The Fifthe
THE TALE OF THE GLOBAL COMMUNICATOR.
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“C
ould you hold on please, my mobile’s beeping.” This is embarrassing but it happens all the time, almost on cue every time I start a conversation on a land line, as if by some ancient spell. I reach into my briefcase to retrieve my mobile phone. And of course, just as you would expect, just as I flip up the protective cover it stops ringing. “Sorry about that,” I apologize.
“No problem,” comes a cool voice, with an accent, down the line. “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you I was teaching all day yesterday. How can I help?”
“Franck, I’m sure that you don’t remember me but I was on one of your learning programs last year, on creating virtual organisations?” I probe waiting for a response.
“Yes of course I remember you. You were just about to join a new company, I believe, how is it working out?”
“Good and not so good. That’s what I was calling about. I remember we discussed communication?”
“Yes?”
“I was just wondering if I could pick your brains, talk to you about any ideas of how to cope with the amounts of information I’m being deluged with.”
“Sure but I must mention that I’ve only managed to make this phone call in a gap in a session I shall have to be away in exactly twenty six minutes.”
“I’m sure it won’t take that long. Let me give you some background. My new organisation has offices around the globe. Each office is relatively autonomous and is managed as a separate profit center. However the current strategy is to try to leverage our size by developing a global capacity to respond to some of our larger clients as well as to develop a global brand and positioning. I have the job of integrating our marketing for all the different units.”
“Sounds like a big job,” he interjects.
I agree instantly, “Demanding. It means I’m doing a lot of travel although my base is still in this country.” I try to move on to the reason I called. “Do you know of any good books or articles on managing time, well not really managing time it’s more about managing communication. But sort of...” I’m finding it difficult to clearly state my problem.
“Time management isn’t really my area,” he replies. “Although I have found that it is rarely the management of time which is the problem. Often the real reason that you don’t have enough time is something else.” Then he chuckles. “Actually when I’m in one of my more belligerent moods I will argue that you can’t manage time, all you can do is spend it. Spend it doing things, thinking, experiencing. It doesn’t really matter how hard you try to manage it a minute happens every minute. I’m not sure I can really help you with this one.”
“Well it’s not really time management,” I say trying to prolong the conversation, “let me describe what happens to me. I’m finding that even in the calmer periods, when I’m not globetrotting, I’m having to get to the office at 7.00 a.m. each day. And when I am actually in my office I spend huge chunks of my time responding to a deluge of information which comes at me from all directions. I mean, typically, in the morning there are about forty e-mails waiting, a dozen faxes, my voice mail to check, and because there is just so much of it unless you respond to it there and then you can’t get back to it. So I don’t really prioritize, as I was taught as a junior manager, anymore. And then, having just waded through all the stuff sent to me, I have to wander through our organisations groupware for all the non-proactive stuff, and then just as I get the feeling I might be getting on top of it, the post arrives.”
Franck bursts into unsympathetic laughter at the other end of the line. “Multi-media-data-deluge!” he chuckles “a common syndrome afflicting managers these days.”
“It’s a nightmare and because like many modern organisations we’ve done away with secretaries, I have to manage it all on my own.”
“Have to?” he interrupts.
“Yes. Our policy is not to employ secretaries,” I explain again. “It’s a headcount thing. And you can imagine what a nightmare it is when I travel. I carry a large black bag containing phone jacks for all the countries I visit regularly along with a couple of spare pcmcia modem cards.”
Now Franck is killing himself with laughter. He seems to find my discomfiture extremely amusing. This is not what I had expected. I decide to tell him more so that he can grasp the seriousness of the situation and offer some sober advice.
“I found it such hard work to try to keep in touch around the globe that I even ended up buying a second mobile phone. So I now have two phones which divert to the other on no reply in case one of them is low on juice.”
No laughter. I think I’m winning.
“Last month I decided to experiment with video conferencing as a method of reducing my travel load.”
“Good idea,” he responds without a hoot. “It can be very effective.”
“Not for me it wasn’t. I’d heard that many organisations do it all the time and swear by it. My experience was the exact opposite. First, it took ages to arrange and book a time when all the people we wanted to interact with would be available. It was as bad as organizing a meeting, no worse because we also had to schedule time on three VC rooms around the globe. The event itself was a bit unruly. In Boston they had auto camera zoom which would swing wildly round their room to focus on the person speaking. It made anyone watching feel sea-sick”
“Couldn’t you have planned your agenda and selected primary speakers for each topic to stop the whizzing around?”
“I guess we could have. I know that now. I didn’t know that then. I think in retrospect there are several other things we would have done like for example get people to introduce themselves in a brief but interesting, and possibly humorous way. Not necessarily at the beginning because that slows the start to boredom. But perhaps at intervals. It was only when we were about half way through that I realised that the reason that some of the people, who should have been key contributors to the conference, were being reticent was because they weren’t sure what the job roles of some of the faces they were seeing, were. We should have made quite clear what the timings were for each topic and broken up the presentation/discussion format with a few short breaks”
“Nice analysis,” he congratulates.
I chuckle, “I guess the funniest thing that happened was that one of the Japanese participants started to fall asleep. You see the time schedule meant that for them it was some horrendous hour of the morning. When it was noticed, it really broke the tension and there were hoots of laughter. One of the participants described it as ‘virtual jetlag’.”
“Brilliant!”
“Yes but I’m still not sure that we would have achieved the purpose we set out to achieve, which was to resolve some issues and gain commitment for the next phase. By the end we heard all the right noises but I’m not sure that they have really bought in.”
“Oh! I didn’t realise that you were trying to use cyberspace for handling emotional issues.”
“Nor did I,” I reply now starting to understand what the real problem was.
“Tell me about your other stuff, your e- mails in particular, are the messages you receive useful?”
“Are you kidding me? About 5% is really useful and critical, about another 10% is interesting or nice to know but the rest..”
“Garbage?”
“Worse. Garbage with attachments, I really hate those attachments they take ages to open and half the time they are written in a more recent version of the software ensuring that you can’t actually read them.”
He giggles.
“The annoying thing is that often, even with all those e-mails, I still have to really hunt and probe to get some of the answers I really need. You see the problem is that our organisation is so fragmented that no one is really sure where the power structures lie. So even before we had e-mail there was a lot of CYA activity...”
“CYA?”
“Cover your anatomy.”
Now he laughs down the line.
“Now what you find is that you get copied in on everything Especially me. When my job was initially announced they made it sound as if I would have influence over the marketing and sales budgets and hence the operational spend budgets of all the operations. People seem to copy me in on everything!”
“Apart from, what was it you called it, CYA, do you have any idea of other reasons people send you this vast tide of cybertrash?”
“No,” I say shaking my head forgetting that he can’t see me.
“Do you remember our discussion about the Old/ New Worlds?"
“Yes.”
“In the Old World information flowed up and down the line, the reporting line was the same as the main conduit for information flows. Generally, because what individuals did was closely regulated by their line manager, most information passed was in either specifically asked for by the reporting line or was information which had always been gathered and distributed, like sales reports or machine efficiencies.”
“I say, “Yes,” not sure of where this is leading but more to encourage him to keep talking.
“The New World creates three big headaches, for a start because the rate of change is generally faster than the rate of organisational learning, a lot of the information generated is being produced for the first time ever, so there is a question over who needs access to it. Also in the New World there is a need to communicate with other people and stakeholders involved in the overall process or project. So most of the information conduits should run along the processes or projects and not up or down some control ‘hierarchy’. Co-ordination is through information not through issuing orders. But the third is even funnier. Because in the New World the learning takes place throughout the organisation it is not appropriate to regulate what people learn. But the effect of that, is that the people in the organisation become very unsure about which other stakeholders need to have access to what they have learnt. They decide more is better than less and so spray the organisation with the data they have collected hoping that all will be well.”
“But it’s not well,” I protest. Most of the stuff I get sent gets deleted as soon as I look at it.”
“Why?”
I think, ‘Why is he asking me 'why'?' I’d have thought that that was obvious, it’s garbage.’ I say, “Because it doesn’t answer any of my questions or issues, because often I’m not sure what they want me to do as a result of reading their e-mail, because it is often too detailed or general for me to act on and usually because it’s too late for me to respond or take any appropriate action.”
“Have you told them this?” he asks. “Don’t forget that in the most people don’t know about the existence of the New World. They think that when they send you some correspondence, any correspondence, it is of value. They don’t realise that information and data are not the same thing, you want answers, you want information if you are not asking the question then anything they send you is useless to you. It’s just data. It’s just data you’ll bin. They’re still living in the Old World where the questions had long been defined and so the bulk of what was circulated answered the questions and was information. They may also not have understood what stakeholders are and assume that because you are senior you are a stakeholder in a process or project, even if you’re not. To you it’s garbage, to a real stakeholder who was asking the question it’s information. One person’s data is another person’s information,” he intones, then he pauses and asks, “Do you follow?”
“Yes,” I reply, “Of course, and because the New World disrupts the neat and tidy linear reporting relationships creating a web of stakeholder interactions, using e-mail to inform people or to keep a record of what is happening, is impossible because no single person has the whole picture. I guess that’s why we introduced groupware. I don’t remember it being explained that way.”
“Sending people data is expensive stuff. In virtual cyberspace interactions can be with millions. Remember in meatspace/ touchspace everything you do costs you money but only a few things you do, which the customer likes, bring the money back in. If you imagine that you cc to 30 people, each of whom takes two minutes to open up and read useless data at $100/hr that is $100 gone to money heaven, or wherever money goes when it dies, remember on a 10% margin that is $1000 additional revenue which needs to be generated to cover the cost of that wasted e-mail. Or in your case at 80% of 40 at, Ooh, $500 per hour, I make that about, er, costs of, er, $2500 per week “Frightening isn’t it?”
“Yeah, real scary,” I respond, too big headed to tell him that he has grossly overestimated my hourly rate.
“That’s why you must reply to every single one of those e-mails. You really need to reply explaining about communication of information.
Just create a standard reply with the points you made above; that the message must serve the purposes of the person being communicated with, the level of detail must be appropriate for the stakeholder and that the timing of the communication must make it useful and that they must anticipate the thoughts and actions they wish you to carry out and possibly inform you of them.”
“Yup,” I respond. It makes sense, but I’m concerned that it may seem Franck must have guessed my thoughts because he says, “If you think it appears unfriendly, preface it in some way, as a chain letter or with a reference to some personal goals of your own.”
That seems far more attractive to me. I notice that he is speaking faster now. I guess we must be running out of time. I glance at my watch. Just then my mobile starts ringing again. I decide to ignore it and just let it ring.
He says, “I guess the other thing we haven’t quite bottomed out is why you have decided to receive your communication trough so many channels.”
Well it wasn’t really a decision, it just happened.”
“How about having your phone calls managed?"
“Headcount freeze.”
I reply.
“So why can’t you go virtual. Come up with a solution which has the effect of a secretary without the traditional form, and hence headcount implications.”
“What would that be?” I say. “I can’t think of anything.” I think it’s a ridiculous idea, in order for someone to take my calls there has to be someone. And in order for there to be someone the headcount has to go up. It’s not possible unless that someone is me. And that is pointless.”
“Why can’t you divert your calls to a call center, people who specialize in phone calls, you could think of them as a ‘virtual secretary’ having the good effects of a secretary without having to physically be in your building and on your headcount."
“Nice idea. I’ll give it a go,” I say with enthusiasm muted by the fact that I hadn’t thought of it myself. As I reflect on the suggestion it becomes apparent that I was assuming that whoever took my calls would have to be employed by us. A real person inside our organisation. I hadn’t considered for a second that I could direct the communication to someone outside our organisation.”
Franck is moving on now speaking significantly faster than he was at the start of the conversation. “It’s probably worth thinking about which medium you want to use for which bit of communication.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you try to channel different communication through different channels?”
“I think so,” I say. “I try to use the most convenient ones.”
“There is a pause, silence down the line. Franck is obviously trying to format his thoughts. He quizzes gently but quickly, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Er, Yes.”
“When was the last time you wrote a love letter?”
“Good God!” I explain, surprising myself as I swear. I wasn’t expecting that question. “I can’t remember,” I say.
“But you’ve told your other half by phone about such matters recently?”
“Sure,” I reply. In my job being away from home so much most of my phonecalls home are half task and half ‘love’ phone calls.
“Well, you see, people find it difficult to express and investigate their emotions in a medium in which they are unfamiliar.”
“What do you mean?”
“Many years ago people wouldn’t speak of love on the phone, but they would write love letters. Letters had been around for a while and we were so used to them as a means of communication, that we relaxed enough to commit to them our emotions and allow them to act as the medium for communication.”
I’m thinking, ‘So?’
“As you communicate using the plethora of media you have available, you need to give some thought to the emotional content of the communication you are carrying out. Newer media with which we are less familiar often do not allow us to relax enough to move from the communication of logic and facts to the higher order range of emotional conditions. So it’s not really surprising that you didn’t get complete buy-in with your video conference. The participants’ emotions were already tied up engaged in handling the mechanics of video conferencing, a change from the norm. They were working flat out to assess if this change was actually a threat to their security. The emotions were far too busy handling the changed medium to focus on even considering how they felt about your proposal and if they would buy-in.”
“I see,” I reply. “I hadn’t really thought about that.”
“But it’s worse than that. You see the thinking part of you also needs to be considered. There are some issues which are only understood if there is an interactive dialectic between the people communicating.”
“I don’t understand,” I say bewildered.
Franck chuckles loudly down the phone. “Joke! Ha! OK I know it wasn’t very funny but I hoped it would make the point.”
“What point?”
“The point that for some things, it is essential to interactively develop clarity of understanding. For some things this is best done with rapid and immediate response otherwise we lose the thread of the argument, we forget the points which were being made and how they fit together.”
“Got it,” I say, “Video conferencing allows the high rate of interactively for discussing a complex problem but is not useful for either resolving an emotional issue or getting buy in. At least not at this stage. At least not whilst it still feels new to people. Is that what you meant?”
There is no immediate reply. “I’m sorry, someone was asking me something this end. What did you say?”
I repeat what I had just said.
“Precisely! You need to consider all your communication routes along with the medium you need to use to make it most effective. Some media allow you operate effectively in the same place and at the same time, like meetings. That makes them particularly suitable, especially if people are familiar with them, for communicating issues which are both emotional and require immediate interaction in order to develop understanding. Others, like e-mail, have the advantage of allowing you to interact with other people in different places at a different time from when you send the communication. But because they are new and because they are not immediate they are far less effective for handling a high emotional content or the need for immediate interactivity. But brilliant at conveying factual information, updates and the like. They are very effective when you wish to avoid the ‘virtual jetlag', you described before because they allow time to operate in parallel, not just in series as it usually does. You see for communication which is effective even when interaction is not immediate,” he says, “Parallel time is the trick. Does all that make sense?”
“I think so.”
“Good, I’m afraid I have to go now. I have to be somewhere else in meatspace/ touchspace.”
I laugh. “Sure, thanks. It’s been very useful.”
“Bye.”
I barely have time to reply. There’s a click and he’s gone leaving my mind whirling with thoughts of sames and differents, virtual secretaries and information without answers.

<Back to the future, swirly wavy lines this time>
· go virtual
· fair = different
· data =/= information
· time = parallel
Bullet points are added to the white board.
“Are we still winning? Do you want to hear more?”
A chorus of ‘yesses’ and ‘uhuhs’ follows.
“Great! Who wants to capture our imaginations next?” he challenges.
A hand goes up.
“OK over to you,” he says.