SEASON 2 - EPISODE 128 - OCTOBER 23, 2024

Principles of Communication

37signals’ co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson share insights from their write-up, The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication. They discuss effective communication strategies within the company and with the public, offering practical advice to consider when conveying messages.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:41 - The backstory of how the guide was created
02:39 - The write up serves as both an internal reminder and a practical manual for how communication is handled at 37signals
06:36 - Why publishing doesn’t require perfection
10:52 - Poor communication can lead to misunderstandings
18:26 - How unclear communication can come across negatively
23:03 - Why you shouldn’t rush tough conversations

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I’m joined as always by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. On the 37signals website, there is a writeup called the 37signals Guide to Internal Communication. There are 30 different points of how we aim to communicate both internally and with the public. And so today I thought we would talk a little bit about that. I’ll link to this in the show notes. We’re not going to go over all 30, but I pulled out a few that I wanted us to discuss. But before we get to that, I don’t even know how this started, to be honest. Did you guys write it together? Did one of you write it? Kind of tell me the story of how this came to be and then we’ll kind of dig into it.

Jason (00:41): I wrote this primarily as an answer to a series of very similar questions I was getting from people primarily on Twitter. I’d say something and they’d say, well then how do you do it? Or I don’t think that’s a good idea. Well, what’s a good idea? So I would just kind of answer these things one off, which is why if you go through the list of 30, they’re kind of tweet length answers in a sense. So I just started writing this list of questions I’ve been asked recently, questions I was asked a long time ago, things I know that people are curious about and embodies things about meetings. It talks about duration of a meeting. It talks about long form writing, short form writing, when to decide on something, when not to, things like that. And at the end I kind of get into more detail, which is about how do we use Basecamp for this?

(01:27): How do we talk about Kickoffs and Heartbeats and a variety of other things. So it was sort of this all encompassing guide to basically how we talk internally, primarily principles based. It’s not specific except for the bottom part. The bottom part is way more specific. The top is like things to keep in mind, things to think about, principles to consider, philosophies to think about as you’re wondering how to communicate internally. And then I put it together in this format because I was originally thinking about writing it as more of, again, like a long form paragraph based thing, but then I realized it’s actually easier to digest this way and further I didn’t feel like I wanted to have any filler connecting these 30 things which are not really connected. They’re just separate things.

Kimberly (02:09): They’re like separate thoughts.

Jason (02:11): They’re separate thoughts. I mean you could certainly pull a bunch together and say there’s groups of them or whatever, but this is what you can do in one day. So I’m like, I’m going to write this basically in one day and get this out and could I make it maybe group it better or whatever, maybe? I don’t think it would add anything and it would take three days and at that point I’d be halfway done and I’d give up because I’d be working on something else. Something would pull me off. So this is like what can you do in a day? I think it’s a really important thing to keep in mind for this sort of thing. So that’s what this is.

David (02:38): I think what’s also typical about how we write is that this is an extraction…

Jason (02:42): Yeah

David (02:43): Of existing principles of how we actually work. This is a recording both for the outside world but just as much for ourselves to remind ourselves, do you know what this is how we should be communicating. This is how we should talk. And when someone new joins the organization, they have I think one piece of guiding material to lead them through this odd organization that is 37signals, this odd emphasis on writing so much down in long form content and the almost entire absence of meeting. I know for a fact that there have been a bunch of people who’ve joined our organization and been a little disorientated by the fact that the normal patterns of communication that they had seen elsewhere just weren’t present and we had something quite different instead. And I think it’s the kind of document then to write down to reassure people, do you know what? This isn’t just because you entered off. This is not because you’re weird. This is just how we do things here and there’s some rhythm to some of the madness some of the time, and here are some points for you to perhaps understand that a little better.

Kimberly (03:53): Okay, before I pull out a couple, I do have a question because I think people do wonder this about you guys and your writing style when you’ve published so many books as co-authors. Jason, you started writing this, is there an approval process? David, are you just looking at it and saying, it looks good on this one and I’m going to write the next time? How do you guys work that out? I know it’s a little off topic, but I know people are curious.

Jason (04:13): I don’t remember how this one went. I may have just written this.

David (04:16): I think you probably just hit publish.

Jason (04:18): Yeah

David (04:19): I mean this is what we do. The vast majority of the time we just hit publish unless there’s something quite specific where Jason perhaps is asking my input on something or I’m doing the same. We don’t have an approval process, generally speaking. Both Jason and I will just go straight from I have an idea, I want to publish it, and then it’s live. And I think that is the product in part of 20 years of trust, but also of the fact that we are so aligned on so many of these things and also just this freedom and acknowledgement that Jason says, what can we get done in one day? If there’s got to be a ping pong ding dong back and forth, that just oftentimes is the deciding factor as to whether this is going to happen or not. I feel about this with my writing all the time.

(05:08): Once I moved some of my writing onto the HEY World stack and it was more directly under my name, just that I didn’t even have to have the mental filter of thinking should I clear this with someone in some capacity? I started writing so much more and that is so much more important I think for us in almost all the circumstances. What can we ship? What can we get out there? And all the things that lay in between that happening and not having, get it out of the way, no approval process, the gut reaction, and sometimes some rewriting. I think both Jason and I really enjoyed the editing process, but it’s also not like three weeks. I don’t know how many times Jason you went over this, but you do it as you write it and maybe a couple of times you go through it and now you’ve spent an hour on it and that’s enough.

(05:54): Let’s ship. It’s not going to go through a long trite editorial process here to just get everything perfect. It’s so much more important to get it out there because otherwise I’d never see the light of day. I think that is always the alternative. Do you know what? Could something be better? Yeah, I’m sure it could, but that’s not what you’re picking between. You’re picking between will this thing be allowed to exist because there’s so few barriers between a thought and an inspiration. This is one of the chapters. I think actually the last one in REWORK, Inspiration is Perishable. We really breathe that and we try to ship. When that inspiration is there through our fingers, alright, get it out there. Nothing should stop it because the other alternative is it’s just not going to happen.

Jason (06:36): One of the other big advantages of writing in this style on the web is that publishing is actually a great way to force yourself into editing, actually. I’ve made probably more changes to this document since it’s been live because it’s real and now I know people are going to read it. When it’s behind the curtain it’s easy just not to get real about it in the end, but now it’s out there so I better make sure it’s good and tight and sharp. That’s another technique we’ll use sometimes is just let’s ship. This happens in software. We QA, we ship very good software, but there’s still something that happens and there’s a compression that happens in the last five minutes before shipping something where you really begin to truly evaluate it in a different level and you just simply can’t simulate that. You can do all the error checking and all the basic stuff you do, but there’s something about getting up on stage and that’s what publishing is, is you’re on stage and there’s an audience and you’re in front of the curtain now and the lights are on and it’s go time.

(07:30): So that really I think helps us focus as well, which is another reason why one of the advantages of being small is that things like this don’t have to go through… We don’t have legal, we don’t have anyone on staff who’s a lawyer, but at a big organization you probably want to run this through a few people because that’s just how it is. There’s no one to run it through here actually. I mean David and I could show and we have, hey, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? The group chat one I wrote, which is also in that same section on 37signals.com/thoughts, we did go back and forth on that one a bunch, but eventually it’s like let’s ship this. The impact is there.

Kimberly (08:04): Right.

Jason (08:04): Whether or not could be 3% more impactful. It doesn’t really even matter.

David (08:09): What I really enjoy about this forcing function too is as Jason says, it’s like turning on the lights really brightly and suddenly you see everything and that’s great for fixing things that need to be fixed, but it’s just as much a forcing function for all the worries, the nagging, the what if, the could have beens, this could have been different because it just gets washed away. As soon as you go live, this thing exists and you’re going to get drawn into fixing things that absolutely need to be fixed, but there are so many of the things you perhaps thought could have been improved. It just doesn’t matter and it’s exactly the same thing in writing as it is in software. We always ship new features, which usually a fairly substantial list of things we would’ve liked to have and quite often we’ll never look at it again. Once it’s live

(09:01): that is that clarifying function of where is the value here and as Jason says it’s not something you can simulate, which took us some time I think to really internalize. I think we used to have more of a blame game going when we would stop something in the 11th hour that just wasn’t right. We’ve done that with quite a few features where we’re just about to go live. Everything has been prepared, all the momentum is behind just pushing. You don’t really want to be the one who goes, actually, I don’t know if this is good enough or this should be different. But I think that’s the thing, at least for Jason and I at that last moment, you go like, no, no, wait, no, no, this isn’t right. If it isn’t right. Most of the time it is right and we push it out and we get all the benefit from it, but just occasionally we’ll go like, do you know what?

(09:47): I don’t feel good about this. And to me the magic of that moment is that you leap over your thinking brain, your high level cognitive, let’s rationalize all the way through it and you go straight to the gut and it’s the gut that supercomputer in your stomach that is telling you whether this thing works or doesn’t, whether it needs to be tweaked in this way or it doesn’t, and that’s why it can’t be simulated because that computer down there is a really lossy function. It can’t just be turned on and off. It just occasionally would jump into action and most of the time we’re up here at the cerebral level and do you know what? You got to find a way to find your gut and going live is the best way I know how.

Kimberly (10:31): Okay, I’m going to pull out a couple of these. I know these are tweet length, but I would love for you guys to expand on them a little bit if you can, and even if you have some real life examples of how this has worked in your business, that’d be awesome. The first one, I’m assuming it’s number one on purpose, but it is number one, “You cannot not communicate, not discussing. The elephant in the room is communicating.”

Jason (10:52): This is a classic thing like you learned this or I learned it in school. You cannot not communicate. I forget who said this originally, but it’s just a classic thing which is everything is communication. Not saying something is communication. Saying something is communication. Avoiding something is communication. Everybody knows basically or they know something is up. Ignoring it or staying quiet about it does not make it go away is essentially what that is. So it doesn’t mean you should say everything either. It’s just be aware that not saying something is communication, acting a certain way, seeming like you’re hiding something. This is all communication. Keep that in mind. Everything is communication

David (11:31): And one of the key parts of that communication is who’s making it. Either you get to set the tone and set things straight and be clear, or if you don’t, someone else is going to step in. They’re probably not going to be that clear. They’re probably not going to have as much of the pictures you do, but they will simply fill that empty space. The not not communication is going to turn into their communication. It’s going to turn into hearsay, it’s going to turn into rumors, it’s going to turn into speculation, it’s going to turn into all these things you really don’t want and what I like about this notion is it comes up because just saying the thing’s difficult, that’s why you’re not saying it. It’s hard and you’d prefer not to. You’d prefer to walk around it, you’d prefer not to address it head on and in a moment of weakness, you think that’s possible.

(12:23): You think you can avoid it, you think you can walk around it, but you can’t. All that walking around is going to send a big message of actually there’s something here. Let’s dig in with our blindfolds on to not figure out what the hell is going on. And I think we’ve had that internally. One of the best examples perhaps is when we let someone go at the company, and we’ve had to do that quite a few times over 20 years and at a lot of companies it’s almost like that person just vanishes, disappears. Maybe a couple people are in the loop as to why something happens, but broadly speaking, you walk around, companies walk around the why and I think we have had a better record than what I’ve seen at most places are not walking around, just go being upfront. Do you know what?

(13:10): It does not always work out. Here’s some of the reasons, not all of them. We don’t have to dig through all the nitty gritty details on all levels, but you should have some indication of why, because again, if you don’t, other narratives will move into fill that space. Oh, it’s the company’s doing really badly and they have to lay off a bunch of people and who’s next? There are all these potential narratives that can creep in and fill that empty void, so you better be there first and you better be clear enough that whatever doubt is left is on the margins and it’s in this stuff that yeah, you might be curious about, but also it’s none of your fucking business.

Kimberly (13:48): With that, we’re going to go on to my second pick, which is number seven, and this is very, very 37signals culture, I feel like. “Never expect or require someone to get back to you immediately unless it’s a true emergency. The expectation of immediate response is toxic.” I think in the world of texting and slacking and all of those things, I think this is kind of unheard of.

Jason (14:11): Yeah, I mean this is about respecting other people’s time and recognizing that the expectation of immediate response is not a fair expectation in most cases. Yes, there are emergencies, yes, there’s times when things absolutely need to be dealt with, but most cases that’s not the case. Just because you use a medium that would suggest instant, instant messaging, they don’t really call it that anymore, but that’s coming from you. That doesn’t mean the person receiving it needs to respond instantly, so just recognize that and if you do need someone to get back to you instantly or very quickly, you’re going to want to communicate that so it’s clear like, hey David, we have to deal with this as something urgent. The medium shouldn’t say that, but the words should say that or you pick up the phone and call someone. That’s kind of, I think for us ultimately, since we don’t use the phone very often, that does mean something is important or urgent or high fidelity in a way that may be texting or email or Basecamp or whatever wouldn’t be.

David (15:09): And I think this is where habits are super duper important. If you have a habit of using say a Slack or chat tool for everything, you’re going to be in that loop of constantly expecting a reply because very often you will get one and there’s just that dopamine loop that goes that I’ll put something in and immediately get something back. It’s very low calories. It’s not actually good for you, but it’s training your brain to expect those things at all times in all circumstances, including when it, not just doesn’t matter, but doesn’t matter at all where I could just as well get a response in two hours as I could tomorrow as I could two days from now. And I think with Basecamp in particular, we’re trying to not just sell you better habits, but to teach ourselves better habits, to have tools that will encourage those habits to become true.

(16:03): Long form writing is one of the absolute pillars of how we communicate at 37signals, and we do a lot of that through Basecamp messages. Basecamp messages don’t have the expectation that someone’s going to reply with a comment in 30 seconds. In fact, the expectation is you could lean back and ponder what was said or written and come up with something insightful maybe in four hours or tomorrow or even next week. And I think teaching your organizations good communication happens. First of all, that’s why Jason wrote this post. It’s both about teaching others that and teaching ourselves that, but then it’s also about the tools, and this is one of the reasons I sometimes get a little frustrated when people say, well, it’s not chat’s fault you’re expecting. It’s just a tool as though the tools didn’t have a handle that encouraged you to grip them in a certain way.

(16:55): They all do. They all have a handle that encouraged a certain way of use and Slack and chat in general, encourage the immediacy, encourage the expectation that’s going to happen, and yes, could you through just sheer will route around that and not use it in this way and just put something in slack and come back and check it days later maybe, but no one does. No one does. This is why the defaults, why the grip matters so much, why the suggestions of use matter so much and why Basecamp is such a healthy alternative to that style of communication. Basecamp has chat in it too, but it’s sort of one thing off the side and we talk about how to use that in a judicious way and then it has other things at the center of it. It has the threads, it has the messages, it has the long form considered writing as its primary function, and I think getting used to that and getting into those good habits is what will keep it happening day after day. You can will yourself into anything as a one-off and you can try something as an experiment, but will it stick? If you’re constantly uphill against your tools, it’s not going to stick for most people most of the time. The tool’s got to lead you in the right direction.

Kimberly (18:10): Okay, this next one is really about writing and even copywriting editing, so I think this is Jason probably right up your alley. Number eight, “If your words can be perceived in different ways, will be understood in the way which does the most harm.”

Jason (18:26): So this is from a guy named Osmo Wiio who I think was a Finnish communications researcher or something. He wrote these incredible laws of communication. I’ve written about them in the past. I think this is sort of borrowed from that. It’s like this human truth that if you’re not clear about what you’re writing, people perceive it negatively typically or they’ll fill in the gaps. It’s similar to something we were talking about earlier, which is that if you don’t lead clearly with what you’re trying to say and trying to explain, rumors will fill in the gaps. Typically, rumors aren’t positive, rumors are almost never positive. They’re almost always like, oh, this happened because so-and-so did something which they didn’t do, or if they did, it wasn’t the thing, and so this is related to that point, and harm is a strong word. It could be very harmful, but mostly it just basically means you may have to re-explain yourself and explaining yourself twice is a huge waste of time and it’s really frustrating in fact, and I think it’s the root of a lot of issues, when you have to say the same thing multiple times to multiple people or to the same person multiple times.

(19:24): That’s a real sign of dysfunction in an organization and I think this rule demonstrates that well.

David (19:29): What I really like about it is it nudges you towards simpler language, clearer language, because there is just less room for additional interpretation if you’re not being overly flowery with everything. I need to check myself quite often that I like language that kind of tastes a little something right? It is not always, I just want a plain cracker. Sometimes I want something with a little more sparkle and I think about that occasionally when I go, do you know what? You might enjoy this because it’s kind of fun stringing those kind of sentences together, but also maybe this is not the place for that. Maybe the place for this is just plain simple English with as little room for interpretation as possible. Now, the hard thing about that sometimes is that that kind of writing style, which is the one I try to force myself to use when writing about important issues, particularly internally when I really don’t want the misunderstanding, is it can come off a little curt. It can come off a little short.

(20:36): It can come off a little just straight in a way that can also be perceived perhaps negatively, but if you’re going to err on one side or another, I think it’s better to err on the side of a little curt, but clear language when the stakes are high enough. And I think this is where it really comes in. Harm I think is the right word to use when the stakes are really high, where if someone misinterprets your words, something really bad is going to happen because you also can’t live under this edict all the time. I have a large group of people on the internet where I could go out and say, kittens are cute, and they’d come back, what do you mean you don’t like dogs? What’s wrong with dogs? There’s an interpretation of a negative way of, regardless of what I’m going to say, you can’t live your life like that. You can’t live your life just constantly worrying about all the most absurd ways people can choose to interpret something, but when the stakes are high enough, you really should pay attention, especially when it’s not just strangers on the internet, but people you truly care about.

Jason (21:40): Another way to think about this real quick is that we think about this in terms of software too, which is this idea of surface area. If your sentence has a lot of surface area, that could be okay, by the way, if you’re going for that, if you’re writing poetically where words can be interpreted in many different ways and there could be double layers of meaning because there’s something flowery and beautiful about what you’re trying to say and you’re trying to evoke actually a sense of wonder in someone like, oh, how could they? That’s interesting. Maybe they thought about it this way, that whatever. That’s surface area, there’s a lot of stuff you can’t see. There’s a lot of things going on there and that can be fine, but if you have to say something that’s very important, very clear and definitive, you don’t want a lot of surface area.

(22:16): You want it to be like a flat sheet where you can see everything. Everyone can see everything. There’s no hidden meanings here. There’s no secret crevice where the real meaning is it’s like this is it, so that’s another way to think about this. In the same way with software, we talk about this hidden features or hidden rules or things that behave in a certain way that you don’t know that you can’t see. That’s where a lot of these bugs creep in. People don’t run into that situation enough. Things get stale, software gets bad that way, so the brighter the light and the less surface area you have, just the fewer things are going to go wrong naturally because you have your eyes on more of those things and there’s less room for misinterpretation.

Kimberly (22:52): Okay, last one. Number 26. “Time is on your side, rushing makes conversations worse.” Can you guys think of an example of maybe when we’ve rushed things?

Jason (23:03): It’s funny, I was looking through the list when I knew we were talking about this and I’m trying to remember why I wrote that one specifically, but I think that this in some ways comes down to some criticality. There’s times where you’re having a hard discussion and it’s easy to want to just end it because it’s messy and…

Kimberly (23:22): Uncomfortable.

Jason (23:23): It’s uncomfortable or maybe there’s a lot of nuance. You just don’t want to get into it, and so you can tend to rush through it so you can sort of jump over it and get it done, but it’s sort of like you cannot not communicate. If you rush through things and you don’t really get to all the points, those points still exist in other people’s heads and they know what you avoided and they know why you probably avoided it or they’ll make up a reason why you avoided it, and so I think you have enough time. I think part of this too is chat. People will often talk about this sometimes our conversations in Basecamp, our threads, we’ll go over a matter of days to discuss something, and when you say that people are shocked because days it’s like, well, it wasn’t like we spent eight hours, three days in a row discussing this.

(24:03): It’s just like we’re in the middle of other things. We got back to each other over a period of days. It’s fine, unless it’s really truly urgent. Most things shouldn’t be, but this idea of rushing to conclusions all the time, primarily driven by the medium that you’re using, if you’re using chat, things will scroll away, so you have to be there or not, so things tend to get rushed. I think that’s another part of the meaning of this one is you tend to have more time than you think to really hash something out. You don’t want to let it go too long. Of course, it’s not about drawing things out, but there’s often not a rush. You don’t need instant gratification for more than half the time for many of the things you’re dealing with at work.

David (24:38): How I like to think about it is there’s a reason why we say the heat of the moment because a given moment is a short period of time, and that’s when things are hot. That’s where they might be a little testy, and if we’re trying to just force that through, we’re going to stay in that maximum heated thunderdome of argument. I’ve certainly been in a thunderdome like that with Jason many times, especially I think earlier on we had Ryan in the room for some very heated product decisions that now in retrospect look almost laughable, that we would get that fired up about things that with the passage of time seem incredibly inconsequential. Now, I think there’s actually a dash of that that’s good, that you want some passion in it. You want people to care. You want to have them argue for their positions, and this is how we’re going to find a better way to do it.

(25:35): That’s all fair. Actually, I’m going to make Jason’s point here. If you just wait five minutes, can you give it five minutes? If you give it five minutes, it’s going to cool off and you are going to look at it slightly differently, sometimes materially differently, and if you give it a day, oftentimes it’s just not a big deal. That sort of fiery argument we just had yesterday feels suddenly completely inconsequential because you let it cool down and you let it sort of marinate in your supercomputer in the gut and you’re like, you know what? I don’t care that much. Or even better. Do you know what? It does matter, but you’re right. Know how few people say, wait a minute, you’re right, in the heat of the moment?

Kimberly (26:19): None

David (26:20): No, nobody does that. We’re not built for that. When you are in the heat of the moment, you are built for pushing your position forward, being able to let it cool down, lean back, consider what was said and go, do you know what? You’re right. Let’s just do it your way is a distinct quality of not rushing through.

Kimberly (26:42): Well, there are 30 principles on the 37signals guide to internal communication. I will link to that in the show notes. You can also find it on 37signals.com/thoughts. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter, and if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.