lessen the pain (in the long term)? Unclear, maybe it just spreads it out, maybe it makes it more shameful, because it indicates it's too severe to be addressed directly.
- sn41 6y ago
  I agree with this view. The statement "you are not that smart" is true and blunt in the case of everyone without exception, but it is useless. A gentle feedback sugarcoating some of the flaws might help the listener.
  - Klinky 6y ago
    "You are not smart" is an insult. "Your plan will never work because of X, Y, Z." is direct/blunt. "I'd suggest you make changes X, Y, Z to the plan, because I don't think your plan will work as it stands right now." is maybe a bit more sugarcoated. The last example is more tentative, less authoritative, and hinges on the person being receptive to your input.
    - paulcole 6y ago
      How is telling someone exactly what to do less authoritative?
      - BeetleB 6y ago
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
This is miserable. Communication needs to be informative and actionable first of all. For example, the opener “I am not impressed by that projection.” Who cares? There is 1 bit of info on that statement (impressed OR not impressed). It achieves nothing. Second to being informative and actionable, communication should be useful (to you, to them). If being blunt or overly straightforward renders it useless, for any reason (even just sensitivity of the listener), then you need to take that into account and consider how it affects the outcome you want. It reminds me of this Yudkowsky quote from [0]: > “what you say is another issue, especially when speaking to nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don't have fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they're going to misinterpret something then you shouldn't say it to them no matter what the words mean inside your own head” This article from Beck is little more than pretense to feel entitled to treat people rudely and act as if that is pragmatic. Very disappointing. [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t-know https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t-kn...
supernova87a 6y ago
What's clear and direct about this guy is that he's using the excuse "clear and direct" to simply be able to say all the negative things he's previously been afraid of saying. The problem with that is if you offer no solutions, positive encouragement, or proposals on what is better, people quickly tire of hearing the negative honesty part of your mind. And they start to learn that it's because your speech reflects a negative person underneath. I think he has another couple of years "experiments" needed on his personality.
- watwut 6y ago
  Three out of four examples were positive? > I told an ex-girlfriend that I loved her and I was offering her a long-term relationship. I told my daughter who is getting shot with rubber bullets that I am terrified and that I am proud of her. I told a project at work that I wasn’t impressed by their goals. > Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of relationships with them. They told me they weren’t interested in romance but they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another talk.
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    It wasn't clear to me from the writing which were his before/after phases, which mostly sounded like what I commented on. But I read between the lines that his "negative-only" traits have probably bled through to his experiment.
- praptak 6y ago
  While that might be true, the article explicitly states it doesn't give one a license to say whatever you want to whoever you want.
  - omgJustTest 6y ago
    The license to say anything exists for all people to use as they see fit. There is an emphasis on what "license he has" in your comment. He has all the same ones anyone else does. Emphasizing the minor point misses the major, that in order to become more functionally happy, you need to have a mental model and understanding of how a person will take your input. Also people may do as many did, nothing.
fblp 6y ago
I want to congratulate and thank the author for experimenting with how he communicates and sharing what he observed.
solidist 6y ago
Thank you for sharing.
justjonathan 6y ago
This brings to mind my favorite affinity on of (small p) political speech. Political speech is about saying something based on the reaction you want rather than what is true. When I first heard things framed this way political, speech struck me as dishonest and manipulative. It certainly can be that, but with the distance of perspective I see that it can provide listeners with the truth in a way that they can react in positively. How’s my new haircut? Honest, clear, direct: pretty bad, among the bottom 5% of haircuts you’ve had. Political (deceptive, manipulative):Great! Political (honest but motivating positive action): I don’t think it is as good as your last one.
stagas 6y ago
The approach has a name, it's called "radical honesty". The idea is this: we are often surprised as to how things turn up, yet at the same time, we are not fully engaged with the world around us, we hold back. The inner world is not expressed fully out in the environment so the environment responds to the projection of you, instead of the real you. No wonder why things don't turn up as you'd expect, they favor the projection. What if you'd be completely honest and direct with everyone and always act as you feel, holding nothing back. Then the world would respond to that instead, everything would have direct causality to your actions. You wouldn't look back to think how you should have acted, since there is only one way to act, truthfully and honestly, and any outcome would be the result of that and then you'd have complete responsibility for your actions and the character you have built. It is probably a spectrum, the far other extreme can be considered psychopathy. When all of your actions are pre-examined thoroughly, you're never trully out in the world. In any case, it's a good experiment for everyone to try, you'd be surprised. Congrats to the OP for figuring it out.
- gls2ro 6y ago
  While I like the idea of representing the inner world as clear as possible I dont think this is possible in human communication. Here is why I think this: - saying things in a way is different than understanding them - communication is happening on all channels: verbal, non-verbal including context, rhythm, tone, time, moods ... So only being honest verbal does not assure that the other will understand the same way the non-verbal or the context - I understand that maybe mathematics is a honest way of communication. But takes a lot of practice (building concepts one from another and all from a starting point) from everybody to understand from a book the same things. And this is not usually possible between two people. Maybe can be done between long term partners - I think focusing on the I without putting effort into making sure how the other understands be a trap of deluding ourselves that we are honest. We are honest when the others also understood what we said and only after that they can truly respond to who we are. At least this is my believe.
- 7532yahoogmail 6y ago
  I am familiar with Blanton's Radical Honesty if that's your reference. What was your experience?
christiansakai 6y ago
This is something that I struggle balancing back and forth. I used to be direct, and then less direct, and then direct again, then less direct again. Moving to different country, or to different communities, and my attempts were resets because people have no expectations and all things are blank state. For every attempts to swing either way, there's pros and cons. I am now on my "direct" phase. I guess that's just the nature of communication, it is all contextual.
MauranKilom 6y ago
This is an interesting article to me because I feel that I have been approaching this from the exact opposite direction. It took me many years to learn that speaking in honest, innocent truths is not all there is to communication. Even if what you say is topical and meaningful, the way it is perceived by recipients has little correlation with how truthful your message is. This is what is meant when "factual information" is only one of four aspects of communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model (see in particular the example at the bottom of the page). Essentially, the best way to communicate something always depends on the receiver. My approach has thus been to try and run everything I want to say through a "if I were the other party and heard this, what would my reaction be? Is that reaction what I'm trying to achieve?" filter. I understood the article as this being the "manipulative" element that the author wanted to eliminate. But for me personally it's been life-saving to have some way of making sure that I'm not completely misunderstood. And that will happen if you present the right information at the wrong time, in the wrong context, to the wrong people or with the wrong presentation. Yes, I deliberate a lot over how I word my emails... This take on "communication is not just truths yelled into the void" is also reflected in several XKCDs: https://xkcd.com/1028/ https://xkcd.com/1028/ https://xkcd.com/1984/ https://xkcd.com/1984/ https://xkcd.com/1860/ https://xkcd.com/1860/ And this one in particular is very poignant: https://xkcd.com/1576/ https://xkcd.com/1576/
- christiansakai 6y ago
  "Is that reaction what I'm trying to achieve", interesting perspective.
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    It seems apparent to me that this is something most people do more or less intuitively (and for those that are especially proficient at it, I can see how it would become manipulative very quickly). I'm getting better at it, but it's still largely a manual/conscious effort. Tangentially, I also found the way Alan Turing was portrayed in The Imitation Game to hit extremely close to home in this regard. E.g. this key scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjMfUCgyyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjMfUCgyyw. Regardless of how historically accurate it is, the movie contrasts these differences between interacting with computers/math and other humans (in that the former is solely about "factual content" alone) very well in my eyes.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
codegladiator 6y ago
It's a mistake to think that "speaking" is communication. And it's worse when one thinks 'but what I am speaking is true'.
dondawest 6y ago
He’s using the language of self help (“clear and direct communication!”) but interpreting it in a manner reminiscent of the “truth telling sessions” enacted by Synanon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon > > Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of relationships with them. They told me they weren’t interested in romance but they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another talk. He considers himself to be a “direct” communicator, when this is an example of very indirect communication. The guy wants to date and/or be intimate with someone — telling them “I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” is so much more indirect than asking “wanna get dinner?” it’s not even funny. His barometer of “clear and direct” is totally off in this case. This guy’s take on “clear and direct communication” is sophomoric and there’s a reason adults don’t communicate in the most direct manner at all times. Sometimes you need to give the other person plausible deniability: asking “wanna see my etchings?” is a cultural shorthand that is just a more respectful way of asking “wanna sleep together?”, but this guys interpretation of clear and direct communication doesn’t seem to have room for a question like that. Sometimes speaking vaguely rather than directly is a way of respect to your conversational partner. This guy doesn’t get it
- skrebbel 6y ago
  "This guy" openly and vulnerably writes about his struggles with something that it's not socially acceptable to be bad at. The fact that he's a minor celebrity in IT likely makes that harder to do, not easier. He posted the article to HN himself and is likely to read your comment. I think you're mostly right in your observations but maybe it'd be nice if you try to practice some of what you preach, wrt how you write it.
  - dondawest 6y ago
    I don’t think he writes or communicates in a vulnerable way at all. “I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” = not vulnerable, not a question, not direct, not clear. Also I don’t respect this article so I don’t feel compelled to demonstrate respect — I’d rather practice what he preaches to demonstrate its fundamental rudeness than do any preaching of my own
nkingsy 6y ago
I recently got feedback that I speak at too low level and with too much emotion/passion. Still digesting it. I think it is a variant of what I’ve heard before, which is that I leap from A to C assuming everyone understands that A and C both connect to B. It’s frustrating because that’s the style I enjoy for receiving information. When someone makes a jump like that, it intrigues me especially when I don’t see the connection. It triggers easy questions when needed. Another one I run into is assumed consensus. I make a statement without saying that it is a team consensus, and people outside the team assume the opposite, that I’m going rogue or something. Then there is dismissive agreement, something I both do and dislike when done to me. Basically “yeah but that’s not what I want to focus on”. I’m intrigued by the Amazon style of memo writing and reading in advance of meetings, as I think a lot of communication issues can be solved by making clear why we are sitting in a room talking right now, and ensuring everyone has the same background information.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > I recently got feedback that I speak at too low level and with too much emotion/passion. How often do you get this feedback? Was it from just the one person? If so, have you asked others if they perceived you similarly? Of all the people you asked, how many agreed/disagreed? Unless there is consensus, don't assume it is true. The majority of times someone gives you feedback like this, it is about them. They usually have a need, are expecting you to provide it. Instead, focus on what that need is. Heck, even if there is consensus in the feedback you get, you should still try to figure out what their real problem is: Yes, you speak at a low level. OK - so what? What problem is that causing for them? The trick is to learn to ask these questions nonconfrontationally (definitely do not respond with "So what?") General steps would be to indicate you've heard them, express some concern, and then ask. Something like: "It would concern me if my voice level is creating problems for our communication/work. It would help me if you could give me an example so I understand better." (This is not the best phrasing, but is probably adequate). You can take it from there based on the response. Ask how they would have preferred you said it. In the end, though, try to find out why it was a problem. Are they intimidated by you when you speak passionately? Are they mishearing you because of the low volume? The other issue is the use of "too" in their statement. How low is too low? How much is too much? Best to get examples so you get an idea. BTW, it's not unusual to find out that it really wasn't a problem when you probe them. People use "too much" even when it isn't. I once took a communications workshop where the instructor drilled two messages: 1. Everything anyone says or does is in service of his/her needs. 2. Never believe what people say about you. The first one is your example. They're giving you that feedback because of some need they have that's not being met. The second one is not a license to behave however you want, but is tied to the first. People can get frustrated by something, and are not good at expressing it, and often take it out on people. I would get all kinds of negative feedback about me, and it was very confusing. When I probed others if they felt similarly, I would often get sharp divides - a lot of people felt there was nothing wrong about my behavior (or even advocated for it) - others hated it. Only when I got more into effective communications did I start realizing that most of the people who were complaining about me merely had different preferences, and it wasn't that I was loud/stubborn/impatient/dull - it was that they had unspoken expectations from me that I wasn't meeting. Often having a mere conversation about the issue would resolve the problems without my having to change my behavior. All this is not easy to do, BTW. I'm still poor at it.
woodandsteel 6y ago
I have a lot of experience training people in interpersonal communication skills. I have come to the conclusion that good communication is based on a set of attitudes. You start by assuming that the other person is reasonably intelligent and well-motivated, and that they will see the point of what you are trying to say if you just explain it to them in a clear manner. But is it also possible that they have things on their own side that you need to hear and understand. And so on the basis of all that you come up with what you need to say, and also how to listen and ask questions. All the specific rules, like reflective listening and Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, are just putting these attitudes into practice. However, it is also the case that sometimes the person on the other side is not well-motivated, either because they are a bad person or they are in a situation where in order to get along in life they have to screw you over. In that case clear direct communication can fail or even be dangerous. So you have to make a judgement as to whether or not it is smart to go ahead and be direct.
- 7532yahoogmail 6y ago
  >However, it is also the case that sometimes the person on the other side is not well-motivated Correct! There are some people fortunately < 5% from what I can tell who are mal-adaptive and sometimes mal-adaptive and intelligent. That's a different ball game indeed.
Arete314159 6y ago
The right to direct communication without punishment is a hallmark of privilege. Women in tech -- and I know a lot of them -- talk about how the only "acceptable" way to call out a guy's Glaring Error without him getting mad at you is like this: "Gosh, I don't know, I maybe don't really understand the requirements that well, but it seems like {huge mistake} isn't right, what do you think? Of course I could be wrong." We don't like doing this but we are told we're "not team players" if we dont do this.

37 points by KentBeck 6y ago

I can't help but feel that even in this "clear and direct communication" the author is continuing to look for ways to manipulate situations and people. What seems to be lacking is empathy. The communication is based upon the value add, the reaction or positioning that the author gets at the end of the interaction, rather than on collaborating with another human and trying to get both parties to a better place. A similar strategy to this "clear and direct communication" that can devolve into the same place is the concept of Radical Candor[0]. It can begin as a "helping" to awaken others to things they may have missed, and can end up being an avenue for tearing people down instead of growing them. The only difference is the intent of the speaker. Assuming the best in people and striving to have positive outcomes tends to work better. This puts you at risk of other people much like the author was previously, who seek to undercut and deceive and manipulate, but those people show their true colors pretty quick and they end up on a different tier of communication that no longer gets the privilege everyone else is afforded. A pivotal change within my own life and communication was reading about Adler's work [0]. Separation of Tasks as a concept is very applicable to interpersonal relationships at the office. I no longer struggle with trying to explain why people are rude and pushing agendas that don't make empirical sense. None of us are infallible and we all are seeking to shape our world in different ways and it's helpful to delineate what we really care about and not. Which hills to die on. [0]: https://www.radicalcandor.com/ https://www.radicalcandor.com/ [1]: https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/lessons-from-alfred-adler-the-influential-figure-in-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-youve-never-heard-of https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/lessons-from-alfred...

tonystubblebine 6y ago
Right. It's like all of these strategies are about how he communicates but not about how he listens. Most people think they are good listeners, but I come at this from the world of training coaches. Coaching starts with being a professionally good listener which is much different than being an amateur good listener. And when you try to reach this level of listening at a professional level you start to realize the millions of ways in which you block yourself from listening. An obvious one that the author did touch on was that he recognized his prior communication as manipulative. Right! We all bring our own agenda and this is one of the ways in which we can filter what we are hearing. What has the person said that supports my agenda? What threatens it and how can I disprove that? Thinking that way doesn't allow you to realize that your judgement might be wrong. The other big ones are anxiety and need for esteem. It's like when you can't help but give advice because you are deeply desperate for validation. You're not broken, that's a very human way to be. Listening is hard and so a good starting place is to separate listening from judgement. The word I use most is curiosity. Just focus on being curious as a way to crowd out all these other feelings. Then later you can make a judgement. If you are a clear communicator and a bad listener then the result is just that you go around being clearly wrong a lot of the time.
- woodandsteel 6y ago
  Former listening trainer here. I discovered though training a great many people that a key listening problem is that people's attention wanders away and then back, and as a consequence they miss a lot of what has been said but are not aware this has happened. I found this was common even among professional psychotherapists. Also the easiest way to improve your listening skills is reflective listening. That is where you simply say back to the person the key ideas they expressed to you.
- 7532yahoogmail 6y ago
  A really nice assessment and description. Periodically I fall into "give advice because you are deeply desperate for validation". I'd like build on your words and summarize what I learned from still another person Dr. William Schutz, and deal best I can on honest communication v. perception. It's an interesting dilemma to me. First, assume that all I can do is observe behavior: what I see, hear, read. I cannot figure out why a person is exhibiting a behavior; guess sure. But know? No way. What's between the ears is between their ears and inaccessible to me. Second, assume the PCA (principle component analysis) of behavior is control, inclusion, openness. Read "Human Element" or get an old copy of FIRO from him or his son Ethan Schutz --- excellent stuff and perfect for the office: it's like healthcare on the battle field: pointed, focused, can-do, common sense, but not so simplistic and removed for the bigger world of medicine that it's silly or merely palliative. With that setup in mind: 1) you cannot resolve significance issues through control. More generally you cannot fix a problem along PCA axis 1 by doing something along another orthogonal axis 2. Often makes it worse. Giving advice is control behavior, which the writer says, was really about significance. Yep, that's me sometimes. It's helpful to know when I misuse one skill to badly fix something else. 2) Behaviors are goal seeking and directly connect right into feelings which hits right into self-esteem. See the book or smarter people here. This is feature rich location of being human. 3) I've worked 30+ years and spent the last 14 years working for large companies. As posters here have said, behavior comes with a zillion motivations. But from time to time I have dealt with programmers, managers, young, and, old who strongly point out they should --- more: it'd be dumb not to try! --- to manage perception on the other side because perception is reality. Now in some artificially distorted way, it does capture a truth but at the expense of omitting a lot of relevant context. But: -- As Schutz says, we know we ought to be open but in the fact that's the last thing we'll ever do because it's not safe. Openness requires safety. If I start being open I might say something to get myself fired. If my boss talks openly I might get yelled at. That's anxiety making. If a co-worker talks openly about me I might get fired. Better to keep quiet about that co-worker so he'll be quiet about me. Fear is a lot of what prevents openness. -- While words are pouring out one should not assume the speaker is open in two facets. First, the speaker may have low self awareness. If so, trying to make sense of that is doubly impossible. Two, the implied success of getting one over me by having the counterparty play to my perception requires low self-awareness my side. And among other things implies lack of choice/agency my side which is along the control axis to respond appropriately. So ... really where does the cause start and effect end. It's more nuanced. -- The insistence on perception as reality is seated, I feel, either in trauma or in that shadow of maladaptive behavior some people come with. But it's the insistence that to me, indicates the perpetrator is the most insecure of all: they don't believe they have control, or are significant, or would want to be included ... and so in the absence of choice through control ... lie to themselves and the world to get by. They're fragile and they cast the world in a fragile light too. https://thehumanelement.com/pages/firo-theory/ https://thehumanelement.com/pages/firo-theory/ https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Esteem-Management/dp/1555426123/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=human+element+schutz&qid=1591467070&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Human-Element-Productivity-Self-Estee...

iandanforth 6y ago

There's an assumption here that I find fascinating. That it is possible to speak clearly and directly. The process of producing speech is the result of the direct or slightly indirect activity of billions of neurons. That activity, in turn, is the result of inputs that take into account the strength of trillions of dendritic connections which encode (in a lossy fashion) the history of a persons experience. Speech is compressive and lossy. You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech. You have a limited vocabulary whose meanings do not map one-to-one in the mind of any other person who hears you speak. So not only are there multiple limitations on the output side of the channel, there are limitations on the receiving side as well. This is why effective communication is so hard! As the sender you don't have full introspective access to the contents of your brain, so you can't even know what the full message is you're trying to send. As the receiver you're operating on a highly compressed message without a fully shared codec. So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" is, it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.

9q9 6y ago
7 3+4 2nd-smallest double Mersenne prime Number of continents
- dataduck 6y ago
  What's the point you're trying to make?
  - frutiger 6y ago
    The irony is delicious.
  - tene 6y ago
    To me, it looks like a pretty clear demonstration that there really is a useful, meaningful spectrum of clarity vs indirection.
ken 6y ago

alexandercrohde 6y ago

What a loaded article. Obviously "clear" and "direct" are both positive-spin words, indicating that the author thinks there's some value to this. As somebody who used to be incredibly blunt, and still is much blunter than average, I'll tell you that social graces, white lies, and indirectness usually serve purposes. The only time you need to be more direct is when people don't understand what you're saying (which actually happens a fair amount in business). Take for example the PIP (performance improvement plan). On the one hand, the name of it is so whitewashed you could worry the meaning might be lost. However, renaming it to the blunt title "were-probably-about-to-fire-you-documentation", though refreshingly direct, would probably be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people. Does changing the words around it lessen the pain (in the long term)? Unclear, maybe it just spreads it out, maybe it makes it more shameful, because it indicates it's too severe to be addressed directly.

sn41 6y ago
I agree with this view. The statement "you are not that smart" is true and blunt in the case of everyone without exception, but it is useless. A gentle feedback sugarcoating some of the flaws might help the listener.
- Klinky 6y ago
  "You are not smart" is an insult. "Your plan will never work because of X, Y, Z." is direct/blunt. "I'd suggest you make changes X, Y, Z to the plan, because I don't think your plan will work as it stands right now." is maybe a bit more sugarcoated. The last example is more tentative, less authoritative, and hinges on the person being receptive to your input.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    How is telling someone exactly what to do less authoritative?
    - BeetleB 6y ago

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

This is miserable. Communication needs to be informative and actionable first of all. For example, the opener “I am not impressed by that projection.” Who cares? There is 1 bit of info on that statement (impressed OR not impressed). It achieves nothing. Second to being informative and actionable, communication should be useful (to you, to them). If being blunt or overly straightforward renders it useless, for any reason (even just sensitivity of the listener), then you need to take that into account and consider how it affects the outcome you want. It reminds me of this Yudkowsky quote from [0]: > “what you say is another issue, especially when speaking to nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don't have fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they're going to misinterpret something then you shouldn't say it to them no matter what the words mean inside your own head” This article from Beck is little more than pretense to feel entitled to treat people rudely and act as if that is pragmatic. Very disappointing. [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t-know https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t-kn...

supernova87a 6y ago

What's clear and direct about this guy is that he's using the excuse "clear and direct" to simply be able to say all the negative things he's previously been afraid of saying. The problem with that is if you offer no solutions, positive encouragement, or proposals on what is better, people quickly tire of hearing the negative honesty part of your mind. And they start to learn that it's because your speech reflects a negative person underneath. I think he has another couple of years "experiments" needed on his personality.

watwut 6y ago
Three out of four examples were positive? > I told an ex-girlfriend that I loved her and I was offering her a long-term relationship. I told my daughter who is getting shot with rubber bullets that I am terrified and that I am proud of her. I told a project at work that I wasn’t impressed by their goals. > Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of relationships with them. They told me they weren’t interested in romance but they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another talk.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  It wasn't clear to me from the writing which were his before/after phases, which mostly sounded like what I commented on. But I read between the lines that his "negative-only" traits have probably bled through to his experiment.
praptak 6y ago
While that might be true, the article explicitly states it doesn't give one a license to say whatever you want to whoever you want.
- omgJustTest 6y ago
  The license to say anything exists for all people to use as they see fit. There is an emphasis on what "license he has" in your comment. He has all the same ones anyone else does. Emphasizing the minor point misses the major, that in order to become more functionally happy, you need to have a mental model and understanding of how a person will take your input. Also people may do as many did, nothing.

fblp 6y ago

I want to congratulate and thank the author for experimenting with how he communicates and sharing what he observed.

solidist 6y ago

Thank you for sharing.

justjonathan 6y ago

This brings to mind my favorite affinity on of (small p) political speech. Political speech is about saying something based on the reaction you want rather than what is true. When I first heard things framed this way political, speech struck me as dishonest and manipulative. It certainly can be that, but with the distance of perspective I see that it can provide listeners with the truth in a way that they can react in positively. How’s my new haircut? Honest, clear, direct: pretty bad, among the bottom 5% of haircuts you’ve had. Political (deceptive, manipulative):Great! Political (honest but motivating positive action): I don’t think it is as good as your last one.

stagas 6y ago

The approach has a name, it's called "radical honesty". The idea is this: we are often surprised as to how things turn up, yet at the same time, we are not fully engaged with the world around us, we hold back. The inner world is not expressed fully out in the environment so the environment responds to the projection of you, instead of the real you. No wonder why things don't turn up as you'd expect, they favor the projection. What if you'd be completely honest and direct with everyone and always act as you feel, holding nothing back. Then the world would respond to that instead, everything would have direct causality to your actions. You wouldn't look back to think how you should have acted, since there is only one way to act, truthfully and honestly, and any outcome would be the result of that and then you'd have complete responsibility for your actions and the character you have built. It is probably a spectrum, the far other extreme can be considered psychopathy. When all of your actions are pre-examined thoroughly, you're never trully out in the world. In any case, it's a good experiment for everyone to try, you'd be surprised. Congrats to the OP for figuring it out.

gls2ro 6y ago
While I like the idea of representing the inner world as clear as possible I dont think this is possible in human communication. Here is why I think this: - saying things in a way is different than understanding them - communication is happening on all channels: verbal, non-verbal including context, rhythm, tone, time, moods ... So only being honest verbal does not assure that the other will understand the same way the non-verbal or the context - I understand that maybe mathematics is a honest way of communication. But takes a lot of practice (building concepts one from another and all from a starting point) from everybody to understand from a book the same things. And this is not usually possible between two people. Maybe can be done between long term partners - I think focusing on the I without putting effort into making sure how the other understands be a trap of deluding ourselves that we are honest. We are honest when the others also understood what we said and only after that they can truly respond to who we are. At least this is my believe.
7532yahoogmail 6y ago
I am familiar with Blanton's Radical Honesty if that's your reference. What was your experience?

christiansakai 6y ago

This is something that I struggle balancing back and forth. I used to be direct, and then less direct, and then direct again, then less direct again. Moving to different country, or to different communities, and my attempts were resets because people have no expectations and all things are blank state. For every attempts to swing either way, there's pros and cons. I am now on my "direct" phase. I guess that's just the nature of communication, it is all contextual.

MauranKilom 6y ago

This is an interesting article to me because I feel that I have been approaching this from the exact opposite direction. It took me many years to learn that speaking in honest, innocent truths is not all there is to communication. Even if what you say is topical and meaningful, the way it is perceived by recipients has little correlation with how truthful your message is. This is what is meant when "factual information" is only one of four aspects of communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model (see in particular the example at the bottom of the page). Essentially, the best way to communicate something always depends on the receiver. My approach has thus been to try and run everything I want to say through a "if I were the other party and heard this, what would my reaction be? Is that reaction what I'm trying to achieve?" filter. I understood the article as this being the "manipulative" element that the author wanted to eliminate. But for me personally it's been life-saving to have some way of making sure that I'm not completely misunderstood. And that will happen if you present the right information at the wrong time, in the wrong context, to the wrong people or with the wrong presentation. Yes, I deliberate a lot over how I word my emails... This take on "communication is not just truths yelled into the void" is also reflected in several XKCDs: https://xkcd.com/1028/ https://xkcd.com/1028/ https://xkcd.com/1984/ https://xkcd.com/1984/ https://xkcd.com/1860/ https://xkcd.com/1860/ And this one in particular is very poignant: https://xkcd.com/1576/ https://xkcd.com/1576/

christiansakai 6y ago
"Is that reaction what I'm trying to achieve", interesting perspective.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  It seems apparent to me that this is something most people do more or less intuitively (and for those that are especially proficient at it, I can see how it would become manipulative very quickly). I'm getting better at it, but it's still largely a manual/conscious effort. Tangentially, I also found the way Alan Turing was portrayed in The Imitation Game to hit extremely close to home in this regard. E.g. this key scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjMfUCgyyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjMfUCgyyw. Regardless of how historically accurate it is, the movie contrasts these differences between interacting with computers/math and other humans (in that the former is solely about "factual content" alone) very well in my eyes.

deleted 6y ago

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codegladiator 6y ago

It's a mistake to think that "speaking" is communication. And it's worse when one thinks 'but what I am speaking is true'.

dondawest 6y ago

He’s using the language of self help (“clear and direct communication!”) but interpreting it in a manner reminiscent of the “truth telling sessions” enacted by Synanon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon > > Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of relationships with them. They told me they weren’t interested in romance but they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another talk. He considers himself to be a “direct” communicator, when this is an example of very indirect communication. The guy wants to date and/or be intimate with someone — telling them “I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” is so much more indirect than asking “wanna get dinner?” it’s not even funny. His barometer of “clear and direct” is totally off in this case. This guy’s take on “clear and direct communication” is sophomoric and there’s a reason adults don’t communicate in the most direct manner at all times. Sometimes you need to give the other person plausible deniability: asking “wanna see my etchings?” is a cultural shorthand that is just a more respectful way of asking “wanna sleep together?”, but this guys interpretation of clear and direct communication doesn’t seem to have room for a question like that. Sometimes speaking vaguely rather than directly is a way of respect to your conversational partner. This guy doesn’t get it

skrebbel 6y ago
"This guy" openly and vulnerably writes about his struggles with something that it's not socially acceptable to be bad at. The fact that he's a minor celebrity in IT likely makes that harder to do, not easier. He posted the article to HN himself and is likely to read your comment. I think you're mostly right in your observations but maybe it'd be nice if you try to practice some of what you preach, wrt how you write it.
- dondawest 6y ago
  I don’t think he writes or communicates in a vulnerable way at all. “I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” = not vulnerable, not a question, not direct, not clear. Also I don’t respect this article so I don’t feel compelled to demonstrate respect — I’d rather practice what he preaches to demonstrate its fundamental rudeness than do any preaching of my own

nkingsy 6y ago

I recently got feedback that I speak at too low level and with too much emotion/passion. Still digesting it. I think it is a variant of what I’ve heard before, which is that I leap from A to C assuming everyone understands that A and C both connect to B. It’s frustrating because that’s the style I enjoy for receiving information. When someone makes a jump like that, it intrigues me especially when I don’t see the connection. It triggers easy questions when needed. Another one I run into is assumed consensus. I make a statement without saying that it is a team consensus, and people outside the team assume the opposite, that I’m going rogue or something. Then there is dismissive agreement, something I both do and dislike when done to me. Basically “yeah but that’s not what I want to focus on”. I’m intrigued by the Amazon style of memo writing and reading in advance of meetings, as I think a lot of communication issues can be solved by making clear why we are sitting in a room talking right now, and ensuring everyone has the same background information.

BeetleB 6y ago
> I recently got feedback that I speak at too low level and with too much emotion/passion. How often do you get this feedback? Was it from just the one person? If so, have you asked others if they perceived you similarly? Of all the people you asked, how many agreed/disagreed? Unless there is consensus, don't assume it is true. The majority of times someone gives you feedback like this, it is about them. They usually have a need, are expecting you to provide it. Instead, focus on what that need is. Heck, even if there is consensus in the feedback you get, you should still try to figure out what their real problem is: Yes, you speak at a low level. OK - so what? What problem is that causing for them? The trick is to learn to ask these questions nonconfrontationally (definitely do not respond with "So what?") General steps would be to indicate you've heard them, express some concern, and then ask. Something like: "It would concern me if my voice level is creating problems for our communication/work. It would help me if you could give me an example so I understand better." (This is not the best phrasing, but is probably adequate). You can take it from there based on the response. Ask how they would have preferred you said it. In the end, though, try to find out why it was a problem. Are they intimidated by you when you speak passionately? Are they mishearing you because of the low volume? The other issue is the use of "too" in their statement. How low is too low? How much is too much? Best to get examples so you get an idea. BTW, it's not unusual to find out that it really wasn't a problem when you probe them. People use "too much" even when it isn't. I once took a communications workshop where the instructor drilled two messages: 1. Everything anyone says or does is in service of his/her needs. 2. Never believe what people say about you. The first one is your example. They're giving you that feedback because of some need they have that's not being met. The second one is not a license to behave however you want, but is tied to the first. People can get frustrated by something, and are not good at expressing it, and often take it out on people. I would get all kinds of negative feedback about me, and it was very confusing. When I probed others if they felt similarly, I would often get sharp divides - a lot of people felt there was nothing wrong about my behavior (or even advocated for it) - others hated it. Only when I got more into effective communications did I start realizing that most of the people who were complaining about me merely had different preferences, and it wasn't that I was loud/stubborn/impatient/dull - it was that they had unspoken expectations from me that I wasn't meeting. Often having a mere conversation about the issue would resolve the problems without my having to change my behavior. All this is not easy to do, BTW. I'm still poor at it.

woodandsteel 6y ago

I have a lot of experience training people in interpersonal communication skills. I have come to the conclusion that good communication is based on a set of attitudes. You start by assuming that the other person is reasonably intelligent and well-motivated, and that they will see the point of what you are trying to say if you just explain it to them in a clear manner. But is it also possible that they have things on their own side that you need to hear and understand. And so on the basis of all that you come up with what you need to say, and also how to listen and ask questions. All the specific rules, like reflective listening and Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, are just putting these attitudes into practice. However, it is also the case that sometimes the person on the other side is not well-motivated, either because they are a bad person or they are in a situation where in order to get along in life they have to screw you over. In that case clear direct communication can fail or even be dangerous. So you have to make a judgement as to whether or not it is smart to go ahead and be direct.

7532yahoogmail 6y ago
>However, it is also the case that sometimes the person on the other side is not well-motivated Correct! There are some people fortunately < 5% from what I can tell who are mal-adaptive and sometimes mal-adaptive and intelligent. That's a different ball game indeed.

Arete314159 6y ago

The right to direct communication without punishment is a hallmark of privilege. Women in tech -- and I know a lot of them -- talk about how the only "acceptable" way to call out a guy's Glaring Error without him getting mad at you is like this: "Gosh, I don't know, I maybe don't really understand the requirements that well, but it seems like {huge mistake} isn't right, what do you think? Of course I could be wrong." We don't like doing this but we are told we're "not team players" if we dont do this.