I can neither confirm not deny the existence of a person named Dean.

Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. And any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental

  1. Layered Complexity: example, news papers with large headline with smaller subtitle, and even smaller content. This way of presenting information helps people quickly glance at the titles and decide if they want to dive deeper.

  2. Point and Ask: people are usually hesitant to voice their opinion in a meeting when they feel they are the only one with that particular opinion. This can cause us to make wrong decisions even when someone knew it was a bad one. To help people speak their opinions, point to them and ask them the question.

  3. Precision Question and Answers: Ask questions that result in a one word answer if you are more curious, you can enquire further. In the same way answer very precisely to the question with minimal information required. if the person wants to know more information, they will ask you.

  4. Engineering tradeoff: When an engineer designs a product, they need to decide what they are optimizing the design for. like cost, reliability, etc. Engineering is an art of balancing these design params.

  5. This is my observation. I’ve noticed that when someone is being mean to another person, Dean repeats back the mean persons statements in a slightly silly tone. This type of calling out seems to be very effective in making the mean person realize what they are doing without explicitly saying it.