A Snowball

It was a cold winter evening. I was sitting on work next to my laptop and working In our team we had many talented persons but in that evening I had 2 extremely talented: a product manager and a data scientist – a Phd guy.I was working on some task then PM just asked me when I predict the feature will be done. I started thinking. Then a Phd guy joined the discussion and started explaining how complicated the task is…Actually I realized that the PM had no idea what the Phd guy was talking about. But he tried to be proactive in the discussion. And asked one more question .Well,  he made the mistake of his life… a stream of math equations had been thrown  to explain him what he was asking…and guess what! It absolutely hasn't explained the second question… Well , guess what happened then…  The misunderstanding started rolling like a snowball. After 15 minutes of such a conversation both of them were totally tired with 0 understanding of each other…But what is terrible what both of them were absolutely sure that they understand and got conclusions.

Next day the PM had some meeting where he explained all other conclusions of his yesterday’s conversation. I can summarize his explanation like a "total wrong " (being very gentle here!) but the worst of all is that he mentioned that the math guy told him this. On that moment the math guy was on day off and they couldn't reach him to prove or disprove it. As a result – a snowball of crap keeps rolling down… and other people start making their decision based on totally wrong things.

And the main problem is that that’s the way it works .Not only in that  company.

The snowball grows and the worst thing: it’s unpredictable. You never know when it starts and what will be its impact.

So please…when you discuss – double check you understand before you make some conclusions.  And in addition to what – double check the opponent understood your question. I know it’s annoying. But that’s the only way ….