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35 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
35 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Conceptual Bandwidth"
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emoji: 🧠
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date: 2023-12-28T10:43:41Z
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draft: true
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summary: How the mental work a person does to import concepts demands communication style changes in large organisations.
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topics:
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- Work
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tags:
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---
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Notes:
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- Humans have a conceptual bandwidth
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- Mapping an external concept to your own internal frameworks is mental effort
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- Amount of effort is inversely proportional to familiarity with the area
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- As an org grows communication must become more asynchronous, more terse, less conceptually dense, in order to not overburden your team
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- Building conceptual frameworks — the tree you hang your communication off of — helps, as it provides everyone with a pre-made conceptual map you can call back to from fresh ideas.
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- You, and your team, invest a one-off cost in establishing a mental map (eg. a strategy, a plan, a model, a process)
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- Announcing new projects or strategies can be quickly explained as a diff to the existing model
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- Regularly creating "checkpoints" for new starters, or those who've been away (holiday/parental leave/ill) ensures everyone's mental models remain in-sync
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- I think of this as people, and organisations, having a fairly stable conceptual bandwidth.
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- When there are fewer people, you can incorporate all concepts directly from source
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- In large orgs you internalise the processes relevant to you and the corporate comms framework; which "compress" future communication, like a dictionary (LZH or linguistic!) Generating suitable compression isn't efficient for small orgs.
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- Not everyone needs the same concept, so shallow for all & deep where its needed
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- Link to Dunbar numbers
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- I spend a lot of time conveying concepts to think-for-a-living folks
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- In 'burst' mode I see fully rested people internalise 1-2 new concepts in areas they're familiar with per minute.
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- Over the course of a day, I'd guess that individuals in teams I work with get to around 30 before they become less productive (so that's ~5 per hour). Usually its less than 1 per hour
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- "Full" familiarity with a concept takes consistent, active interaction with it over ~weeks.
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- How could I measure this?
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- Business context
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- This is why interviewing others (well) is so draining — you, as the interviewer, need to do the conceptual mapping (all of it, except the point where you're seeking concept mapping capability), so you can evaluate their existing experience and skill (rather than _only_ their concept mapping)
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- This also explains why comms in small businesses is person-to-person, and later depends on process & documentation.
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