The point is not “rationing out your words” is the correct way to coordinate people. The point is that you need to attend, as part of your coordination strategy, to the fact that most people won’t read most of your words. Insofar as your coordination strategy relies on lots of people hearing an idea, the idea needs to degrade gracefully as it loses bandwidth.
Walmart I expect to do most of it’s coordination via oral tradition. (At the supermarket I worked at, I got one set of cultural onboarding from the store manager, who gave a big speech… which began an ended with a reminder that “the four virtues of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea company are integrity, respect, teamwork and responsibility.” Then, I learned most of the minutia of how to run a cash register, do janitorial duties or be a baker via on-the-job training, by someone who spent several weeks telling me what to do and giving me corrective feedback)
(Several years later, I have some leftover kinesthetic knowledge of how to run a cash register, and the dangling words “integrity, respect, teamwork, responsibility” in my head, although also I probably only have that because I thought the virtues were sort of funny and wrote a song about it)
The point is not “rationing out your words” is the correct way to coordinate people. The point is that you need to attend, as part of your coordination strategy, to the fact that most people won’t read most of your words. Insofar as your coordination strategy relies on lots of people hearing an idea, the idea needs to degrade gracefully as it loses bandwidth.
Walmart I expect to do most of it’s coordination via oral tradition. (At the supermarket I worked at, I got one set of cultural onboarding from the store manager, who gave a big speech… which began an ended with a reminder that “the four virtues of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea company are integrity, respect, teamwork and responsibility.” Then, I learned most of the minutia of how to run a cash register, do janitorial duties or be a baker via on-the-job training, by someone who spent several weeks telling me what to do and giving me corrective feedback)
(Several years later, I have some leftover kinesthetic knowledge of how to run a cash register, and the dangling words “integrity, respect, teamwork, responsibility” in my head, although also I probably only have that because I thought the virtues were sort of funny and wrote a song about it)
The recent EA meta fund announcement linked to this post (https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/the-fidelity-model-of-spreading-ideas ) which highlights another parallel approach: in addition to picking idea expressions that fail gracefully, to prefer transmission methods that preserve nuance.