136 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
Chunk size refers to the scale of a task with which a person prefers to work. A
person with a global preference breaks tasks into larger chunks than a detail
person, who needs to have a task chunked down into smaller, more manage-
able steps.
If you prefer to work at a global or conceptual level and have trouble deal-
ing with details, you prefer a big-picture outline of what you’re about to be
taught when you learn something new. If your presenter launches straight
into the details of the subject, you may have difficulty in understanding the
new topic. You see the forest easily enough but get confused by the mass of
trees. If you prefer working globally, that is, with the big picture, you may
find yourself switching off or getting impatient with the amount of informa-
tion that a detail-inclined presenter may give you.
When training other people, give an overview of the course before going on to
talk about the specifics, to avoid losing the globally inclined people before you
even get started.
If, on the other hand, you prefer eating the elephant a bite at a time, you have
a predisposition for handling details. You may find that sharing the vision of
someone who thinks globally is difficult. Detail people handle information in
sequential steps and may have trouble getting their priorities right, because
they’re unable to make the more general connections to other areas within
which they’re working. These people are very good in jobs that require close
attention to detail, especially over a period of time, for instance on an assem-
bly line or conducting a test in a laboratory.
Detail people have a tendency to dive straight into working on a task without
looking at the impact of the steps on the final, desired goal. As a result, they
may not meet the actual goal or they may see the goal only after a great
deal of time and energy has been spent following the steps getting to the
wrong goal.
When Romilla worked in IT, weekly meetings at one multinational company
were interesting to say the least. The manager was a global person and one
of the programmers always gave him his progress in minute detail. The rest
of the team had great difficulty in keeping a straight face when the manager’s
face went through its contortions of not understanding, boredom, and blatant
irritation, until he would snap at one of the project leaders, ‘Explain what he
means.’ Fortunately, the project leader was somewhere in the middle of the
chunk-size range and was able to translate the details for the manager. The
poor programmer sweated buckets before the meetings and his stress levels
rose unbearably prior to them.
If the programmer had known the reason for his miscommunication with his
boss, he might have reverse-engineered his work. Instead of talking about the
code he was writing, he could have spoken, briefly, about the results his work
was producing and how it was affecting the project of which the manager was
in charge.
