TBM 313: Chat, Breathe, and Reflect
When a situation becomes more dynamic and uncertain, it is important to do three things:
Reduce the distance information must travel, reduce communication layers, and create direct channels. Minimize delays and distortion.
Increase the frequency with which you exchange information. Check the system more frequently for updates (so you can respond more quickly).
Be prepared to handle packets of diverse, confounding information. The information that arrives may not always fit neatly into existing understanding, and it may be hard to distinguish signal from noise.
This work comes at a “cost”: we must invest more energy in maintaining communication channels and processing information (sampling, coordination, updates). There’s a good chance you’ll need to reorganize or build direct links where “hops” previously existed. Finally, teams need time, bandwidth, and cognitive flexibility to deal with and make sense of ambiguity.
Imagine a mountaineering expedition beset by dangerous and dynamic conditions. To prepare, they might:
Set up more regular checkpoints.
Use scouts to test the route.
Check on the weather more often.
Shorten the route intervals (“pitches”). This increases the moments when the team is all together and can chat, breathe, reflect together.
Check in on team morale and health more often.
Spend more time discussing and interpreting ambiguous signals.
Plan for plans—route, pace, goals—to change.
That extra work would come at a cost, but given the risks involved, it would be worth it.
This extra effort might be doable if the team was rested, healthy, well-equipped, well-practiced, and operating with trust and high psychological safety. But imagine if that wasn’t the case. Imagine if the team was chasing arbitrary deadlines, distrusting each other, becoming territorial, and not having a moment to understand what they saw and heard. What if their radios and GPS units stopped working?
Things would definitely go very badly, and as conditions worsened, they would get worse. Conditions would expose any weaknesses very quickly.
Why do I mention all this?
Say you are a leader trying to grapple with a more dynamic situation (like the current macro climate in tech). You sense, on a deep level, that you need to 1) reduce the distance information must travel and 2) increase the frequency with which information is exchanged.
Those instincts are spot on. However, without:
Trust and psychological safety
Cognitive flexibility and the leeway for diverse perspectives
Bandwidth to pay the “cost”—this will not look or feel “efficient”
Taking into account the current state and morale of the team
Your efforts will fail.
And say you aren’t a senior leader. Perhaps you’re an IC caught in the swirl. Maybe you were recently laid off. Try very hard not to self-gaslight. The situation out there is messy and incoherent at the moment. Try to find a Boundary of Safely Challenged Assumptions where you can effectively ramp up the information exchange and sense-making.