8 ms·

Repeat Yourself, a Lot

• Noumenon72 5y ago
  Even low-level management is a lot better at repeating themselves than I am. They make sure everybody knows something changes even if they have to go explain it ten times. They say it in every meeting so that when developers are designing things, we say "$MANAGER is going to want us to do X". I tend to just write my canonical version of something and say it once, expecting people to take notes to remember like I would do.
• 1121redblackgo 5y ago
  Repeat Yourself, a Lot
• decebalus1 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect classic
  • shoto_io 5y ago
    Could you elaborate why that’s relevant?
    • eska 5y ago
      I suppose due to paragraphs like this: > When selling a company, a product, or an idea to customers, employees, investors, candidates, repeating a consistent message several times embosses the message upon the individual’s memory. It establishes clarity: Redpoint is a leading venture capital firm.
    • decebalus1 5y ago
      From the wikipedia article: > In a 2015 study, researchers discovered that familiarity can overpower rationality and that repetitively hearing that a certain fact is wrong can affect the hearer's beliefs.[4] Researchers attributed the illusory truth effect's impact on participants who knew the correct answer to begin with, but were persuaded to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood, to "processing fluency". > The illusory truth effect plays a significant role in such fields as election campaigns, advertising, news media, and political propaganda. From the article: > When selling a company, a product, or an idea to customers, employees, investors, candidates, repeating a consistent message several times embosses the message upon the individual’s memory. It establishes clarity: Redpoint is a leading venture capital firm. It's not that hard, seriously. This is a staple of propaganda repackaged into low quality blogspam. Let's take `Redpoint is a leading venture capital firm.`. What does that even mean? Leading what? In what? It's a pointless meaningless phrase. But if you hear it often enough it becomes 'truth' in whatever the context you're in at that point. Basically one of the major ways in which we manufacture, package and sell bullshit.
      • shoto_io 5y ago
        Thanks for elaborating. I agree with your overall premise. Then again it seems like that this is one way people can become successful. There is value in knowing. PS: What if the method is applied to something, which has some real substance? And not on something pointless like the phrase you cited.
        • _dw7s 5y ago
          > PS: What if the method is applied to something, which has some real substance? And not on something pointless like the phrase you cited. The word 'propaganda' has a negative connotation. But there is 'good' propaganda, or propaganda which is done for a good or valuable cause. A recent example would be pro-vaccine propaganda.
      • astrobe_ 5y ago
        And that's yet another reason why we have to have ad blockers.
• 123pie123 5y ago
  I get what supposed to be happening but, please don't keep repeating yourself in meetings it's annoying
  • drewcoo 5y ago
    If it's annoying, it's working. To make it less annoying, signal that you have the message by voicing the same memes. Once it's obvious that enough people get it, those people can start repeating something else instead.
    • 123pie123 5y ago
      i understand that, but once certain pepele are talking there is no way they're being interrupted also, some people just keeping repeating stuff in slightly different ways I suspect sometimes this is not planned but they're thinking out loud
• Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  I've worked with a lot of execs or managers who seem surprised that after they say something, one time, in a meeting, it didn't register with the team. People some time don't pay attention. Or they do, but they forget. They have habits in their actions and way of thinking. So I agree. You have to repeat yourself.
  • 08-15 5y ago
    It might be because managers talk all the time while saying nothing. So nobody really listens anymore. It was certainly true in most meetings I experienced.
• gjkood 5y ago
  "Tell ‘Em What You’re Going To Tell ‘Em; Next, Tell ‘Em; Next, Tell ‘Em What You Told ‘Em" - attributed to lots of people all the way back to Aristotle. [1] I know this is not the same thing as the linked article but I just love this fundamental guidance to public speaking. 1. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/15/tell-em/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/15/tell-em/
  • tailspin2019 5y ago
    Maybe off topic, but I take a lot of online courses (Pluralsight being the majority) and I find that this standard approach of “intro”, “content”, “summary” doesn’t add much for me. It might just be a personal thing but it’s never felt useful and just serves to lower the signal to noise ratio. I always skip the intro and summary sections. I find the same with blog posts that religiously follow this structure. Just tell me the actual information! It could be a very subjective thing. I have a short attention span and will generally crank up the speed of these video courses too. I just want to quickly and efficiently extract the raw value without the fluff. I don’t find it helps comprehension and retention. (For me, the only thing that does is immediately putting into practice what you learn).
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      The "intro / content / summary" structure is primarily useful in situations where: 1. The content is extensive, or 2. The information is being presented in real time without the opportunity for review. Courses often use this structure because the primary audience are the students in the classroom, which fits criterion 2. Written content roughly the length of a book chapter often follows this structure because they fit criterion 1. There's enough content that the intro and summary contribute non-trivial insights. Short blog posts on trivial ideas use this format because of either SEO or cargo culting, I assume.
      • tailspin2019 5y ago
        Yes, very good insights. Online learning content seems to unnecessarily and blindly follow this structure even when a lot of the time neither 1 or 2 apply. Perhaps because face-to-face courses would traditionally do the same. The ability to rewind, slow down, rewatch etc. for online content removes a lot of the need for extensive intros and summaries. But there are certain scenarios where it's still a valid structure.
• thatsamonad 5y ago
  A somewhat related approach that I’ve found incredibly useful in my career is repeating what -others- have told you back to them, a lot. It’s honestly amazing to me how much mileage I’ve gotten out of simply saying, “I heard you say X about Y. Does that sound right to you?” a couple of times during discussions just to make sure that everyone is clear that we’re all discussing the same thing. It seems like “common sense” to clarify your understanding of someone else’s communication but I haven’t run into very many people who actually take the time to do it.
  • SamPatt 5y ago
    100% agree. This is not only useful for improving communication but for making other parties satisfied they are being heard. I do this too and it gives people an opportunity to clarify their views, which everyone appreciates, and often leads to them explaining broader motivations which helps develop trust.
  • __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    Repeating what others said back to them is called “mirroring” and is an effective technique for not only confirming your understanding but also showing others that you are actively listening. I recommend reading “ Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” by Chris Voss if you are interested in conversation tactics.
    • kqr 5y ago
      Mirroring is different from what your parent comment talks about. Mirroring is simply about repeating, verbatim, the last part of what someone said. So as a response to your comment it might be something like "Conversation tactics." Your parent comment seems to be talking more about summarising someone else's point in your own words, which is a deeper reflection on what someone means, and an even stronger signal that you're actively listening. (That summary is what gets you a "that's right" in the terminology of Voss. Mirroring is used to get your counterparty to expand on what they're saying, not just go "that's right.")
      • 5y ago
• mattzito 5y ago
  As someone who believes in this approach, this article doesn't give the right advice or level of detail about how you do this right as part of a management team. You can't just repeat "year of the hound" over and over again and expect the team to rally around it. You have to build a narrative, a story, get everyone to understand it, and then continue to bring people's work back to align against that. So you start by identifying a problem or goal (or a few), and write it down, and walk everyone through why that's important. Then you talk to everyone about what they're working on - does that work ladder up to that problem or goal? How? Then on a regular basis, you talk about how the team is progressing against those problems/goals. Send out emails celebrating wins and specifically explain why they are important to those goals. Then if you hit a goal, you have a party, and you genuinely thank everyone involved in hitting that goal, and recognize them (even if it's everyone). And by the same token, if people want to get distracted, you bring it back to those core goals - "hey, it sounds great that we've got this cool opportunity to expand into eastern europe if we internationalize the product, but how does that get us closer to our goal of getting 50% of our current enterprise customers fully rolled out with all critical feature requests addressed?" You have to be able to tell a story, build a narrative, take criticism and debate, organically bring people's work back to the story, and so on. It's not EASY, but it's incredibly powerful when done well (and I am not saying I am great at this, I've seen people who do it beautifully, but I do it better than many people I have worked for).
• redisman 5y ago
  I ignore any ideas management has if they only mention it once. Twice or more and I might start considering that they’re serious
  • JazzXP 5y ago
    At a previous job I did this too. Ignore for a week, if it comes up again, then somebody actually cares about it and it's not an off the cuff comment. Current job, no so much, it's really dependent on the culture of the workplace.
    • redisman 5y ago
      Yeah it definitely depends on how seriously I take them as a person. Some actually think things through while most just feel like they have to tell me every random idea that pops in their heads
• harshreality 5y ago
  Many teachers (of various things, not just academics) say the same thing. It makes a lot of sense. Almost everyone here will know about spaced repetition and SuperMemo, but even improperly spaced repetition (rapid repetition during a speech or lesson) is almost certainly better than no repetition. Are there any studies that badly spaced repetition can be neutral or negatively affect recall?
  • kqr 5y ago
    No. More repetition is always better. Proper spacing comes in only when you want to maximise retention with a fixed amount of repetition. (Source: Hoffman, Ward, Feltovich, et al. 2013. Recommended read if you're into that sort of stuff!)
    • dgarrett 5y ago
      > (Source: Hoffman, Ward, Feltovich, et al. 2013. Recommended read if you're into that sort of stuff!) I’m very curious. How did you come across this book? It seems very niche.
      • kqr 5y ago
        Edit: Oh, sorry, I misread your question entirely. I don't remember, unfortunately. I get most of my book recommendations from authors of other books I like, and sometimes from HN. So probably one of those two! This book in particular lies close to the naturalistic decision making (NDM) research, which I associate primarily with Gary Klein, which in my mental knowledge graph has an antagonistic connection to Kahneman and Tversky, so it might have been along that path. Or one of the millions of side paths that also connect those two. Or something else entirely. Original comment based on misreading below. ---- Depending on where the emphasis of your question lies, there are two questions in your comment. 1. Why do people publish research about such a niche subject? It seems that a lot of organisations have a self-interest in finding out how experts come to be such, and if there's a way to optimise that path. 2. How come this niche stuff is collected into a book rather than some other format? You wouldn't believe what kind of niche books there are out there!
• mro_name 5y ago
  humans are herd-creatures after all. They take repetition for relevance.
• kqr 5y ago
  This was one of the major practical lessons I got out of Thinking, Fast and Slow. Before reading that book I would try to get people to change by powerful logcal argument. I would get frustrated when people didn't immediately realise the potential I was explaining. Having read that book, I've realised people need to hear something many times before their system 1 will even consider thinking of it as true. So these days, I have much more patience and I deliberately employ repetition strategies -- sometimes with powerful logical arguments, but sometimes without, too. It's about as effective either way, in my experience. Saying "we need to also consider a solution that doesn't use Oracle" in different contexts and with different reasons attached over a few weeks time somehow mysteriously gets people to think that maybe we should at least consider a solution that doesn't use Oracle.
  • fragmede 5y ago
    Mysteriously? People talk to each other and it gets around that hey, we'd better not use Oracle, kqr really hates them. Depending on your status in an org, that's enough to move mountains, or get you ejected (professionally and quietly). Oracle's an easy one to hate because programmers have issues about money, but other opinions require more depth before things can actually change. Eg hey let's switch programming languages!
    • kqr 5y ago
      I deliberately chose Oracle as the example for this comment, because I wanted to step on as few toes as possible. In reality, it's been about more contested topics. But I never try to frame it as me hating something. I always think of it in terms of actual realiseable costs and benefits.
• deleted 5y ago
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• alexashka 5y ago
  You know what's better than fortune cookie advice? Providing the context for when that advice is applicable. These types of blogs (and fortune cookie thinkers in general) routinely do 'you have to have laser focus', followed by 'don't put all of your eggs in one basket' without any hint of irony or self awareness.
• ncmncm 5y ago
  Repetition is needed more for cementing falsehoods than truths. Thus, we encounter falsehoods repeated overwhelmingly more often than truths. Falsehoods get more backing, so win remarkably often. Corollary is that much of what you have been told, and have come to believe implicitly, is false. It is your inborn responsibility as a human to discover which are falsehoods, and root out behaviors based on them. The project has barely begun.
• deleted 5y ago
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• KerryJones 5y ago
  I feel attacked. ;) I find my internal conflict with DRY and what's actually necessary for leadership (yes, repeat, repeat often, then repeat again) continually show up, but absolute, the best teachers and leaders tend to say the same thing over and over again.
• antognini 5y ago
  Reminds me a bit of the old Ribbonfarm post "CEOs Don't Steer" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/ He basically makes the argument that companies live or die by their focus on a long term strategy, and the role of the CEO is to basically be the human embodiment of that strategy. The CEO repeats themself over and over and over again so that everyone at the company intuitively knows what they want and what direction to move it.
  • kqr 5y ago
    Related: What Do Executives Do, Anyway? struck me with its succinct description that the CEO is always the least informed person in the room, being furthest from the action in almost every aspect. And, like your reference, also maintains that they ratify decisions that are in line with the company values. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926