If you have any experience with hospitals (and who doesn’t, unfortunately?) you know of the “Doctors’ visit” ritual. Once or twice a day a procession of the attending doctors go from room to room in a ward, followed by nurses and a cart that once had all the patients’ paper files and these days may have a computer on it instead. It is a solemn affair, and the patients and their families hold their breaths as they await the experts’ verdict regarding the situation of this patient or that. Meanwhile other people are kept out of the ward – the physicians need to concentrate, and their visit is religiously shielded from all disturbance.
Or is it? I was at the World Usability Day conference recently, and after lecturing on Information Overload in corporate settings I was treated to a fascinating lecture by Prof. Yoel Donchin of the Hadassah Medical School, who has been studying the matter of interruptions and distractions during these medical visits. These were defined as anything that causes the doctor to focus attention on something other than the purpose of the visit. The research was done in detail and with careful statistical methodology. Care to guess how many times, on average, a group of visiting doctors are distracted during a two-hour visit?
Did you guess 80? Yep… the exact figure is 83 distractions per visit. Some of these are bearable perhaps, like noisy activities in the background or nurses talking among themselves, but there were nine distractions per visit that forced a full suspension of the execution of the visit for a while, like phone calls and unrelated conversations involving the visiting doctors.
Obviously, the ability of the medics to focus on the matter at hand – the patients and their illnesses – must suffer a good deal with all this interrupting going on at a rate of once every 1.5 minutes. In that respect things are no different than with other knowledge workers in other environments – and yet, in a hospital setting this is really worrying. It is at least encouraging that Hadassah is conducting this in-depth research to understand what is happening in detail – and, I understand from Dr. Donchin, to examine remedial changes in the procedures and organizational culture that make this reality possible.
Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years.
More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms.
I’ve been preaching a move from email towards other platforms – internal social networks, blogs and RSS feeds, shared workspaces and so forth – for some years now; but this is the first time I see a large corporation deciding to make such a bold leap. And they’re likening the situation to the trend of curbing physical environmental pollution in the aftermath of the industrial revolution – a bold analogy.
Of course God is in the details, as the saying goes; it is interesting and important to consider what is involved in this plan. Obviously email itself is not going away entirely; they will need it to communicate with their external customers and stakeholders. And they will need a method to bridge external email and internal networking: if you want to forward a message from a client to a coworker, you will not want to start cutting and pasting, especially if the coworker needs to respond to the original sender. But three years should be enough to solve such issues if they have their mind set on it, and they clearly do.
The most heartening fact in this story is that the deal seems driven with great enthusiasm by the CEO. Furthermore, this CEO sounds convinced of what I’ve been saying for 15 years: email overload imposes a severe toll on the company’s ability to succeed. With such role modeling and leadership, Atos Origin should have a good chance at making this drastic change a success.
I received a letter (yes, on paper) from Audible.com. I am a happy customer of their audio book service; I pay a fixed modest sum monthly, and receive one “credit” each month, which embodies the right to download one book into my iPod. Their letter tried to sell me on the idea of getting onto their “Email Network”. In other words, grant them permission to send me promotional emails.
I can’t complain – they were kind (and law abiding) enough to ask my permission, after all. But I read the letter and was struck by one of the “benefits” they claimed this arrangement would confer on me. It was “Credit notification – know as soon as your credit arrives“. In other words, they would send me an email when I get each new monthly credit. Which would be very useful if we used an arcane and complex calendar system like the ancient Maya priests had; but with the Gregorian calendar, the new credits arrive once a month, regular as clockwork, and wait in my account until I use them. No mystery. No need to be notified. I can figure out when the month begins without adding to my busy Inbox a new stream of useless mail.
We have spammers for that, after all…
When I was a ham radio operator, I could communicate with far away hobbyists using either Voice transmission or Morse Code. You’d think Voice would be the faster means of conversation; after all, the spoken word is faster than the dots and dashes of even the fastest telegraph operator. And yet both modes had their charm – and both took about the same time, because with Morse, we’d use abbreviations and keep the conversation focused and terse in a way not necessary with the luxury of voice. Thus, the question of which mode is faster was far from settled…
The same situation exists when we compare Voice telephony and Email. This was made clear to me during a lecture on Information Overload that I gave this week. I was discussing the interesting experiments done with “No Email Day” in various companies – encouraging people to use face to face or telephony instead of email during the chosen weekday. One attendee raised her hand and asked whether this would not add to the overload, because people would engage in lengthy conversations instead of brief emails. Her thought was of shooting off a short email and forgetting it, whereas a conversation might drag on much longer.
This struck me as interesting, because I often teach the opposite lesson – that a short phone call can often resolve an issue that could degenerate into an endless ping-pong of emails; that is, voice can be faster, not slower. The scenario here is that people engage in a lengthy exchange of emails until someone picks up the phone, and puts an end to whatever is causing the thread to continue. Direct synchronous conversation, with its much richer spectrum of nuances, can remove ambiguity, clear away misunderstandings, and force people to get down to making a decision on the spot.
So – which is faster? Obviously, it varies – depending on the context and on people’s habits. Perhaps the bottom line is that what matters is not the medium, but the people – those who are focused and effective will know how to apply any medium for rapid achievement of the desired results at work.
Outside work, by contrast, I definitely recommend conversation, preferably over a good cup of coffee…
