Archive for April, 2010

Correspondence of yesteryear

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 27, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!

I once told a friend of mine, a veteran engineer at Intel, that I found that people at Intel devote 20 hours a week to “Doing email”. His thoughtful response was “actually we always had this. We called it Correspondence”. Then he added, “and we devoted 2 hours a week to it”.

Good point… I too remember those days at the start of my career. The correspondence consisted of messages – just like email – and it would come from inside and outside the workplace – just like email – and it would come on sheets of mashed tree pulp inside manila or regular envelopes. Unlike email.

So why did it take only 2 hours a week? Admittedly, many factors have changed since then, but there is one factor that is of key importance: those envelopes had colorful little pieces of paper stuck to them, called stamps. The stamps had their beauty – as a kid, I used to collect them, and I still enjoy them when I get them on my snail mail today. But as to Information Overload, the key factor is that these stamps (or the equivalent postmarks) cost money. The whole mailing process cost you; for each additional recipient you had to copy the letter, stuff it in another envelope, address it, and add one stamp.

Now, if only email would cost money on a per-recipient basis, much of the present overload would disappear (as would most of the spam out there). Making email cost, in whatever manner, is one solution to email overload; some experiments along these lines have been tried, and you may see them in a future post. But overall, alas, we’re still stuck with this curse of plenty: free email, free overload!

Eliminating PowerPoint altogether: a brave experiment

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 20, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Organizational Solutions
. 3 Comments

I’ve discussed the shortcomings of thoughtless reliance on PowerPoint before. I was recently made aware of an audacious experiment tried out at Ashridge business school in the UK. As reported by Phil Anderson here, the purpose was “to see what the effect would be on us as learning and development professionals and more importantly how participants would find the experience, if PowerPoint was done away with all together and not a single slide was used”.

The effect, it turns out, was largely beneficial, and in ways beyond my immediate expectation. Not having PowerPoint forced the teachers to think more carefully about their message and how to convey it effectively. But it also enabled completely new ways of teaching it; for instance, teaching now involved the entire physical space of the room, not just a screen at one end. Teachers devised a variety of ways to engage their audience, which in turn reported a more enjoyable learning experience. As the article sums it up: “our experience has shown that presenting in other ways is liberating for both you as a presenter and your audience.” I like Liberating; it is a powerful scenario.

There are caveats, of course, and there are situations where judicious use of a presentation adds definite value. I myself prefer to use a mixed mode where I speak my mind, but  use slides to show images or diagrams that augment the audience experience. Not having any projected slides at all would probably be a bad idea in some cases, but in others it could lead me in intriguing and promising directions that I might never explore otherwise.

An interesting question that all this brings to my mind is what effect removing slides entirely would have on the distribution of speaking skills. Neither university professors nor corporate managers are selected on speaking talent; their abilities in this area must fall on a normal distribution. PowerPoint may be serving as an equalizer, making the good and the bad able to present in the same mediocre manner. My first guess is that removing PowerPoint would expose the innate variance in teaching skills, much more than the standard method does. That is, good teachers may do better than they had with PPT, while poor speakers will do much worse without the “crutch” it provides.

Where I’m really curious is how this might affect the very best speakers. Would they remain just as effective with or without slides? Would giving PowerPoint to Cicero or Demosthenes have made their speeches even more impressive, or would it have encumbered them? Perhaps they’d keep their excellence while speaking in a completely different style?

Thoughts, anyone?

The shifting perception of the acceptable

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 14, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 7 Comments

I was discussing the effect of email overload on work/life balance with a manager, when he pointed out that emailing late at night was acceptable in his eyes because if he receives an email from a subordinate at 10 PM the sender may well be watching a game on TV and “doing email”. I found this interesting because of the underlying assumption that if the poor chap was sending the email while watching the game then it was not a problem for his work/life balance, since he was, after all, watching the game – in other words, he had no right to complain, he was “having a life” after all!

This is a nice case of rationalizing the problem away by redefining expectations. In times past (and I’m not speaking of the middle ages; this was a few decades ago) one’s time at home was one’s own; if one did any work there it would have been perceived as a breach of the work/life barrier. You did work at the office, and you watched TV at home. Nowadays you work at the office without watching TV, and you work at home while watching TV. The manager I was talking to would probably consider it a poor balance only if one were to work at home with no TV at all…

And don’t get me started on the implied multitasking!

WiFi in the classroom: enabler or distraction?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 9, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

My friend Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli of Haifa U writes a fascinating column in Calcalist where he examines our new digital world (if you’re one of my readers to whom Hebrew isn’t Greek, take a look!)   His last post examines the dilemma of WiFi use in university classrooms: some universities are turning the net off, to ensure students will listen to the lectures instead of mucking around in Facebook; others prefer to keep access available, claiming freedom of speech and the fact that with cellular web access the battle is lost in any case.

Sheizaf personally advocates the second position, which his university adopts. True, he says, many students are distracted by the connection, but regressing to pre-Internet times is not the answer. Our world, our society, have changed to the point that ubiquitous connectivity is a fact of life. Today’s good students are those who learn more and better by surfing, exploring and discussing things in real time in parallel to the formal lecture they’re hearing. As he concludes: “it’s time to concede the net’s victory and to accept it”!

Thinking this over, I certainly agree that there’s no turning back, and as I’ve been saying for years, management – whether in a university or in a company – can either adopt the new technology early and be a partner in influencing its usage, or try to fight it and lose. That said, the vision of the students using the net to deepen their studies, attractive though it is, troubles me. The good students will surely do so, because there’s no stopping a smart young person on a quest for knowledge and success; but there will be those at the other end of the distribution who may not be up to such self-discipline. To the extent that WiFi can be used for either learning or distraction, might it be introducing a differentiator that will increase the gap between the best and the worst students, depending on how they use it?

Since we want to create an education system where all students are helped to achieve their best, I sense a need for some degree of guidance here. Certainly, as Sheizaf points out in his article, the traditional frontal classroom needs to be replaced with a model where students are encouraged to interact online; being proactive in driving this transition is the way to go. But after providing the connectivity (technology is always the easy part), how adept will our universities be in inventing the new behavioral model? Do they really know how to modify the old one so the surfing enhances the learning experience rather than muddling it? How do we instill the required discipline (and how much is required?), and make the students live the exuberant possibilities of a learning model we have yet to fully understand? This will require professors who can guide such interaction and encourage the critical, intelligent use of web resources by all the students. Last time I checked professors weren’t even screened for lecturing skills, much less web-use facilitation ability; so creating a cadre of such brave new teachers (and retrofitting the old ones) will take some doing and time. At least, knowing that people like Prof. Rafaeli are on it makes this difficult task seem less scary.

But after providing the connectivity (technology is always the easy part), how adept will our universities be in inventing the new behavioral model?

Altruism and Email Overload solutions

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 4, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion and Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

While checking online for tidbits on Email Overload, I bumped into an article in The Advocate titled Managing E-mail Overload: Reducing Volume by Being Mindful of Others, written by Stephen M. Nipper. It shares a variety of useful tips, but its main emphasis, as the name implies, is on considering the impact of the mail one sends on others, and practicing restraint by avoiding Reply to All, writing concise messages, etc. Which makes perfect sense: if we send less mail, and it is easier to read, surely that will reduce email overload to everyone’s benefit.

But it isn’t so simple. This angle on the Information Overload problem essentially relies on altruism: taking steps to benefit others. Without going into a discussion of human nature in general, we must consider that email senders act out of no small degree of self-interest – at least in a corporate environment they do. After all, we all know what happens to useless email we might send, such as that generated by abusing Reply to All: it gets deleted unread, just as we do to it when we receive it. So why do intelligent knowledge workers send out mail they know will not be read? What’s in it for them?

What’s in it for them can be any of a number of things. They may want it known that they’ve been awake, working, at 2AM. They may want to create a paper(less) trail, to prove they’ve said something, in case of later accusations. They may want to excel at the “publish or perish” game. They may want to show the intended recipient that their boss has been copied (as I’ve described here). But primarily, they want to be noticed; not sending the email won’t give them this, and in many organizational cultures, going unnoticed can be (or is perceived as) definitely risky. So people are always willing to apply solutions that improve email overload at the receiving end – their own end – by processing their Inbox faster, since this gives one a selfish benefit; but they’re less than eager to adopt etiquette standards that reduce the flow they send out. Being mindful of others is good for the group, but in the pressured competitive environment of the corporate world it is not necessarily a high priority for the individual.

If you doubt this, suggest to a coworker that they stop sending out their status reports by email, and put them on some web repository instead, where anyone in need of it can go read their activity update. Good luck.

This is not to say that you can’t get people to improve their etiquette and curb their outgoing mail flow. You can, as I can attest from experience. It does mean, however, that your solutions must be designed to resolve the aforementioned conflict of interest.  The simplest way is to deploy them top down in the hierarchy: management must credibly convey that one will be judged on the impact on others of one’s outgoing mail. This changes the rules of the game: mindfulness of others may seem much more attractive when your group manager has made it clear that it will be rewarded (or its absence penalized). This is why in all the email overload programs I’ve deployed I’ve made sure the etiquette definition part is conveyed as management expectations, unlike the Inbox-processing training. With a little guidance from above, altruism may yet flower in your organization…

He doesn’t DO PowerPoint!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on April 1, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 4 Comments

We should all learn from a senior corporate executive I know. This guy once participated in a meeting where half the attendees were in another geographic location, and were hearing our location via teleconference. At some point one of the people in the remote location asked “Are you showing any PowerPoint slides? Because we aren’t seeing them on our screen here”. And the exec said, emphatically:
“I don’t DO PowerPoint!”

I was overjoyed when I heard that. He didn’t do PowerPoint; instead, he talked to his audiences, explaining, instructing, directing, managing, leading, role modeling… all the things a manager ought to do, none of which really necessitates slide presentations.

Of course, PowerPoint and its like are useful; I use them myself, when the need arises. But I do my best not to make them the main thing; after all, a slide deck is but a support tool to help the speaker get the message across. Unfortunately this obvious truth is often forgotten. We’ve all sat drowsily through meeting after meeting where 80-slide presentations are droned through by one presenter after the other, to no conceivable use. The mind boggles at the accumulated effort and time invested worldwide in preparing snazzy slides (many of them quite confusing) and in listening to them being read mechanically. And the medium isn’t conducive to critical thinking, as pointed out by Edward Tufte in his insightful but sad booklet “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”, where he goes so far as to attribute the Columbia space shuttle disaster to the deficient managerial process triggered by the presentations used at NASA.

I myself had a jarring wakeup call years ago when our plant got a new training manager. The newcomer sat through a few meetings (we had lots of those) and told me “I don’t get it. Why do you guys read endless bullets from slides? Why can’t you just say what you want to say?”  This had a serious influence on my slidemanship from that day on… I began to use slides for pictures that would illustrate what I had to say, rather than for text to read from. It did my lectures a world of good.

So – next time you or those around you use PowerPoint, try to use it sensibly, like that exec I mentioned. Or at least try to avoid the style of the hilarious Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation (don’t miss slide 5 – it always cracks me up :-) ).

We should all learn from a senior corporate executive I know. This guy once participated in a meeting where half the attendees were in another geographic location, and were hearing our location via teleconference. At some point one of the people in the remote location asked “Are you showing any PowerPoint slides? Because we aren’t seeing them on our screen here”. And the exec said, emphatically: “I don’t DO PowerPoint!”

I was overjoyed when I heard that. He didn’t do PowerPoint; instead, he talked to his audiences, explaining, instructing, directing, managing, leading, role modeling… all the things a manager ought to do, none of which really necessitates slide presentations.

Of course, PowerPoint and its like are useful; I use them myself, when the need arises. But I do my best not to make them the main thing; after all, a slide deck is but a support tool to help the lecturer get the message across. Unfortunately this obvious truth is usually forgotten. We’ve all sat drowsily through meeting after meeting where 80-slide presentations are droned through by one presenter after the other, to no conceivable use. The mind boggles at the accumulated effort and time invested worldwide in preparing snazzy slides (many of them quite confusing) and in listening to them being read mechanically. And the medium isn’t conducive to critical thinking, as pointed out by Edward Tufte in his insightful but sad booklet “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”, where he goes so far as to attribute the Columbia space shuttle disaster to the deficient managerial process triggered by the presentations used at NASA.

I myself had a jarring wakeup call years ago when our plant got a new training manager. The newcomer sat through a few meetings (we had lots of those) and told me “I don’t get it. Why do you guys read endless bullets from slides? Why can’t you just say what you want to say?” This had a serious influence on my slidemanship from that day on… I began to use slides for pictures that would illustrate what I had to say, rather than for text to read from. It did my lectures a world of good.

So – next time you or those around you use PowerPoint, try to use it sensibly, like that exec I mentioned. Or at least try to avoid the style of the hilarious Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation (don’t miss slide 5 – it always cracks me up).