Tame Your Feed: Taking Control of Internal Communications
(This post may well have been entitled “How To Have Internal Organizational Conversations At Scale” or “Let Your Intended Audience Find Your Communications Instead of Choosing It For Them.” It came about as a result of a conversation predicated on a challenge that enterprise social networks, rather than replacing email and making life easier and reducing the load of internal conversations, actually have made things worse — now you need to manage your inbox AND your enterprise social network feed as well.)
If only every organization was small and manageable. Seems like things work well in small doses, then begin to fall apart at scale. I have written before about the challenges of pervasive communications and the chaos that ensues as we try to navigate it. One consistent challenge is deciding who to include in a conversation. Too often this choice includes too many people or not enough. The root of the problem is the choice is inverted: you shouldn’t choose the audience for your communication, you should let your audience find it. The challenge is this requires some new tools and some new skills.
I see tools blamed for this problem — email most often — and there is an expectation that a tool can help us tame the chaos. That’s simply not true. Every aspect of an organization is governed by three factors: people, processes and tools. Working on one factor without consideration of the other two is a recipe for failure. When I see organizations looking to improve communications by implementing new tools, I always have to ask “How are you going to change the culture? How are you going to change the people and processes as well?”
Analyst and collaboration software expert Alan Lepofsky recently posted on Twitter (note: ESN is Enterprise Social Networks e.g. Yammer, Jive, Workplace):
And the following exchange ensued:
Alan Lepofsky has this great chart that perfectly illustrates the challenges we face with the proliferation of communications tools:
To really affect change in regard to how your organization communicates, you need more than just a better tool. And don’t be fooled by the success of a new tool in a small, sample group. Things that work well in small doses can easily have problems at scale.
You should have to input your credit card and incur a charge every time you hit “reply all.”
Email is a perfect example. We’ve all sent an email to one recipient and then had a few back and forth iterations to continue and, perhaps, resolve the conversation. Now contrast this with another situation in which we’ve all been involved: the group email. It’s starts as an email to a large group, then continues with the dreaded “reply all” which creates an unruly mass of threads which is difficult to follow, difficult to add new people to the conversation, and difficult to extract yourself when you realize it doesn’t concern you anymore.
Email fails at scale for group conversations. So how do you manage group conversations well? Let your content find it’s audience.
We discussed previously that a key digital skill is search. In order to make sure there’s plenty for your employees to find, you need to teach them how to create and share as well. It requires:
- a good collaboration tool — e.g. Enterprise Social Network or messaging platform
- new processes and skills — e.g. working out loud, search first, outside-in thinking, curation, tagging
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This post is the latest in a series of explorations by Mike Fraietta 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, please subscribe to our mailing list. Yeah, it’s old school, but email is not dead. Mistreated, maybe. But not dead.
