Trade Adviser Warned White House in January of Risks of a Pandemic // This is all crazy craze stuff. BUT there is a valuable BigCo lesson. Leaders in any org are viewed through their "high order bits" no matter the issue. 1/9 https://nyti.ms/3aPtSZ5 

2/ Over time everyone develops a "high order bit" for how they view any new development. In software/biz it might be specific tech principles, org philosophies, pricing, positioning, competitors, etc..

People react to new inputs calling on or context of high order bits.

3/ Challenges arise when trying to drive action in crisis (versus just new data). In crisis, an org's immediate reaction is almost always "what crisis?"

Until more people with different high order bits see a crisis, most view a single reaction as "oh that's just X again…"

4/ It is no surprise that the NSC staff saw something Navarro said as based on concerns and distrust of China. That's his high order bit.

Equally unsurprising is that Navarro's initial memo had the subject line "Impose Travel Ban on China?"

That would be ineffective.

5/ So the lesson is "know your high order bit" and literally avoid using that when trying to drive change or response to something.

You're own high order bit is not a secret—everyone knows it and will always add it to the end of everything you say no matter what.

6/ My own high order bit was always "shipping software" [high-quality, on-time, easy-to-use]. After about 10 years of meetings where no matter what came up I would always offer a view through the lens of "gee, will that ship" or "that will take a long time to ship".

7/ If I wrote a memo or email ("writing is thinking") on a topic and included or led with commentary about shipping I now know the rest of what I wrote was mostly ignored at best or at worst fell on deaf ears.

It took a while but I learned.

8/ In fact what I really learned was that it is good to leave out your high order bit, but it is even better to include the high order bits of other people. They might be non-issues to you or even annoying, but to others, well, it's their high order bit.

9/ So as you can imagine I learned to lead with topics like software architecture or code reuse for some and pricing, pricing, and then pricing (and positioning) for others.

Turns out they would always fill in the part where I say shipping on time w/quality and features. // END