Tease apart


This reflection comes from my personal life instead of from work: my wife had a pretty terrible experience with the kid sports club that our son goes to, and she was quite irritated, therefore she decided to write an email to escalate the issue to their management chain. We worked together to revise the email a few times such that structured critical feedback was being provided, and that email was responded to promptly by the club's management team, and our issue addressed.

This made me reflect on similar situation at work, when people want to escalate an issue or pitch an idea, quite often due to various reasons (urgency, excitement etc.) people might present the story in a black & white form, and overlook the importance of addressing the matter in a structured, nuanced form. This short note is about the 3 most common frameworks that I use to elaborate (both verbally and in writing) an issue or an opportunity, such that it's easy to digest from the receiving end.


The 4 quadrants (first chart in the attached picture)

I learnt this first from reading the book "Radical candor", the very famous chart of the book breaks the interaction at work into 4 quadrants with 2 axes.  One axis is called "challenge directly", the other called "care personally". Then the author is able to map the whole space of people's relationship at work into these 4 quadrants. They also gave intuitive names to these 4 quadrants: Radical Candor, Obnoxious Aggression, Ruinous Empathy and Manipulative Insincerity.

The inspiration that I got from this 4 quadrants view is that it naturally break the black-and-white single binary expression, into at least 4 independent spaces, so we can understand why each quadrant is good or bad, how are they ranked, and is there a way to move from one bad quadrant to a good one. 


The 2-objective trade-off curve (the second chart in the attached picture)

I learnt this from a tech presentation that describes the tradeoff space for AR headsets, where the presenter drew this curve to describe the space of AR feasible headsets. The 2 axes captured the 2 key objectives of AR devices: Ubiquity (which means everyone wears it everywhere all the time) and Immersivity (which means the user can gain the most immersive, rich experience with the device). The key insight is that the 2 objectives on the 2 axes can not be both achieved given the current constraints of the world, therefore possible solutions will lie on a convex curve. 

The inspiration that I got from this trade-off curve is that it forces people to take constraints into consideration while elaborating the problem or the opportunity, the convex curve is used to bring the conscious awareness to the audience that wanting both objective A and B at the same time will end up in the middle gray star which is mediocrity. So a lot of times compromising one objective for the time being, focus on the other objective (red or blue star), then lift the curve is usually the better solution.


The 3 bullet points (the 3rd chart in the attached picture)

This is not something that I learnt from a book or other people, just my own experience. I found it very useful to force myself to break a complex statement into 3 bullet points. You might ask why 3? Well, as I said, empirical. When breaking into 2, they are usually better explained using the previous 2 frameworks, and when breaking into 4 or even more I found people get lost quickly. Therefore 3 had been the golden number for me. If you had read some of my notes, you might have found that the majority of my notes actually have 3 sub-sections or bullet points that I further explain in detail 🙂

The inspiration of this framework is that it forces me to decompose the problem / idea into 3 relatively independent aspects, as I write or talk about these 3 bullet points each point can stand on its own, and there isn't repetitive information among them. Now closing the loop with the beginning of the note: Using the our email with the kid's sport club as an example, really the bad experience was that our son's whole month's classes got canceled last min, which caused disruption, so the way how we listed the feedback was the following 3 bullet points

  1. Unresponsiveness: it took an average 3 days' turnaround time for an email exchange to book the classes to begin with, which had been a lot of effort for us.
  2. Unreliable: several previous individual classes had been canceled in the past, and now a whole month's class canceled.
  3. Irresponsible: when classes got canceled, there was no mitigation or compensation being offered, we had to chase it down ourselves.

By listing these 3 bullet points explicitly, the director of that division was able to respond to us w.r.t. these points explicitly, and promised to 

  1. her staff respond to email within 24 hrs in the future, 
  2. give advance notice if there is predicted disruption and mobilize trainers across classes to minimize disruption
  3. provide priority booking for the next sessions given our cancellation.

Location: Redmond, WA, USA

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