There’s a concept I think about when teaching, which I call Graceful Degradation. The basic idea is, how well does this lesson work if someone doesn’t remember it very well or if I teach it badly?

I picked up Graceful Degradation as an engineer, and you might be familiar with it from that milieu. It's basically the same idea, just used in a different context.

I.

Consider throwing a punch.

Make a fist with your thumb on the outside of your fingers, because you don’t want to pop your thumb. Place your feet shoulder width apart and then take a comfortable step forward with one foot and plant yourself solidly. Bring your fist close to your chest or face, then move it in a straight line from there to your opponent so you waste as little motion as possible. You want to make contact with the first knuckles of your pointer and middle fingers. Don’t hit someone in the face unless you’re wearing boxing gloves, particularly the jaw or mouth since that’s one big crumple zone.

Different martial arts might quibble over some of those details and a good instructor would drill you into much more precise form, but that’s a pretty good crash course on punching people. As a lesson though, it also has the interesting property that every single line is helpful in isolation even if you forget why the line is there.

If you forgot literally everything else except putting your thumb on the outside of your fist, well, at least you’re not going to dislocate your own thumb when you hit someone. If you threw an off-balance hook right to someone’s jaw but remembered to connect with your first two knuckles, that’s still better than landing with the inside of your fist. If you only half remember what your sensei said from years ago, well, you aren’t going to be worse off for using what you do remember. This lesson degrades gracefully.

II.

Compare this to heart transplant.

In a heart transplant,

1. The patient is put under general anesthetic, drugged so that they are unconscious but still able to breath under their own power.
2. For many procedures, the patient is put on a heart-lung bypass machine to pump blood through their body while the heart is being operated on. They’re possibly also placed on a ventilator to help their breathing.
3. The tools, including forceps and a sharp scalpel, are sterilized along with the operating room.
4. The surgeon cuts a long incision in the patient’s chest and the patient’s ribs are spread open to grant access to the heart.
5. The surgeon cuts the original heart out, places a new heart in its place, and stitches the donor heart together with the arteries and veins.
6. The new heart possibly received an electric shock to get it going again.
7. The ribs are pushed back in place and the surgeon closes the incisions.

If the surgeon forgets a step, the patient is going to have a very bad no good day. Some of it is kind of intuitive, in that it’s hard to forget you need to open up the chest to get at the heart before cutting the original heart out, but some of it isn’t. If you were performing heart surgery and you forgot what to do in order to get the heart beating again, that’s probably worse than not doing the heart surgery in the first place. Remember, introducing checklists to hospitals improved medical outcomes.

(Also, every one of those seven steps has substeps. Figuring out the right drug dosage to put a patient under without killing them is not obvious; imagine being handed the contents of the hospital pharmaceutical storage, presented with a patient’s chart, and asked to pick some vials.)

Heart surgery does not have the property of graceful degradation.

(Heart surgery is hard and high status, but there’s other things that don’t degrade gracefully. If you remember most of the rules of chess but not how knights move, then you aren’t going to be very successful at playing chess. If you remember half of the steps involved in killing and cooking a chicken, the result is not going to be appetizing.)

III.

I think this is useful to have in mind, especially when communicating.

If you’re trying to convey an idea, and it does not have the property of graceful degradation, then you need to put a lot more effort in if you want the idea to be properly used. If you have a project you want to work on, but the project only works if everyone involved actually has the whole concept down in their heads, then you’re going to need to check that they have all the parts. Conversely, if it’s enough for people to do a little better than they were doing at some of the parts, then you have a lot more options.

To put it another way, if you’re trying to get everyone to make good decisions every time, that’s really hard. If you’re just trying to get people to make better decisions, to be a little better tomorrow than they were yesterday. . . if you want to raise the sanity waterline, and there’s many ways people can be insane that are kind of independent of each other...

This, I claim, is doable. It’s just the ordinary kind of hard, not shut up and do the impossible kind of hard.

This shapes how I approach teaching. Since I don’t get years of detailed or personalized tutelage with people, I can’t assume I can teach them the kind of step by step sequences that a surgeon would use. I can’t even assume they’ll read the whole essay instead of skimming parts of it. As a result of that assumption, I discard lots of ideas for sharing that I think can’t be refined into a form with the property of graceful degradation.

It’s also worth considering what you think goes wrong if people miss parts of the advice. If you need to convey something where it needs all the pieces to go right, build in some warnings of what you expect to happen if someone goes off half cocked. I expect it also helps to explicitly embed the steps as part of a greater whole; this is the motivation behind making guides and instructions in the form of numbered lists. Even still, it seems common for people to remember steps one and two and four but not three.

Not everything has to have this property. Not everything can have this property. If you can express an idea such that it has this property, I claim that’s better.