I always find Joel Spolsky’s essays interesting reads. Often I agree with him, and sometimes they make me want to argue with him over a beer, but I never feel like my time is wasted. His recent short piece on the problem of over-communication, though, is a one that hits a place near-and-dear to my heart. Recommended read for anyone who has ever worked on a software project involving more than 4 or 5 people.
As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a “keep everyone on the same page” problem. But often what they actually have is a “stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something” problem.
I think most of the over-communication problems that technical organizations (and maybe all of them–I only really can speak to software shops) face are really rooted in trust issues–people don’t need to be in meetings if they can trust the people in them to come to the right conclusions, if they can trust that the managers have the right people on the problems, if they can trust that no one else is working on things that will impact them, if they can trust that the meetings won’t result in misattribution of credit or misrepresentation of facts, etc. I’d actually like to see Joel write a bit more about that–he hints at it in his comments on the kind of corporate culture you need to avoid the over-communication problem, but I’d like to see a more fleshed out look at the relationship between trust and communication.
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