Ever play “Telephone” when you were little? You whisper a phrase to someone, they whisper it to someone else, and so on and so forth until the last exuberant kid joyfully screams the phrase aloud in all its mangled, mistranslated glory and milk squirts out of your nose because you’re nine years old and life is freaking hilarious. Now imagine playing Telephone as an adult, but drawing from a decidedly less enjoyable lexicon filled with dry terms like “database schemas” and “EBITDA,” and having the game’s final result be money squirting out of your company’s coffers instead. Sound familiar?
In some offices, a “best guess” will be passed from person to person with increasing confidence until finally some invisible threshold is crossed and the next recipient takes what was once a wild, finger-in-the-air assumption as gospel. For example:
PERSON #1: “With these ludicrous PLACEHOLDER assumptions, we’re going to net $100M in annual gross revenue.”
PERSON #2: “Person #1 predicts that we’ll net $100M in annual gross revenue.”
PERSON #3: [hmm, I remember hearing the word “net” …] “Person #1 is projecting $100M in net revenue!”
PERSON #4: “We’re guaranteed to do $100M in net revenue next year; Person #3 validated it. Teslas for everyone!”
At Scopely, this sort of miscommunication was never an issue when we were a small team crammed into a shoebox of an office above the Wiltern Theater … and from my personal experience at medium-sized companies, it wasn’t as much of an issue since carefully-qualified statements were the fortuitous albeit unintended byproduct of cultures that incentivized covering one’s own ass and disincentivized devil’s’ advocacy. But for fast-growing teams worshipping the trite-but-true startup mantras of “Fail Fast” and “Ask Forgiveness, Not Permission,” the problem can be particularly insidious.
For what it’s worth, Scopely’s gotten really great at minimizing this sort of miscommunication as we’ve grown from 15 to 85 people. While there’s not much you can do the closer you are to the “receiving” end other than be healthily skeptical, here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way for those closer to the “giving” end:
Assume Telephone will happen. Because it will.
Particularly when putting things down on screen or paper, make sure to be explicit and mark assumptions with visual cues. Gross vs net? Linear vs log scale? Empirical vs predicted? Outliers excluded?
The importance of the conclusions that will be drawn from the data should dictate the amount of effort you invest in validation or making assumptions explicit. If you’re putting together a shopping list to stock the communal fridge, I suspect you’ll be just fine if you wing it. If you’re modeling profitability for a go-or-no-go contract negotiation, it’s worth a few extra minutes.
People can only process so much data—present them with too much and they’ll tune out most of it, potentially drawing the wrong conclusions. You might also consider dumbing down the specificity of the data to produce a more generalized conclusion that implies a lack of granularity. As Chris Stucchio puts it, take your inspiration from xkcd.
If you’re caught off guard and don’t have the luxury of time, tread carefully. If you’re forced to make a guess and find yourself succumbing to a cognitive bias (e.g. anchoring) or logical fallacy (e.g. argument to moderation), sometimes it’s better to simply say, “I honestly don’t know and anything I tell you will be a complete guess.” After all that, you may still need to produce a guess if it’s your job to do so, but you’ll have done all you can by instilling some healthy doubt.
Anyone that gives you a list with fewer than six tips is not to be trusted.
Cross-posted from billkang.com.
Email me when Musings on Communication publishes stories