Prioritizing Communication: How understanding Dunbar's number and filling your jar of rocks can help

You will often find a story floating around your social media field. It is about a professor that demonstrates a life lesson by gradually filling up a container with rocks, then pebbles, then sand. At each stage the container is full, but there is space for more objects, as long as the object is smaller.

If you haven’t come across it, a short example video is here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPgMeKfQFq8) 

The lesson in that metaphor, is that your life can be considered full, even if you can fit more and more things in. Those things are invariably not as important as the big things in life, like family and relationships.

This is a nice and simple story, which is probably why it’s so popular and pops up again and again in social feeds. Once, while ruminating on a challenge I was seeing, I realized I could use it for another topic, specifically around communication and transparency in business.

Transparency

Companies naturally start off small, and communications can be managed informally across personal networks. Once companies grow beyond around 150-200, roughly around Dunbar’s number, personal networks can’t be relied upon any more. Not everyone will have been in the organization since the beginning, and they won’t know all the history. Leadership will no longer be able to rely on personal connections to resolve any miscommunications. At this stage, leaders need to be more systematic and considered around what and how they communicate.

How does the metaphor of rocks in a jar work with this? Let’s imagine that you have to fill that container as best as you can. Once you have declared that the container is full, someone is going to pour water into that container. So it will be properly full, not just to the best of your abilities. If you only place big rocks in the container, then a lot of water will get in. If you put in the big rocks, but then pebbles, and then sand, then you fill up more and more space, and less water can get in. 

Imagine you are communicating something to your organization, such as a round of redundancies. You have to communicate the basic facts, that some people are being let go. These are the big rocks being placed in the container. You can look at that container afterwards, and say that it is full.

The pebbles and sand in this metaphor are the extra things that you can communicate on top of the basic and necessary facts. The summaries of the decision making process, the external factors that necessitated the decision, and the reasons that it won’t be necessary again.

What is the water in this metaphor? It’s gossip, conversations at the water cooler, chats in the pub. It’s the people asking questions like “Why was this done now?”, “Why was that guy let go?”, or “What would it take for this to happen again?”. In other cases, it’s “Why did that girl get a promotion when I didn’t?” or “Why did we invest in that idea and not the one that I championed?”.

To do this, you need to be able to continually look deeper and put yourself in the position of the people in your organization. You need to be able to empathise with them, and, to use the classic chess metaphor, think a few moves ahead.

• You have to not just say “The results are not what we expected.”, but go deeper and add background like “Some factors were beyond our control, like the change in the attitude of venture capital funds in the last year”.

• You then have to go deeper and say “We realize that not everyone in the organization may understand what is happening in venture capital at the moment, so let me take five minutes to explain, and we will send some articles from the press afterwards.” 

It is the job of the successful leader to understand & anticipate where these gaps in understanding are, where uncertainty can turn to speculation & gossip, and how they need to be addressed. In the above example, the communication explains that there were external factors that affected the decision, leadership understands that these may not be obvious to everyone, and these are in the public domain. Once all this has been explained, there is far less chance of someone in the organization thinking that there is something they are not being told that might mean they lose their job in a few months.

This can be difficult for people that don’t realize that the culture has shifted in their organization. In the early days of the company, when the company is small, managers can rely on the relative compactness of the company to ensure people know everything, and on personal networks to smooth over any cracks. This is an example of Dunbar’s number in action, when communities can maintain themselves when they are under around 150 people. To quote Robin Dunbar himself:

The Hutterites and the Amish, two groups of contemporary North American religious fundamentalists who live and farm communally (the one in the Dakotas, the other in Pennsylvania), have average community sizes of around 110, mainly because they split their communities once they exceed 150. What is interesting is the reason the Hutterites themselves give for splitting communities at this number. They find that when there are more than about 150 individuals, they cannot control the behavior of the members by peer pressure alone. What keeps the community together is a sense of mutual obligation and reciprocity, and that seems to break down once community size exceeds about 150. Since their whole ethos is against having hierarchies and police forces, they prefer to split the community before they get to that point.

Dunbar, Robin. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks (pp. 27-28). 

How organizations can deal with managing communications as they grow is a massive field, so I'll just say read anything by Dunbar. I'll focus on some conadvice for the individual. How can an individual leader know that they are thinking about the effect of hearsay and gossip? 

How to prepare yourself

A mentor once gave me a wonderfully simple and prescient piece of advice, which has proved foundational for me over the years.

Whenever you promote someone, you have to send a mail out to the whole company. That mail should explain why that person got the promotion. More importantly, anyone that reads that mail should understand why they didn’t get a promotion. If you can’t send that mail, you shouldn’t be promoting the person. If you send that mail, and anyone asks why they didn’t get promoted, you have screwed up.

In business, some of the most dangerous questions that can be floating around the organisation are of the form “Why?” or “Why not?”. Managers can answer them when they come up, but if that is the approach, then they will not be answering all the questions that don’t come to them. In that situation, a rot can easily set in to a company, affecting morale, performance, and retention.

The reason I love the rule so much is that it forces someone to think a few moves ahead where it concerns managing people, to consider how their actions will come across to others. It makes people think about celebrating success, but also being mindful of the broader impact. This is often not a natural step for managers, and it is where people can make mistakes that they don’t realise that they are making.

Once one is comfortable with the underlying lessons, it can also be extended to other situations, for example to the earlier case of making redundancies. If you make people redundant, you obviously can’t share all the details of the decision-making process with everyone, and there will always be an amount of acceptance from people that they don’t have the full picture. 

Saying that, if you have anyone seriously asking a question such as “Why was this person let go?”, or “Why is that person still here when that person was let go?”, then you and your organization have a critical problem on your hands. People will make their own minds up about why things were done the way they were done, and the resulting opinions will never be opinions that you want people to have.

In my professional life, I’ve always found this rule to be a great test for how open & transparent I am. For example, I use it as a discussion point in promotions & development, and that means I can avoid negative sentiment. 

Dealing with promotions and redundancies are likely going to be rare occurrences in your professional career. However, these are dramatic examples when a leader should be considering how decisions will be viewed by individuals & groups that are not directly affected, and how that leader can think more broadly to ensure that considered communications can mitigate the risk of their colleagues coming to unwanted, but easily anticipated, conclusions.