There’s a funny scene in the Matrix when the Oracle first meets Neo. Having spent her whole life waiting for his arrival she’s pleasantly surprised by his good looks, but disappointed when he opens his mouth.
I thought about that while trying to teach my dog some tricks the other day. If you’re new to the world of animal training, as I am, you might be surprised to learn that, when it comes to interspecies communication, the less you talk, the clearer your message will come across.
The idea is to minimise the signal-to-noise ratio. Voice commands, if you think about it, are actually quite imprecise. By the time you’ve said, “Gooood booy,” millions of neurons have fired in your dog’s brain. He knows he did something right but can’t quite figure out what or when.
So most people serious about communicating with animals have learned to talk less, and instead use a little device called a clicker. It’s deceptively simple: just a piece of plastic with a tin sheet that makes a clicking sound when pressed.
The sound can’t be mistaken for any other random noise generated by human beings and the fact that it exists in time only a few milliseconds means it can be closely tied to certain events. It turns out these exact qualities are key when it comes to having animals decode our intentions. In this case at least, less really is more.
(Side-note: For a fascinating backstory I recommend reading Karen Pryor’s memoirs Reaching the Animal Mind, where she tells the story of how she experimented with no-punishment approaches to shaping animal behaviours and eventually came up with the clicker method. For a more hands-on instruction manual there’s also her best-selling book Don’t Shoot the Dog. As a funny side-note within the side-note, what got me buying *that* book was the fact that a psychologist friend — with no interest in dog training — revealed to me that she regularly recommended her clients to read it, since to her mind it says just as much about how human behaviour works. I guess we’re all animals at the end of the day.)
The clicker technique has now spread far beyond animal training. Olympic coaches use it to fine-tune their gymnasts, speech therapists apply it to help clients reduce verbal tics, and it’s said to work wonders for perfecting golf swings.
And I’m starting to think this school of thought can be applied to how we work, too.
Recently, I observed a great example of this principle in action. A team I’d been following had grown to the point where it was becoming unwieldy. Their daily stand-ups, once snappy, had started feeling like time wasters. Despite the best intentions, people were busier keeping each other updated than making actual progress. Things were getting out of hand.
So the founder introduced a new routine that literally encouraged people to shut up. Instead of the typical morning stand-up format—where everyone shares what they did the day before, what they plan to do, and what help they need—each team member simply picked a colour: green, yellow, or red. Only those who were “red” got to speak.
Red means you’re having serious trouble and won’t be able to deliver on what you’ve committed to. There could be any number of reasons for that, but whatever they are, the rest of the team have to find a way to adapt, and so that’s what everyone is focusing on. The standup meetings are back on track.
A simple little hack, and it works because of what’s omitted.
Jake Knapp, Google insider, writer and self professed “process geek,” makes a similar point in his book Sprint, where he presents a methodology that allows teams to “Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days,” as the subtitle boldly proclaims.
It’s a book I return to because its principles work well in practice. The tools it provides help teams make progress while avoiding groupthink. The trick, largely, is to be disciplined about parallelising processes and resisting the urge to “get to the bottom” of things as a group.
This approach resembles concurrent engineering or deep collaboration—terms Steve Jobs used to describe Apple’s product development process. Jobs portrayed it as messy and chaotic, the opposite of a controlled, sequential workflow. Apple’s approach was more like a Mediterranean family dinner where everyone talks over each other. So how does this fit in with minimising noise?
Well, let’s not be too literal. The clicker method shows that communication needs to be timely and precise to be effective. That doesn’t necessarily mean a quiet team is more productive than a noisy one. Rather, it means the same number of words can carry different amounts of information—just like a gallon of rocket fuel has higher energy density than an equivalent volume of diesel.
Speaking of Apple, this talk-less principle also applies to pitching. In The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, Carmine Gallo contrasts the simplicity of Apple’s presentations with Bill Gates’s jargon-heavy style. Quantitative linguistic analysis of their speeches reveals a clear advantage for Apple in clarity and conciseness.
And it’s not just about what’s said. While the average PowerPoint slide has 44 words, a typical Steve Jobs slide had just one short sentence, or often simply one word.
So how can the talk-less principle be codified for human-to-human communication?
One answer is to look at design patterns for scalable, complex systems. Consider Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which relies on concealing the complexity of individual services behind simple interfaces.
In SOA, millions of moving parts make up a system in which the highest abstraction layer remains blissfully unaware of the underlying complexity. Subsystems are often written in different languages, yet communicate via a common protocol that conveys essential information.The magic that allows for this, the cost of concealing complexity if you like, is the universal adherence to a generic communications layer, a protocol, that allows just enough expressiveness for services to be able to send each other the necessary high octane signals that make the whole more than the sum of its parts.
And here’s where we’re back to what makes great teams tick: It’s the fact that they’ve arrived at a common protocol that efficiently cancel out noise, thus shielding each other from the messy complexity that needs to go on behind every curtain. In a word, they’ve learned to be brief.