Talkers are dangerous

Talkers are dangerous in an organisation.

Talkers don't do. Talkers waste time. Talkers talk their way into positions for which they are wholly unsuited. They lead the organisation astray.

But none of these are so bad.

The biggest danger that Talkers introduce to an organisation is complacency.

Talking creates the appearance of work being done. This appearance of work done creates an illusion of progress.

There is subtly here. Failing to make progress is not bad in and of itself. Deploying strategic inaction is a legitimate option.

Neither is it true to say that Talkers leading the organisation down the wrong path is unequivocally bad. Predicting the right path to take is tricky at the best of times.

Instead, it is the false impression of action that is dangerous.

The false impression of action has knock-on affects. It creates assumptions in other parts of the organisation. One such impression is that 'someone is working on this' and therefore there's no need for us to solve for this problem we've just noticed. Another is that we may be actively shut down because 'someone is already working on this'.

Talkers create artificial, fragile place-holders around a problem that prevent others in the organisation from solving that problem.

Talkers introduce fragility to the organisation by injecting false assumptions into the planning of dependent groups.

The effects of Talkers are not self-contained.

Because Talkers are good at talking, they are good at promoting their talk. Their ideas tend to spread. Because talk is cheap it is easy to do a lot of it. Updates can be frequent. This too helps their ideas spread.

As humans we are surprisingly unskilled at differentiating between secondary evidence of real, tangible progress and the appearance of progress. Surprisingly, Talkers who simply don’t know any better can be more detrimental than Talkers who knowingly practice the dark arts of peddling bullshit. A well-intentioned Talker does not signal deception.

It gets worse.

The mere fact that a Talker is talking, even if they lay little claim to ownership of action, can be counter-productive to progress.

And so we get to my suggestion.

The Hypocratic Oath for Talkers. First, let your talking do no harm. If you Talk about a topic you must point to action being done or take responsibility for the creation of action. A derivative of Amazon's rule of ‘if you notice a problem, it's now your problem’. The Talkers Rule states: ‘if you Talk about an opportunity it's your responsibility that the opportunity is achieved’.