Compasses Over Maps
The year is 1955. Most of the Fortune 100 that year are industrial powerhouses. It is safe to assume that the majority of employees of these companies is wearing a uniform, including the office workers typical suit and tie. In the peak of the Industrial Age following a set of clear instructions, a map, if you will, was the model.
Today, if there is a blueprint for your business model, it already has, or soon will, get disrupted by automation or a tech-first company.
General Motors has survived and thrived, being #2 in 1955 and were #7 in 2017 on the Fortune list. Recently, their CEO Mary Barra announced their 2–word dress code, “Dress Appropriately”. The decision is getting pushed to the edges; the employees.
Much like the transition of top-down dress codes, the model for communication and creation is transitioning rapidly and needs to be pushed to the employees. Your firm may suddenly have a dozen or hundreds of communication and collaboration platforms (especially with Microsoft) and you may be looking for clear guidance on what tool to use and when.
The Swiss-army-knife approach of having one tool that does it all, but does it all poorly, does not hold. New employees will expect the most efficient tool for their respective role and type of project. (Please see The Communication Cannonball Run if you’re responsible for choosing your firm’s platforms.)
The options could be: email, Hangouts, Slack, Jira, Symphony, Salesforce, Powerpoint, Skype,WeChat, Git, Whatsapp, text message, Trello, Stack Overflow, Webex, Vimeo, Sharepoint, LinkedIn, Evernote, Workplace, Medium Jive, Confluence, GoToMeeting, Telegram and HUNDREDS more.
Regardless of the size of your company, it is dangerous to try to force everyone on one platform (or even suite offerings like Atlassian, Microsoft, Gsuite) as the amount of communicative and collaborative technology offerings, methods and models will not subside.
So, where do we collaborate? Unlike the decision for what to wear, the collaboration and communication decisions should be made on team level by the team leader. This may sound disconnected from a global perspective, but it should ride the hierarchy naturally and efficiently as team leads should decide on what best allows them to hit their respective objectives and key results.
So where do I communicate? That depends on what and how you want to contribute to and the path that you want to create. Collaborate Appropriately.
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This post is the latest in a series of explorations by Alan Berkson and me into what we are calling The Control Scale, a guide to digital communication and collaboration. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with our happenings, pleasesubscribe to our mailing list. Yeah, it’s old school, but email is not dead. Mistreated, maybe. But not dead.
