4 ms·

The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter

183 points by kiyanwang 3mo ago

Krei-se 3mo ago
Great post, lots to learn for me but also reassure for some parts i like to advocate for in communication that now have scientific backing. That's great!
preetham_rangu 3mo ago
[dead]
dleeftink 3mo ago
The weak ties were strong all along.
- deebosong 3mo ago
  The real treasure was the weak ties we made along the way. Jokes aside I do agree with you! The little things actually build up to the big things. Trying to insist on the big things via big-things-methods, that somehow forego the little things that comprise it all, will ironically have you miss the actual big thing. (Which might not be what you're pointing at... but I am!)
  - dleeftink 3mo ago
    I think social graphs are often pre-disposed to capturing strong interactions only—an email chain, a trace-able back and forth (just as this), friend degree networks—not the off-hand conversations you overhead on the coffee corner, a tidbit you saw on a documentary awaiting a doctor's appointment, a faraway poster hanging on a museum wall.. you get the idea. Weak ties are everywhere! (Just not always recorded)
    - deebosong 3mo ago
      I like what you're saying. There's a quote in The Wire, when an ex-cop becomes a teacher in some of the toughest schools. The principal says to the new teacher about to be thrown into the gauntlet, "You need soft eyes." Feels similar to what you're pointing out.
mulhoon 3mo ago
This is a great post. I've been advocating this for over a decade. > The most important conversations are not always the ones that appear on the agenda. They are the ones that happen before the formal session begins, in the ten minutes after it ends, in the corridor while people are putting on their coats. These are not peripheral to the group’s work. They are often where the group’s actual thinking takes place. This is a core belief. One, in fact, that at my last workplace, we understood well and designed for. After client meetings, we would walk clients slowly back though the kitchen and pause for a while there, splitting up into informal chats, before seeing them out of the door. Afterwards, we would quickly compare notes on all the things they said on the way out. These things were often the most important steers for the project.
- acbart 3mo ago
  The best talks at a conference are the ones in the hallway.
- HPsquared 3mo ago
  Just like how the most valuable thoughts and ideas tend to come while walking or in the shower etc.
bmacho 3mo ago
So bad article. It is waay too long and it is just repeating ~3 claims without even looking like the author is interested in their truthness. Here's a nice pdf version of the sourced article 'Pentland, A. (2012) The new science of building great teams' : <https://globalioc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-New-Science-of-Team-Building.pdf https://globalioc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-New-Sci...> That one at least tries to look valuable, e.g. they mention someone implemented their ideas and their team's productivity went up (although we don't know if more than what Hawthorne effect would've caused alone). OTOH to be a thought-provoking piece it suffices, and the concepts it defines might turn out to be useful when you try to increase the productivity of your teams.
- ricardobeat 3mo ago
  This is a confusing comment. There is no repetition in the article, and it goes over examples of workplaces that implemented these ideas. It’s basically a shorter version of the paper.
  - bmacho 3mo ago
    I see now, it gives the same example as the article I linked, even worded a bit shorter. I missed that. TFA certainly doesn't have the tone what I want from an article that talks about facts, compared to the linked/source article that talks about their own experiments, research and results, in plural first-person.
jdw64 3mo ago
What I find most difficult about Western concepts is 'productivity.' They attach so many things to this fictional concept. It's about designing things to produce a large volume of output. That's why so many posts on HN always include the same pattern, 'productivity.' I clicked thinking it would be about the social physics of conversation, like how to engage people socially or avoid hurting them, but instead it drifts into the concept of 'productivity.' But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were
- stuxnet79 3mo ago
  > But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs. But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business. Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law. Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.
  - jdw64 3mo ago
    Thanks for the good keyword. I'd never heard of Taylorism before. I looked it up and it seems to be an approach that breaks everything down into measurable metrics. I didn't know the term, but I think I was somewhat familiar with the concept. Thanks for teaching me something I didn't know. I think we've all had a lot of experiences like this. When people try to explain that 'good atmosphere' and 'friendly communities' lead to better output, and then try to force that into their own metrics, that's when all the problems start. That's what you mentioned and what I often call Goodhart's law. And on top of that, there seems to be a desire for recognition and prestige. People want to be seen as the one who explained this concept. Thanks for sharing
guenthert 3mo ago
'social physics of conversation'? Were social dynamics of conversations meant?
- steve1977 3mo ago
  No physics werw involved in this article. But I guess it makes it appear more "sciency"
  - m0llusk 3mo ago
    Wrong. Energy, velocity, and flow characteristics are central to this analysis. The term Social Physics differentiates this context from Physics.
    - ooterness 3mo ago
      Energy and velocity are science terms because they have very specific meanings. If you use them in a completely different way, that's not science, that's just science-themed marketing vibes.
    - steve1977 3mo ago
      But the terms are not used properly. It's like "vibrations" in esoteric contexts. There is no such thing as "social physics"
    - lioeters 3mo ago
      "Social physics" is pseudo-science abusing the name of physics and actual scientific terms to pretend it's even in the same ballpark.
    - exe34 3mo ago
      Sounds like cargo culting.
  - cheesecakegood 3mo ago
    You can to some extent model a flexible number of conversations in a room in terms of a kind of graph theory: duration, number of participants, correlations or overlap between participants, and so on. The assertion here is that those particulars change the fundamental nature of what is taking place. Though “kinetics” or “mechanics” are probably more apt terms for the framework of those interactions, I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand.
vjulian 3mo ago
What are the implications or recommendations for WFH environments, I wonder?
- wincy 3mo ago
  Personally I try to chat before meetings. Say hi to people I know or have worked with in the past. Recent management told us to not do this during our standup and I expressed that was a bad idea. Got shot down though, so I make sure to go to the office despite it being three hours away at least once a quarter so people recognize my face, like the captain of some far off lord that has sworn fealty to the King making sure to show up and pay tribute every once in awhile. One thing I’ve noticed is some people are very chatty over text and some people really aren’t. So I make good friends with people who like to make a little small talk on text, tell me about their weekend.
- foobarian 3mo ago
  I've been wondering how to move past the "Slack and occasionally Zoom/Google Meet for meetings" phase of remote work we've been stuck in since Covid hit. Some teams tried to set up optional social hours but they feel forced. The two managers always show up and it becomes really sweaty. Maybe set up personal office hours once a week? It would be nice if some new pattern emerged that providers like Slack or Google could build into their remote work products. Something that replicates the vibe of sitting in an area where you can overhear coworkers. Like an always-on proximity chat, but with a way to mask your sweatpants/picking your nose/getting up to flip laundry.
  - acbart 3mo ago
    The closest I ever saw this working was a site called OhYay. It really felt like spaces you could move around in. It wasn't the same as IRL, but it was about as close as I think you could get. Sadly, the company shut down before they could become profitable.
  - burningChrome 3mo ago
    Interesting thing was our company paid millions to covert our office into an open office concept - just about a year before COVID hit. People were not fans and some of the horror stories were hard to imagine were real - like the guy who's desk was in front of a good friend. During morning stand-ups, he would raise his desk to the highest point, then while the meeting was going on do a full kettle bell routine AT HIS DESK. Because of all the negative feedback, they spent millions more during COVID to put up cubes and prepare for a post COVID world. 5 years on and the RTO policy is you have to be in the office 4 days a week. Its like a library now - people come in, work, go home. Very little interaction. People are silent on the elevators. I've heard some groups getting together and having impromptu chats or having more traditional lunch groups, but for the vast majority of people? They're not interested. Its like being in the office is more a formality for some. Rather a place to network, chat other people up and use it as a good way to keep tabs on your own mental health. I was telling a guy I play hockey with how this new reality is kind of weird. He said he worked in Germany for 8 years and said this is how Germans have done it forever. Would be interesting to hear if this is actually true, or just his experience.
tippa123 3mo ago
I’ve had a very similar experience to what has been described. A few additional elements from my experience: - Trust within the team meaning the required competence and delivering on time. - Team size. - Team empowerment, imo the most important one. If the team doesn’t feel empowered for whatever reason, this will bring most of the things listed in the article to a halt.
dmvvilela 3mo ago
noce
mannanj 3mo ago
You can structure meetings to drop performative theater and rigid ineffective communication patterns, so that less artificial "informal" conversations at the water cooler are needed. Not saying they don't have a place, just that we over lean on artificially controlling and "steering" or manipulating our way with others and that IMO is what limits the creativity we are claiming to be after.
semiinfinitely 3mo ago
font colors matter too
phoneafriend 3mo ago
Our internal voices are often very different. A core feature of not only functioning teams but also democracies is that room exists for a strong diversity of these to be expressed (& heard) freely & frequently. Absent this, we can backslide very quickly, or stagnate. Or sometimes grow until market conditions no longer favor us, when underlying limits are surfaced by well positioned rivals.

183 points by kiyanwang 3mo ago

Great post, lots to learn for me but also reassure for some parts i like to advocate for in communication that now have scientific backing. That's great!

preetham_rangu 3mo ago

[dead]

dleeftink 3mo ago

The weak ties were strong all along.

deebosong 3mo ago
The real treasure was the weak ties we made along the way. Jokes aside I do agree with you! The little things actually build up to the big things. Trying to insist on the big things via big-things-methods, that somehow forego the little things that comprise it all, will ironically have you miss the actual big thing. (Which might not be what you're pointing at... but I am!)
- dleeftink 3mo ago
  I think social graphs are often pre-disposed to capturing strong interactions only—an email chain, a trace-able back and forth (just as this), friend degree networks—not the off-hand conversations you overhead on the coffee corner, a tidbit you saw on a documentary awaiting a doctor's appointment, a faraway poster hanging on a museum wall.. you get the idea. Weak ties are everywhere! (Just not always recorded)
  - deebosong 3mo ago
    I like what you're saying. There's a quote in The Wire, when an ex-cop becomes a teacher in some of the toughest schools. The principal says to the new teacher about to be thrown into the gauntlet, "You need soft eyes." Feels similar to what you're pointing out.

mulhoon 3mo ago

This is a great post. I've been advocating this for over a decade. > The most important conversations are not always the ones that appear on the agenda. They are the ones that happen before the formal session begins, in the ten minutes after it ends, in the corridor while people are putting on their coats. These are not peripheral to the group’s work. They are often where the group’s actual thinking takes place. This is a core belief. One, in fact, that at my last workplace, we understood well and designed for. After client meetings, we would walk clients slowly back though the kitchen and pause for a while there, splitting up into informal chats, before seeing them out of the door. Afterwards, we would quickly compare notes on all the things they said on the way out. These things were often the most important steers for the project.

acbart 3mo ago
The best talks at a conference are the ones in the hallway.
HPsquared 3mo ago
Just like how the most valuable thoughts and ideas tend to come while walking or in the shower etc.

bmacho 3mo ago

So bad article. It is waay too long and it is just repeating ~3 claims without even looking like the author is interested in their truthness. Here's a nice pdf version of the sourced article 'Pentland, A. (2012) The new science of building great teams' : <https://globalioc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-New-Science-of-Team-Building.pdf https://globalioc.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-New-Sci...> That one at least tries to look valuable, e.g. they mention someone implemented their ideas and their team's productivity went up (although we don't know if more than what Hawthorne effect would've caused alone). OTOH to be a thought-provoking piece it suffices, and the concepts it defines might turn out to be useful when you try to increase the productivity of your teams.

ricardobeat 3mo ago
This is a confusing comment. There is no repetition in the article, and it goes over examples of workplaces that implemented these ideas. It’s basically a shorter version of the paper.
- bmacho 3mo ago
  I see now, it gives the same example as the article I linked, even worded a bit shorter. I missed that. TFA certainly doesn't have the tone what I want from an article that talks about facts, compared to the linked/source article that talks about their own experiments, research and results, in plural first-person.

jdw64 3mo ago

What I find most difficult about Western concepts is 'productivity.' They attach so many things to this fictional concept. It's about designing things to produce a large volume of output. That's why so many posts on HN always include the same pattern, 'productivity.' I clicked thinking it would be about the social physics of conversation, like how to engage people socially or avoid hurting them, but instead it drifts into the concept of 'productivity.' But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were

stuxnet79 3mo ago
> But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs. But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business. Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law. Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.
- jdw64 3mo ago
  Thanks for the good keyword. I'd never heard of Taylorism before. I looked it up and it seems to be an approach that breaks everything down into measurable metrics. I didn't know the term, but I think I was somewhat familiar with the concept. Thanks for teaching me something I didn't know. I think we've all had a lot of experiences like this. When people try to explain that 'good atmosphere' and 'friendly communities' lead to better output, and then try to force that into their own metrics, that's when all the problems start. That's what you mentioned and what I often call Goodhart's law. And on top of that, there seems to be a desire for recognition and prestige. People want to be seen as the one who explained this concept. Thanks for sharing

guenthert 3mo ago

'social physics of conversation'? Were social dynamics of conversations meant?

steve1977 3mo ago
No physics werw involved in this article. But I guess it makes it appear more "sciency"
- m0llusk 3mo ago
  Wrong. Energy, velocity, and flow characteristics are central to this analysis. The term Social Physics differentiates this context from Physics.
  - ooterness 3mo ago
    Energy and velocity are science terms because they have very specific meanings. If you use them in a completely different way, that's not science, that's just science-themed marketing vibes.
  - steve1977 3mo ago
    But the terms are not used properly. It's like "vibrations" in esoteric contexts. There is no such thing as "social physics"
  - lioeters 3mo ago
    "Social physics" is pseudo-science abusing the name of physics and actual scientific terms to pretend it's even in the same ballpark.
  - exe34 3mo ago
    Sounds like cargo culting.
- cheesecakegood 3mo ago
  You can to some extent model a flexible number of conversations in a room in terms of a kind of graph theory: duration, number of participants, correlations or overlap between participants, and so on. The assertion here is that those particulars change the fundamental nature of what is taking place. Though “kinetics” or “mechanics” are probably more apt terms for the framework of those interactions, I see no reason to dismiss it out of hand.

vjulian 3mo ago

What are the implications or recommendations for WFH environments, I wonder?

wincy 3mo ago
Personally I try to chat before meetings. Say hi to people I know or have worked with in the past. Recent management told us to not do this during our standup and I expressed that was a bad idea. Got shot down though, so I make sure to go to the office despite it being three hours away at least once a quarter so people recognize my face, like the captain of some far off lord that has sworn fealty to the King making sure to show up and pay tribute every once in awhile. One thing I’ve noticed is some people are very chatty over text and some people really aren’t. So I make good friends with people who like to make a little small talk on text, tell me about their weekend.
foobarian 3mo ago
I've been wondering how to move past the "Slack and occasionally Zoom/Google Meet for meetings" phase of remote work we've been stuck in since Covid hit. Some teams tried to set up optional social hours but they feel forced. The two managers always show up and it becomes really sweaty. Maybe set up personal office hours once a week? It would be nice if some new pattern emerged that providers like Slack or Google could build into their remote work products. Something that replicates the vibe of sitting in an area where you can overhear coworkers. Like an always-on proximity chat, but with a way to mask your sweatpants/picking your nose/getting up to flip laundry.
- acbart 3mo ago
  The closest I ever saw this working was a site called OhYay. It really felt like spaces you could move around in. It wasn't the same as IRL, but it was about as close as I think you could get. Sadly, the company shut down before they could become profitable.
- burningChrome 3mo ago
  Interesting thing was our company paid millions to covert our office into an open office concept - just about a year before COVID hit. People were not fans and some of the horror stories were hard to imagine were real - like the guy who's desk was in front of a good friend. During morning stand-ups, he would raise his desk to the highest point, then while the meeting was going on do a full kettle bell routine AT HIS DESK. Because of all the negative feedback, they spent millions more during COVID to put up cubes and prepare for a post COVID world. 5 years on and the RTO policy is you have to be in the office 4 days a week. Its like a library now - people come in, work, go home. Very little interaction. People are silent on the elevators. I've heard some groups getting together and having impromptu chats or having more traditional lunch groups, but for the vast majority of people? They're not interested. Its like being in the office is more a formality for some. Rather a place to network, chat other people up and use it as a good way to keep tabs on your own mental health. I was telling a guy I play hockey with how this new reality is kind of weird. He said he worked in Germany for 8 years and said this is how Germans have done it forever. Would be interesting to hear if this is actually true, or just his experience.

tippa123 3mo ago

I’ve had a very similar experience to what has been described. A few additional elements from my experience: - Trust within the team meaning the required competence and delivering on time. - Team size. - Team empowerment, imo the most important one. If the team doesn’t feel empowered for whatever reason, this will bring most of the things listed in the article to a halt.

dmvvilela 3mo ago

noce

mannanj 3mo ago

You can structure meetings to drop performative theater and rigid ineffective communication patterns, so that less artificial "informal" conversations at the water cooler are needed. Not saying they don't have a place, just that we over lean on artificially controlling and "steering" or manipulating our way with others and that IMO is what limits the creativity we are claiming to be after.

semiinfinitely 3mo ago

font colors matter too

phoneafriend 3mo ago

Our internal voices are often very different. A core feature of not only functioning teams but also democracies is that room exists for a strong diversity of these to be expressed (& heard) freely & frequently. Absent this, we can backslide very quickly, or stagnate. Or sometimes grow until market conditions no longer favor us, when underlying limits are surfaced by well positioned rivals.