Twaddle Tendency
Irrelevant or empty talk can distract people from serious work. The passage uses a honeybee anecdote to argue for protecting useful discussion and work from speech that contributes little.
THE IDEA
TWADDLE TENDENCY
All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with ‘winning or losing this game of chess.’
—Marcel Duchamp
Man, as a social animal who has the gift of language, is born to prattle and to pour out twaddle that does much damage when serious work is being attempted. Some people produce copious amounts of twaddle and others very little.
The trouble with the honeybee version of twaddle was once demonstrated in an interesting experiment. A honeybee normally goes out and finds nectar and then comes back and does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is. The other bees then go out and get it. Well some scientist – clever, like B. F. Skinner – decided to see how well a honeybee would do with a handicap. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar a long way straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what she now has to communicate. You might guess that this honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but she doesn’t. She comes into the hive and does an incoherent dance. Well, all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. And it’s a very important part of wise administration to keep prattling people, pouring out twaddle, far away from the serious work.
A rightly famous Caltech engineering professor, exhibiting more insight than tact, once expressed his version of this idea as follows: “The principal job of an academic administration is to keep the people who don’t matter from interfering with the work of the people that do.” I include this quotation partly because I long suffered from backlash caused by my version of this professor’s conversational manner. After much effort, I was able to improve only slightly, so one of my reasons for supplying the quotation is my hope that, at least in comparison, I will appear tactful.
When to use it
A meeting organizer asks participants to connect their comments to the decision at hand and offers another way to submit ideas that need more time.
A project manager uses a 'parking lot' for off-topic comments during brainstorming sessions, ensuring twaddle is captured but not allowed to derail progress.
An academic department head shields top researchers from administrative chitchat by filtering internal communications and assigning a liaison to handle non-critical queries.
A writer blocks social media and chatty environments during deep-work hours to avoid the temptation of generating or consuming twaddle.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Honeybee's incoherent dance
When nectar was placed abnormally high, a honeybee returned to the hive and performed an incoherent dance that failed to communicate the location, analogous to humans who fill gaps with meaningless talk when they lack useful information.
The unproductive meeting participant
In a meeting to solve a critical issue, one member repeatedly shares unrelated personal stories. The group loses time and has to return to the problem after each interruption.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
When you feel the urge to fill silence, do you default to twaddle rather than staying purposefully quiet?
How could you design meetings or workflows to minimize twaddle and keep focus on what truly matters?
Recall a recent project setback—was twaddle a contributing factor, and how might you guard against it in the future?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Wisdom Theory 100 Mental Models (2020) (Wisdom Theory)