> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.
This can be both true and unhelpful at the same time. “Extracting the kernel” is about putting agency back into your own hands when someone else is less-than-perfect. How do you read beyond the utterance to understand the intent? Will that lead to better outcomes?
Since you sadly cannot force leaders to improve, and sadly cannot usually also pick for yourself perfect leadership, what power do you have to make things better?
So I think you are scratching at something interesting here - as a (senior) engineer who values communication intensely, I also try to “read between the lines” and extract what someone meant and not just what they said.
And so in that sense, I agree with you - from the perspective of the engineer in this example, yes: try to figure out what they meant and don’t get lost in the details. It’s a good example of not trying to control things that are fundamentally out of your hands.
But the other side is: this blog post (and the linked one explaining the “kernel” idea more deeply) is written from the perspective of the CTO! And it’s framed as a strategy - “encourage your engineers to learn how to intuit what you mean, and not what you say” (paraphrasing, of course).
I think that’s where it rubs me the wrong way. It subtly puts the responsibility for effective communication the receiving end. If we are considering it from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s just far more efficient for the CTO to say what he means from the get-go.
I mean, honestly even with the example: how much harder would it have been for the CTO to say “is it possible to go faster with something off-the-shelf rather than build our own?”
Communication doesn't scale and there are many examples of that. It's not possible to convey complex topics to a large audience, well, at all times. The audience has to do some work too.
This can be both true and unhelpful at the same time. “Extracting the kernel” is about putting agency back into your own hands when someone else is less-than-perfect. How do you read beyond the utterance to understand the intent? Will that lead to better outcomes?
Since you sadly cannot force leaders to improve, and sadly cannot usually also pick for yourself perfect leadership, what power do you have to make things better?