April 03, 2018
A few moons ago I read Simon Sinek’s ‘Start With Why’ following Kent C. Dodds’ recommendation in his newsletter. The things that stuck with me the most from that book were the three levels of communicating: ‘Why’, ‘How’, and ‘What’. Simon Sinek modelled this in what he calls ‘The Golden Circle’. These are my thoughts on how this framework of thinking affects effective engineering communication and leadership.
This is the simplest form of communicating, and is how we communicate with machines when writing code. The machines don’t care about why we’re doing something. They don’t even care about how we’re doing it, assuming you’ve got the proper abstractions in place.
Unfortunately, this is often also how we communicate as human beings. “Make the UI responsive”, “Fix that bug”, etc. This form of communication can yield quick results in the short term, assuming all parties involved in this conversation have the necessary context. However, at some point you’ll end up with the receiving party not having all the pieces, and is unable to perform the ‘what’ without knowing more about the ‘how’ or ‘why’.
In engineering, it is a lot easier coming up with the ‘what’ when you know the ‘how’. Take the following sentences for example: Which do you think communicates better?
/user/:userId/followers
to retrieve a paginated list of the user’s followers.”I would argue the latter example is clearer, and as engineers we could probably work with this to establish the desired result. The first example necessitates more communication to figure out any additional context. Assuming the communication remains in a ‘what’ fashion, this would be an arduous affair. “Write a @ResponseHandler
with GET as a parameter, or a @GetHandler
both of which taking user/:userId/followers
(…)“.
In engineering disciplines it’s easy to forget that engineering in and of itself is worthless. Your engineering efforts must meet a business requirement in order for them to be valuable. This is where communicating in terms of ‘why’ comes into play. When leaders speak in terms of why it inspires action. Engineers are skilled at figuring out how to do something when given a purpose and then figure out what exactly to do. Great technology leaders trust their team to take appropriate actions and make appropriate decisions. Great leaders focus on instilling values and beliefs over concrete actions. This isn’t to say that leaders shouldn’t step down to the ‘how’ or even ‘what’ level at times, if necessary. In fact, doing so helps prevent a toxic ‘us-vs-them’ mentality in your company. This is especially true for medium to large sized companies.
Adding another option to the above example, which option do you believe is the most effective form of communication?
/user/:userId/followers
to retrieve a paginated list of the user’s followers.”The latter example requires more thought and effort to communicate, and we may not know exactly what to do, but we now have a set of values. These values, in combination with team collaboration and the trust of management as a catalyst, answers the ‘how’ and (as a non-trivial side-benefit) fosters team spirit and a healthy company culture. Figuring out the ‘what’ from that point on is what we call engineering design.
We need all three forms of communication to communicate efficiently. As we navigate towards the centre of Sinek’s Golden Circle we must be aware of the following trade-offs in order to communicate clearly.
I highly recommend that you check out the Start With Why book, or do what I did and listen to it as an audiobook. The book is essentially one simple concept with many real-world examples that help you understand the value of communicating values and beliefs. I’ve started to implement what I’ve learned from this book, but old habits die hard and I still have a way to go.
Written by Roger Guldbrandsen.