Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.
Telecommunicating Ideas
Not long ago I was working for a national telecommunications company. We’ll call it National Telecommunications Company for now. On several occasions (per day) I was faced with situations and tasks I didn’t know how to accomplish. Yet, in the end, accomplish them I did.
Sure, part of HOW I was able to do that is due to me being awesome. I get that. But a far larger part of those successes came from talking to people which everyone can do.
Assuming they can talk. Perhaps we should use “communicate”.
We won’t, but if you’re unable to speak, substitute the word communicate.
Oftentimes as we’re going through our day-to-day we see and hear examples of humans who appear to have the ability to speak without thinking. Over time this leads us to believe the practice is normal in our species. In some places it can be, but believe it or not, speaking should be akin to thinking.
It should be used to think, so it should at least be adjacent.
How about this instead: Use speech as audible thought.
It IS possible. We CAN think BEFORE we speak. Can can even think AS we speak. See, even if we do think before we speak chances are we’re going to slip up and say something stupid anyways.
This is due to something I like to call “humanity”. We are imperfect, fallible, and a bit weird. We’re weirdos. In isolation we are some crazy people. For example, take the lone housecleaner attempting to remember everything she needs to do that day. She goes around cleaning all by her lonesome, occasionally reciting the mental list she made that morning. It’s audible, but only clear to her. If anyone was around, they’d only hear mumbling.
To herself, she’s completely sane. It makes sense. She made a plan, she made a list, she likely wrote it down somewhere. It got memorized and to make sure she isn’t forgetting a step she’s reciting it. A litany of sorts, perhaps.
However, imagine she isn’t alone, though she thinks she is. A kid decided to stay home that day and is now hiding from the deranged lady mumbling to herself as she meticulously gets the house in order. When the kid does hear her, it’s some sort of list and it’s the same thing over and over.
That example is only dealing with how we’re perceived. That’s not including how we delude ourselves into thinking our ideas, our UNVETTED ideas are GEMS.
Let me tell you another story. It’s fictional, but illustrative:
There’s a man named Elliot. He’s 29, recently read half of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and watched two YouTube documentaries on psychedelics and quantum physics. He’s unemployed (temporarily, he promises) and spends most of his days journaling about “the structure of the cosmos as it relates to the divine feminine.”
One evening, after a few bong hits and a stream-of-consciousness session with his fountain pen, Elliot has what he calls a breakthrough:
“Time…isn’t linear. It’s a spiral. But not just any spiral. It’s a womb spiral, and civilization is just a fetus stuck in labor.”
Now, that sounds profound to him. It’s emotionally resonant. He feels it in his chest. There’s power in that kind of insight. He thinks he’s onto something massive. He is onto something Terrence McKenna would have written a book about if he’d just lived a few more years.
So he goes to a philosophy Meetup group the next day, mostly retirees and grad students, and he says it out loud:
“I believe civilization is in the womb of a spiral. Time is a maternal vector. That’s why history repeats. We’re contracting, spiritually.”
Silence.
Then someone gently says, “Okay... but what does that mean? Can you give an example?” Elliot fumbles. He has no model. No clear definition of terms. No logical scaffolding. Just vibes.
Someone else asks, “How is that falsifiable?” He doesn’t know. He hadn’t thought that far. What follows is twenty minutes of verbal tap-dancing, some references to Carl Jung, a misused quote from Einstein, and a frustrated sigh as he mutters, “You guys just don’t get it.”
Alright, let’s pause here. Elliot does actually exist. The story doesn’t, but it also does. Weird. Maybe I should crowdsource a better way to say that portion.
Okay, Elliot as a person doesn’t exist. This scenario never took place.
Except the problem Elliot has does. Only it’s not HIS problem, it’s OUR problem. We’ve all been in a situation where we thought we knew something and didn’t. Be it like Elliot here and talking philosophy without having thought, a dude strolling into a fantasy football league meetup at a bar trying to talk stats, or anything in between. We’ve all been in over our heads and had our idea and our idea of what’s real completely demolished.
It’s frustrating and it’s awkward.
We fall in love with the way something feels in our minds before it’s been run through the harsh filter of reality. Or logic. Or someone else’s scrutiny.
Fresh ideas are newborns. They’re messy if you let them loose, they’re loud and obnoxious, and they’re functionally blind. They also have no object permanence. Don’t ask me how I know that.
They’re not fully formed nor do we know if they ever will be. You may need to throw one or two out every now and then.
The ideas, not the babies.
Most ideas are malformed. They’re abominations. They’re abhorrent or shallow enough to be dangerous. Most ideas are bad.
Let’s give that a line of its own.
MOST IDEAS ARE BAD.
Take that to the bank. Most ideas are bad. And it takes a lot of failure, testing, and humility to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
The delusion is this:
We confuse novelty with truth. We confuse emotional resonance with intellectual validity. And most damning of all, we confuse the fact that we’ve had a thought with the assumption that it’s worth something.
But meaning comes from refinement. From turning chaos into order. Not from reveling in the chaos itself and calling it genius.
So when you speak your untested idea into the world, especially in front of people who know more than you, expect to look a little mad. Because you are. Temporarily. (No offense meant, but if taken, feel free to take another.)
That’s a required stage. A prerequisite stage, if you will. Only the fool becomes the master. As evident, the fool must precede the master. That does not mean go out and act a fool. It just means you will take lumps, you should practice listening and learning from those who know more than you, and stay humble.
You must be a fool before you become a master. That’s the price of progress. Only a narcissist stays a fool and calls it enlightenment.
Now That We’ve Got That Out Of The Way
Well that got out of hand. I meant to explore how we use communication with others as a tool to properly orient ourselves and those we’re collaborating with.
I guess, in preparing to put that idea out for public consumption and criticism, I realized that it may be necessary to lay out a few starting points so we’re all working from the same foundation.
Meaning, writing and exploring my thoughts WITH THE CONSCIOUS and INTENTIONAL PURPOSE of presenting to other fellow humans and human-adjacent beings has already given this idea more breadth, depth, and a bit of extra length.
That’s not something I did intentionally. You can validate how true that is by examining how unstructured the piece has been thus far. Yes, I’m examining this in real time as I write. That’s how it has always been excepting a few pieces and some poetry.
Upon having (read: borrowing from many thinkers before me) this idea, I wanted to test the validity. There are plenty of sources and sources used again (resources) I could reference for evidence. That’s true. However, I’m asking of you children to DO. I’m asking you to ACT.
So I wanted to act, too. I wanted to work through this myself. I tell you often you should write what you think. Don’t show anyone unless you want to, even if it’s bad. Even if YOU think it’s bad. If you want to then go ahead and show someone. I have sent MANY a terrible piece to friends of mine because I think they’re HILARIOUS.
Do I get audible groans I can hear all the way from New Zealand? ( Ben Black )
Yes.
Will I do stuff like that again? And tag them in the piece?
Also yes.
The opinions of people are a mixed bag, naturally. Oftentimes they’re like armpits and assholes. Everyone has them and they all stink. However, I don’t like to use that comparison much.
Mostly because there are some people I enjoy getting opinions from. Which makes it weird.
Just know not every opinion is good or worthwhile. Some ain’t worth shit.
It’s difficult to discern which is good and which is bad at first. It gets easier with time and exposure, but it never gets easy. It cannot get easy as ease begets complacency. Once that sets in you’re screwed until you get rid of it. Sometimes those people whose opinions you value have garbage opinions. If they’re thoughtful or of the sort that values thought they realize this.
If they do not realize that sometimes their opinions are garbage, perhaps those are opinions you do not need. They are unlikely to be pondered on, considered, and well fleshed out.
Unless you enjoy them for their shallow and potentially humorous nature. I do have a few friends like that. I do value them.
I guess what I’m saying is this: realize your thoughts are important. They’re heavy, they have weight attached to them. Your thoughts shape your world, your reality, and your actions. If you cannot be consistent in understanding your thoughts should be weighed carefully, add some weight onto them yourself.
Either intentionally work through them with the understanding they will be put forth for review and scrutiny or work through them aloud. That will add some metaphysical weight. Even alone that adds a touch of REALITY. It helps, try it.
If you do this you will flesh your ideas out far more than if you’re keeping everything in your head. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I’ve never met them. You’re human, you have the dumb thoughts. We all do. Sharpen them up with a little tempering, a little iron-on-iron action.
Give them value.
Collaborative Sharpening - Cloud Version
Circling back to the original point in telling you about my telecom background, let’s run through some… background on the “cloud” or my “cloud” and then a hypothetical scenario that I found myself in many times during that portion of my career.
As I begin this next section, please imagine I am doing so while looking for my glasses and pipe using my cane to walk around. Also make sure to add in whatever olfactory or auditory remembrances you may desire for the authentic “back in my day” feel.
Back in MY day, or “the” day as we called it, the cloud was nothing but an image on a diagram. I can’t remember using the term much if at all, but we saw it plenty. It was known that whatever was in there we weren’t all that concerned about, we just needed to know what was touching the cloud on each side and who was providing an entrance and an exit to the cloud.
Sure, we would name our clouds, but who the heck knew what was in there?
Okay, we had an idea but mostly we trusted it to work and to be available. On occasion we’d have to dig into first and second hops to troubleshoot an issue or two but for the most part the nuts and bolts were a mystery.
Somewhat. In reality the cloud was just a bunch of networks like ours doing network shit like ours. That’s all. I’ve been out of the telecom game for a few years now and with the way technology advances I’m assuming this is all grossly outdated.
Anyways, there are clouds. You can see them above. Those clouds are third party infrastructure used to connect pieces of the network. Clouds represented the unknown, the unfinished, the theoretical, and the abstract. We used these for current network topologies as well as planning out new network topologies.
With the cloud representing the unknown, we would surround it with the known, the understood, or the currently implemented portions of our network.
If we had a location in South Carolina and a location in California and were tasked with creating a network topology or diagram and those networks hit a carrier anywhere in between (they always did) there would be a cloud.
Location - Wiring - Handoff - CLOUD EMOJIS FOR DAYS - Handoff - Wiring - Location
Basically that’s it. We didn’t always have that information, though mostly it was to avoid having to explain different parts of networks that weren’t ours to people who didn’t know how to interpret what they were seeing. It’s mystical, magical, wizardy shit. The internet works via magic, people. Duh.
Yet at times we would need to explore how to make the cloud. We could have all the end-points we wanted but if there wasn’t anything that actually made up the cloud there were no connections. It must exist. If it works, there is a path, infrastructure, and working configurations between point A and point B.
Every so often we would have network architects and engineers that worked well “alone” on getting things connected. There were freaks like that. Wonderful, wonderful freaks. I say it with love, honestly.
However, even “alone” they’re frequently on the phone or chatting over some messenger application with somebody else. Problems happen, oddities occur, turns must be made when we thought it was a straight shot. So “alone” is misleading. They “alone” saw the design from start to finish, yes. But they did not do every piece alone. Hell, we had to call central offices and COLOs to see if they actually had the space/wiring/equipment available or if it even existed. Records are useful but sometimes they’re wrong.
All the time. I meant all the time they were wrong. It was awful.
Aside from those absolute units of architects and engineers, there would normally be a collaborative effort. There is much utility in this as I hope to portray. Collaboration helps with far more than telecommunications planning and architecture, by the way. It is not my intent to school you on the intricacies of the field.
In fact, you can ignore the terminology and the order of operations here. They will not flow with the most up-to-date agile FIVE ESSSSSSS lean productivity and compliance certificate authorities. Instead they will be used to help you visualize the effect collaboration has on shaping out ideas that are worthwhile and dumping those that are not.
The Scenario
Ah, a simple and clear header. How agile is THAT?
In this exercise we’re going to be part of a team tasked with getting our newly acquired satellite office in Oceanside, California connected to our main office in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
For you geography buffs both of those cities are on the coast.
They’re just not the same coast.
Personally I’d prefer to just wire them together with one big cable but that’s not feasible, the attenuation would be horrendous, and the cable would be heavy as a pause before going into the confessional the week after Mardi Gras.
Okay that was a bit much, but you get it. There must be some plan, some idea of what needs to happen before working to make it happen.
Now, our task is to find the best way to connect the location in South Carolina (point A) to the location in California (point B).
So we have an idea. That idea is point A and point B having a secure, stable connection on the same network so they can interact with the data locally stored in South Carolina as well as the data locally stored in California.
That’s basically the internet. Access to data.
However, this is an idea that hasn’t been thoroughly fleshed out. It’s there, it looks nice on the surface, but once put to scrutiny it’s a bit underwhelming if not downright cringe.
We could just get local internet providers to hook up both sites to the internet and try to connect all our internal systems to allow external traffic.
That would be a nightmare. Don’t do that.
In order for us to ensure we don’t make silly mistakes like that and for the company to ensure the same thing we collaborate.
What a silly little mockup I made. Point B is on the left because West is left. That’s why I included the compass rose reference icon widget. Whatever they call it now.
The Process
So we’re going coast to coast. Much to work through, for sure. However, we’re only hitting the general idea and applying that to how we work through ideas to make them worthwhile and to make them work.
Most ideas don’t work. This idea does not work right now. It’s just lines connecting the sites to a cloud icon.
So now we’re part of a team and we go into a meeting with everyone else.
We propose a point-to-point solution.
It’s cool. It’s clean. Perhaps we’re ahead of the curve for once.
But then Carl from infrastructure squints at the diagram like it owes him money and mutters something about distance limits, physics, and “bro, you ever heard of curvature of the Earth?”
True, true. That’s a fever dream. Even pseudo-p2p running over rings would likely be cost-prohibitive.
That idea, that iteration of the idea is set down. Not gracefully, but it’s down now. We’ll cry later.
Then Dana jumps in. She’s network security, and she proposes leveraging an MPLS connection with VRF segmentation.
MPLS. The wizard tunnel of enterprise networking. Private, fast, and cloaked in just enough mystery to keep it safe. And VRF? The digital velvet rope. Keeps our traffic all classy and separated.
Now we’re having a bit of an “American Psycho” moment, envious over an idea, not stock of paper. Let’s dial it back some, she might need this win.
But now logistics gets twitchy. Turns out we’d need to work with not one, not two, but four separate carriers. One for each coast, one for the mysterious dark fiber middle bits, and one that just sort of... appears whenever you say “cross-country low-latency SLA” three times fast.
So Dana’s plan? Technically viable. Beautiful on paper. Onboarding that many providers, though? Feasible but undesirable. Hell, it may not even be necessary.
Cue Alex. Our infosec wild card. Comes in hot with: “What if we tunnel everything through VPN over dedicated internet?”
Classic. We nod. We acknowledge the wisdom. And then we immediately start bickering about encryption overhead, routing convergence, throughput loss, IPsec key rollover schedules, and whether or not we trust AT&T with literally anything.
Spoilers: we don’t. I’ve even worked with employees (unioned) who don’t. The ones that weren’t unionized (not onionized) probably just didn’t want to say over the recorded line.
Alas, we move on, putting our collective heads together to figure this out. Each of us has likely done each and every step it takes to get this connected individually dozens of times over, so we know the ins and outs. We know the pitfalls and the workarounds.
But sometimes we as human beings cannot think of or remember everything, especially in a complex or complicated system.
Collaboration does not automatically imply a lack of knowledge, expertise, experience, or anything else. It’s simply a wonderful tool we SHOULD TAKE ADVANTAGE OF when working through something worthwhile.
What we’re doing here is what you do with any real idea. You toss it on the table, you let it get poked and prodded and interrogated like it’s hiding something. Then you dress it back up, see if it can walk again. If it can’t? That’s fine. Now you know what not to do.
Then we do it again.
So we don’t stop, we add.
Jules, who never talks unless it's important, says, “What about an aggregator? Someone who manages the relationship with all those carriers?”
We look at each other. That’s... not bad.
Could offload the chaos of multi-carrier integration. Could centralize support. Could keep our hands mostly clean while still getting the reliability and performance we need.
Downside? Less direct control.
Trade-offs, always. But now we’ve got a spread. We’ve got:
The Fever Dream Cable (RIP)
The Clean-but-Carrier-Cluttered MPLS w/VRF
The Cloaked (Daggerless) Tunnel VPN Method
The Outsourced Aggregator Handoff
That’s not bad at all. We began with a generalized idea. We started with what we wanted to see done.
One bad and three feasible ideas later and we’ve got the beginning of a fleshed out idea. Something that is implementable.
We arrived there because we were willing to put the ideas out there, to have them see the light of day and be judged on merit. Any thinking person understands not every idea can be great, not every idea can work, and not every idea even makes sense.
Pay attention to those that judge you based off a single comment, a single idea, or a single proposal. This is excepted if you’re selling something. You better get that one right.
But otherwise, pay attention. They’re likely ones to avoid or ones who are insecure. Hell, they may just not have the capacity to think. It happens.
Presentation, critique, rejection, and revision are how ideas evolve. They don’t just appear fully-formed in someone’s inbox. They get hammered out, reshaped, sometimes burned down entirely and rebuilt from scratch.
The talking, the drawing, the arguing, the laughing, the admitting “yeah, that was dumb” is how solutions are born. The scenario presented was about connecting two offices using nerdy lingo, but the process is the same when working through an idea or a problem of yours.
Iteration, preferably collaborative iteration is the way forward for most things. Ideas specifically.
Regarding connecting the sites? There’s more to be done, more iteration to happen. Now that there are four three ideas born from the first, it’s time to assign research (to get more info), get quotes (even more info), call providers (info, you say?), and get a good cry in by the servers. They’re loud and the door locks.
But we’re moving towards the goal of getting this idea fleshed out and implementable.
We’ve narrowed the cone, the goal is clearer.
I wonder how well we’ll see after the next meeting.
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