Everything You Know About Communication And Collaboration is Wrong
…and it’s not your fault.
Many people talk about digital transformation. We are told data and analytics will transform how we do business. Well what about communications?
One challenge we face in the workplace is the skills and processes we have for communication and collaboration were designed in a pre-digital society.
Communication
We are interrupt driven. We were taught that when the phone rings, you answer it; when a letter comes in the mail, you open it. The pace was slow so we never had to learn how to prioritize and manage these interrupts.
The pace of communication has accelerated and proliferated to the point where the interrupt-driven model is grossly overloaded. Many of the communication channels we are used to using are overloaded in terms of volume and utility. A screwdriver was designed to help you put screws into things. You could also use it to make holes or hammer in nails, but it’s really not very good for that. The same is true for many of the tools and processes we use today to communicate. If I asked you how often you use a fax machine to communicate I’d probably get a chuckle. Why? There are faster and more effective ways to get a copy of a document from one place to another. Should you use faxes for conversations? Could you imagine going back and forth over fax to have a conversation with someone at a distance? How about multiple people? That’s where email shines. It allows you to move documents from one place to another. It even allows you to carry on a conversation, with multiple participants.
Do you think about the best way to communicate or do you simply accept the default?
Now take a step back for a moment. If I asked you to send me some information right now, how would you do it? You might start to think about what type of information it is before you decide how to do it. Today, you have MANY options. You can call or email, but you can also message me on a multitude of platforms including SMS, WhatsApp, Skype or direct message me on a social platform like Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter. Would you call or email? Or would you use one of the numerous other “messaging” options available?
This takes me back to the screwdriver analogy. Back when we didn’t have a lot of options to choose from it was easy to make that decision. For a half century, you would likely call, fax or send a physical letter. At the turn of the century you would more likely choose email. It wasn’t that hard. Today, it’s much more complicated. And with this complication comes confusion and noise. Email still represents a huge volume of communication, but is it always the best tool? How do you know which tool to use?
How Do We Tame the Chaos?
In the old days you got excited to hear “You’ve Got Mail” when you had a new email message to view. Today, if you are like me, you have several hundred if not several thousand unread emails in your inbox. And also, if you’re like me, you have several email inboxes to manage. Now that we have better communication options available, why are we still using email for every communication possible? We need to accept that our habit of email may be dated.
In the business world the traditional mode of interrupt driven communication is failing.
Part of the problem is the tools we use, but an even bigger challenge is not only how we use them but how we think about communications in general. The ease with which we can communicate with others — our ability to create interrupts for others — has exceeded our ability to handle these interrupts on a serial, interrupt-driven basis.
How we manage communications and notifications in the interrupt driven model is dated and unsustainable. Our capacity to handle interrupts hasn’t increased, or at least not in any significant measure. So there is a need to set our “personal” Control Scale to help manage/prioritize notifications and communications.
Outside-in vs. Inside-out
In nursery school we move from parallel play to actually playing with each other. We acknowledge there is someone else who needs to be accommodated in communications and actions. In the work world, management theory is focused around hierarchical models, teams and career paths. The idea of “need to know” drives how information was created and shared, and org charts drive who needs to communicate with and accommodate who. In our pervasive communications/knowledge abundance world this model is strained to the point of failure, or at least rapidly diminishing utility.
The common means of communications starts with considering your audience: the first thing you’re prompted for in an email is “To:”. That’s inside-out thinking. You start with a limited audience and then consider “who else” may need to know about it.
Outside-in thinking flips that around: start with an audience of “everyone” and then consider if you have to narrow it down for clarity, privacy and/or security.
Outside-In Thinking in Action
How does this really work? Here’s a personal story from Mike Fraietta that illustrates a new take on collaboration and outside-in thinking:
“My wife and I are a couple of weeks away from visiting Japan and we had nothing planned. So many people said, “You can’t just show up to Japan, it takes a LOT of planning.” Fair enough. I took to Facebook and asked my network for recommendations. A few trickled in. Then some friends tagged local Japanese and they gave their recs as well. Within 24 hours, we had a great itinerary. But then, I shared our prospective itinerary on Reddit and the community found several holes in our plan and gave even better recommendations. After 48 hours we now had a solid itinerary and even made plans to meet friends of friends in Tokyo.
Let’s play that scenario out via email. Where would I have begun? I didn’t know which of my friends had visited Japan or knew friends there. If I did know of one or two, how quickly were they likely to reply? Would they have felt comfortable forwarding my query directly to their friends? That’s just for Facebook. The Reddit responses were all from strangers whom I did not know. Would I have sent an email to a travel agent asking to be introduced to strangers who have visited before?
Had we gone the email route, it would have taken months, not 48 hours. Why do we insist on getting from A to B via email for EVERY project. More often than not, open communication allows for a project to get completed faster.
Cool travel story bro, but what about a real business project? I am glad that you asked. A former client of mine, an insurance company, ran through a very similar situation described above in the Japan trip example. They offered car and auto insurance and were mandated with expanding to offer boat insurance. Typically, they would have brought in consultants and hired a new team to create their new product. Since they had an internal social collaboration platform for their tens of thousands employees, they asked “Does anyone have experience working on boat insurance?” and lo and behold the responses came piling in from internal colleagues that had the exact expertise they were seeking. They were able to assemble an experienced team without hiring outside consultants nor spending time and money on finding a brand new team. The timeline to launch was cut by over a year. New products were queued up to launch sooner than expected. Revenue faster.“
What’s Next? The Control Scale
As a way to frame and discuss these new ways to look at communication and collaboration Mike Fraietta and I have been working on a framework called The Control Scale. In this space (and in a book coming soon) we will explore the skills and processes we need to effectively communicate and collaborate in our digital world.
It’s tough these days, and it’s not your fault. And we’re here to help.
