How Culture-As-Vibes Prices Silence Out of Human Systems
Why culture-as-vibes optimizes for visible contribution, misreads silence, and quietly breaks engagement and feedback systems.
You're in tech.
You're reading this.
You're potentially interested in communication.
Welcome to systemic.engineering.
Welcome to engineering a room full of people.
Language is load-bearing.
So is silence.
..
When Words Become Noise
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Lorem ipsum.
Word salad.
Meaningless.
Empty.
(Only skimmed it, eh?)
Without shared reality.
Without shared meaning.
Language becomes.. foggy.
(And silence load-bearing.)
How can we identify fog?
Which interventions remain?
And when does silence protect coherence?
TL;DR: Hodobodo.
When Words Create Fog
You're talking past each other.
When do conversations become circular?
..
Your team is a distributed system.
Conflict a known failure mode.
And language the transport layer.
Message delivered.
Integration failing.
Retry pending.
..
Message delivered.
Integration failing.
Retry pending.
..
(Are we looping yet?)
TL;DR: Deadlocks in human systems.
When Alignment Becomes Theater
Human systems are always in motion.
Requirements change.
Teams restructure.
Colleagues churn.
(Humans go brrr.)
If language is the transport layer between divergent realities,
alignment becomes an optimization target.
Not a one time task.
If alignment is a continuous process,
active integration becomes a must-have.
Not a nice-to-have.
If active integration is a necessity,
circular conversations become a failure signal.
Not "bad communication".
If circular conversations are a failure mode,
silence becomes a coherent choice.
Not "quiet quitting".
TL;DR: Alignment is a moving target, not a single workshop.
When Silence Becomes Culture
Everyone does it this way.
Who is everyone?
Why do I care?
(Do you care?)
You're in a meeting.
Everyone is talking.
Nobody is listening.
What do you do?
..
Finite options:
- Observe. Let it run. Leave the system be. (Maintain.)
- Act. Intervene. Give an input into the system. (Change.)
- (Exit. Expensive. Leave the system.]
TL;DR: What do I do? What do you do?
When Silence Becomes Choice
Silence.
Can be a chosen action.
(Wait what?)
Not responding.
Not engaging.
Not feeding.
(The loop. From earlier.)
..
Any observed statistical regularity
will tend to collapse
once pressure is placed upon it
for control purposes.
— Goodhart's Law
When systems punish authentic communication
and misread silence,
silence stops being neutral
and becomes active choice.
Silence is a lawful adaptation
to systems that punish signal.
A symptom.
(A screaming dashboard, muted.]
If this resonates, consider these questions:
- Who is expected to act?
- Based on which history?
- In what function or role?
- (Who am I for whom when in which way?)
Members get practice-oriented insight.
(Okay.)
..
Cheers
Alex 🌈