The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!

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.

The weak ties were strong all along.

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.

font colors matter too

noce

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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-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.