When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter experts, or resolve key differences of opinion. ASAP makes a big assumption that all relevant parties are already in the room.
Because coordination is expensive
If you’ve ever worked at a larger organization, stop me if you’ve heard (or asked!) any of these questions: “Why do we move so slowly as an organization? We need to figure out how…
The Social Physics of Conversation: Why Communication Patterns Matter
Discover how communication patterns shape team performance, innovation, and collective intelligence. Learn why idea flow matters more than talent alone.
Small talk acts like social glue – here’s how to get better at it
Maybe think of small talk as a technology: a human invention for accomplishing social goals.
Human–AI Collaboration at Scale: Task Criticality, Agency, and Friction Across 250,000 Conversations
Stanford University researchers analyzed nearly 250,000 real-world human-AI conversations from Claude.ai to understand collaborative dynamics, finding that over half of interactions involve...
Researchers say we’re talking less than ever
It’s not just small talk, it’s all talk that’s dying.
Why ChatGPT Keeps Interrupting You — Dr. Tom Shapland, LiveKit
AI is teaching us to speak like bots, and it’s a problem - Fast Company
AI is creeping into our everyday conversations, making us less patient and teaching us to 'prompt' others instead of talking to them.
If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems | Debugging Leadership
AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.
Reflector: Infrastructure for Meetings, by Greyhaven
Most organizations run on meetings. Strategy gets debated there. Decisions get made there. Context lives there. And yet...
Speed: How It Explains the World - Vaclav Smil
In a world that feels like it’s moving faster than ever, Smil examines how our relentless pursuit of speed – in areas such as production, travel and communication – shapes not only our technological landscape but also our social and environmental realities. And through engaging anecdotes and striking statistics, Smil challenges the assumption that faster is always better.
Misplaced Divides? Discussing Political Disagreement With Strangers Can Be Unexpectedly Positive
Differences of opinion between people are common in everyday life, but discussing those differences openly in conversation may be unnecessarily rare. We report three experiments ( N = 1,264 U.S.-based adults) demonstrating that people’s interest in discussing important but potentially divisive topics is guided by their expectations about how positively the conversation will unfold, leaving them more interested in having a conversation with someone who agrees versus disagrees with them. People’s expectations about their conversations, however, were systematically miscalibrated such that people underestimated how positive these conversations would be—especially in cases of disagreement. Miscalibrated expectations stemmed from underestimating the degree of common ground that would emerge in conversation and from failing to appreciate the power of social forces in conversation that create social connection. Misunderstanding the outcomes of conversation could lead people to avoid discussing disagreements more often, creating a misplaced barrier to learning, social connection, free inquiry, and free expression.
Paging Charity? How do I get my leaders to stop running teams Into the ground? - Stack Overflow
I'm a senior staff engineer, and I’m wondering what advice you might have for a person in my role in a large company to affect priorities and the speed at which work is "expected" to be executed.
(PDF) Algorithmically Mediating Communication to Enhance Collective Decision-Making in Online Social Networks
PDF | Many collective decision-making contexts involve communication among group members. Sometimes this communication helps the collective reach an... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
What we (don’t) talk about when we talk about AI
Everybody’s talking about it; everybody’s tired of talking about it. Why aren’t we making more progress in the discussion?
Excellent @tgspodcast.bsky.social episode, finding myself pausing every minute to take notes. "What sorts of systems are going to make it through the bottlenecks of the 21st c?“ TLDR collective robustness beats individual optimization Once (if?) funders get this, atproto will see investments
The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile with Olivier Hamant
open.spotify.com