All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

“I’m just giving you a brain dump.”

Please don’t. Not to me, not to your colleagues, and especially, no matter how dire the circumstances, not to your manager.

Start with the prevalent but inaccurate distinction between data and information. Data are, supposedly, meaningless until processed into meaningful and useful information.

Not to nitpick or nuthin’ but “information” already had a definition before this one came along. It comes, appropriately enough, from information theory, which defines information as the stuff that reduces uncertainty.

As long as we’re being annoyingly pedantic, far from being worthless, data consist of indisputable facts: A datum is a measurement of some attribute of some identifiable thing, taking measurement in its broadest sense — if you observe and record the color of a piece of fruit, “orange” is a measurement.

So a fact can, in fact (sorry) reduce your uncertainty, as in the case where someone has asserted that something is impossible. If you observe and document it happening even once, you’ve reduced everyone’s uncertainty about whether the phenomenon in question is possible or not.

As long as we’re being metaphysical, let’s add one more layer: Meaning isn’t something information confers. Meaning is a property of knowledge — something a person develops, over time, by interpreting their experience, which is a combination of raw data, information, and logic, and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, no shortage of illogic as well.

(If, astonishingly, you’re interested, Scott Lee and I covered this topic in more depth in The Cognitive Enterprise.)

Back to brain dumps. You might think the problem is that the dumper is providing data, not information. Au contraire, mes amis. In my experience, brain dumps contain precious little data. They are, instead, a disorganized jumble that does include some information, interspersed with anecdotes, opinions of varying degrees of reliability (the brain-dumper would consider these to be knowledge), and ideas, which, as we’re being definitional, we might think of as hypotheses only without the supporting logic that makes good hypotheses worth testing.

And so, now that I’ve thoroughly buried the lede, the reason brain dumping is generally worse than useless is that it’s an exercise in reverse delegation.

Brain dumps happen when one person asks another person to figure something out and then explain it so they’ll both be smarter about the subject at hand.

But instead of making the delegator smarter, the brain-dumper has instead de-delegated the hard work of organizing these bits and pieces into a clear and coherent narrative.

It’s as if I were to assign you responsibility for baking a cake, and to satisfy the assignment, instead of returning with my just desserts, you were to dump a bunch of raw foodstuffs on my desk, some of which might be useful as cake ingredients and others not, along with 23 recipes for pies and cakes, plus commentary about how eating too much sugar causes cavities and adult-onset diabetes.

When receiving end a brain dump I often conclude the dumper has lost track of the explanation’s purpose. Instead of trying to make me smarter about a subject, the presenter is, instead, trying to show me how smart he or she is.

But it’s more likely I’ll reach the opposite conclusion, due to one of Einstein’s dicta: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Bad meta-message.

How can someone keep themselves from becoming a brain-dumper? Here’s one approach: Start by carefully choosing an entry point.

Imagine I’m supposed to explain something to you. Presumably I know quite a lot about the subject at hand or you wouldn’t ask. I know so much, in fact (this is, you understand, hypothetical) that I can’t explain anything I know about it until you understand everything I know about it.

And as you won’t be able to understand anything I have to say about it until you’ve heard everything I have to say about it, my only choice is to dump the contents of my brain onto your desk.

But if I choose a good entry point I’ll be starting my explanation with something about the subject you can understand immediately, like, “We have a problem. Here’s what it is, and why you should be concerned about it.”

Then comes the second-hardest part: Leaving out everything you know about the subject, except what helps explain what the problem is and why your listener should be concerned about it.

Leaving out any of my precious knowledge out hurts.

But that’s better than the pain I’d inflict by leaving it in.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

What’s your plan for dealing with the almost-certain presence of bigotry in your workforce?

As pointed out last week, if you lead and manage a group big enough to be a statistically significant sample, bigotry is, almost certainly, present, and dealing with it has, with George Floyd’s murder, become a part of your job description.

Not the most fun part, to be sure, but it’s now among the most important.

Some context:

Once upon a time I thought jokes about the Irish and their propensity to drink in quantity, told in Lucky Charms Irish, were funny. That was right up until an Irishman overheard me and explained, in no uncertain terms, that he didn’t find my jokes at all funny.

In high school I thought Italian jokes were funny. That was right up until a young lady of Italian origin, who I found quite attractive, made it clear telling Italian jokes made me quite unattractive.

I also thought Polish jokes were funny. I told one to my friend, whose last name happened to be Kowalski. He explained that if I told another one he’d become my ex-friend.

Ethnicity and race were standard features in the humor of my youth. But just because my intention was to be funny, not mean, didn’t matter then and matters less now.

Which is why, as a leader and manager, your spider sense should tingle when you hear someone preface a remark with the telltale phrase, “This probably isn’t politically correct, but …”

No, it probably isn’t. What it probably will be is offensive.

It is, perhaps, a shame that we can’t solve prejudice by everyone who’s on the receiving end of such things growing thicker skins. But while I’m certainly in favor of enough epidermal thickening that we don’t encourage a culture of victimhood, making this the centerpiece ignores the reason racial and ethnic jokes are a bad idea.

It isn’t that these jokes offend people and hurt their feelings. They do, but there does come a point when having to tiptoe around a growing thicket of sensitivities does nobody any good.

No, the problem with racial and ethnic jokes is that they establish and reinforce stereotypes. And presenting the stereotype in the form of a joke makes it impossible to counter: Were you to hear a drunken Irishman joke, would you really feel comfortable saying, to the assembled, possibly chuckling audience, “Hey, wait a minute. Don’t you know the Irish rank 21 in per capita alcohol consumption? Why aren’t we picking on the Moldavians?”

Stereotypes are pernicious, because they turn people into cartoons. And that isn’t fair to the cartoons: The stick figures in Randall Munroe’s xkcd are more differentiated than “Jews are good negotiators.”

Stereotypes are why so many IT shops resisted Agile for so long, and why so many that reluctantly adopted it are busily turning Agile in to “Scrummerfall.” Namely, it’s the stereotype that says programmers aren’t capable of having conversations with non-technical managers and users, coupled with the stereotype that regular folk just aren’t smart enough to have conversations with technical professionals.

The cure that’s worse than the disease for this stereotype is to insert a business analyst to translate non-technical English to programmer-ese and back, thereby enshrining the children’s game of Telephone as methodology.

What stereotypes do is establish expectations as to how people will think and act. That’s a problem when three employees are expected to collaborate and one is an IT geek, the second an HR bureaucrat, and the third a bean counter from Accounting.

That isn’t, you might think, a big deal and in fact forcing them to collaborate can help them break through their stereotype-laden thinking.

And it can, but having to break through it is certainly more wasteful than not having it in the first place.

And anyway, it doesn’t stop there. What might be even worse is that sometimes, some people deliberately sign up for a stereotype, as happens in high school and the notorious mean girl cliques. Jillian wants to be part of the popular crowd, and so, even though she doesn’t have a mean bone in her body, she ends up growing one.

In this respect, culture can make stereotypes real.

Which gets us to the linchpin of combatting prejudice in your organization: As with most forms of change, it starts and ends with the culture. That’s as true for culture that makes stereotyping others okay as it is for culture that establishes and legitimizes expectations we have of ourselves.

# # #One of the hazards of writing about IT management for as many years as I have (24 and counting) is that I find I’ve already written about the topic at hand. In this case I suggest you take a few minutes more to revisit these archival missives: “Leading in general,” (9/4/2006) and “Uncomfortable conversations,” (9/13/2010).

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