Today I was writing my monthly Newsletter (this always seems to slide to the last day of the month 
) and as I was re-reading it – I always do, aware of Murphy lurking in the shadows – I noted this passage, relating to choosing a video conferencing system:
Talk to your IT people about your options; but remember that the key thing is user perception and willingness. You may want to raise the subject in a group or staff meeting, and identify what the best usage model would be in the context of their collaboration needs. Then work with IT to implement a setup that would benefit these needs.
It occurred to me suddenly that this advice, which seemed to me so obvious when I penned it, was the exact opposite of what tends to happen in reality in organizations. The way things work with an introduction of innovative IT tools, it is IT that decides what to deploy, and asking the users in advance is seldom practiced. In fact, the innovators and change agents that pull companies forward in adopting new tools tend to decide what would be a cool capability, and they proceed to instigate pilots and demonstrations that will convince management (and IT) to deploy this capability. This is certainly what I saw in the matter of Videoconferencing tools.
In a sense, this is the way to go: often the end users can’t be bothered to realize the benefits of the new technology until they see it in action. Been there: I’ve followed this path many a time. But it’s a pity, because if you were to ask the users up front what technology they need and what its attributes should be to make them use it, you could avoid the many cases where a new technology fails to “catch”. Been there too…
So: ask your users, and involve them as early as you can in your thinking process about the new IT tools you want to deploy. By Involve, I mean more than surveys: add user reps to any team or task force you have that will affect their computing environment. You will learn much, avoid mistakes, and as a bonus have champions eager to help introduce the new capabilities to their peers.
In the film Her majesty Mrs. Brown, we see a grieving Queen Victoria refusing to return to her duties in the years following the death of her husband, Prince Albert. The film has much else to recommend it, but as an Information Overload practitioner I couldn’t help but enjoy the moment when the Queen – played by Dame Judi Dench – angrily exclaims “my ministers send me letters to read – boxes and boxes of letters!”
This was before email, before Facebook, before our BlackBerry-distracted modern existence; and yet even then Management involved Information Overload – and even then, senior managers took a major share of this problem. Even the mightiest manager of the land, describing the tedium and stress of her royal job, saw the “boxes and boxes” of messages (and, naturally, the tasks they embodied) as a major affliction.
Sure, it’s only a movie… but it managed to capture the moment quite well! 
Our desire for extreme mobility is both enabled by and a motive of the impressive progress in powerful mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and their clones. We can now read our email messages anytime, anywhere, on these tiny marvels. But there is a price – because the small form factor is inherently unsuited to reading many of those messages.
This was pointed out by an attendee at one of my information overload sessions. This guy, a manager at a hi-tech company, was very familiar with the use of handhelds to communicate; and he pointed out that a consequence of the use of these little wonders is that the quality of the interaction has suffered a good deal. This is because when you receive a message of moderate or larger size on a PC, you typically read or scan the entire body text, check out the attachments if needed, then make an informed reply. On a BlackBerry, by contrast, the tiny screen causes people to read only the top of the message, ignore the attachments, and shoot off a quick reply without having absorbed the full message with all its content and nuances. These messages, he said, are very easy to identify as being from a handheld device – they clearly transmit the fact that the sender hasn’t read the message in any depth before replying.
Of course, there is one case where this is acceptable: when the exchange is of terse one-liners, as in “Can we push the meeting to 5PM?” – “Yes“. In these cases, being able to communicate on the go is very valuable and the medium is well suited to the message. Not so with longer messages, which end up requiring further exchanges for clarification, adding to the overall information overload.
Perhaps we need a separate mailing paradigm for handheld and computer – use the handheld only without attachments and in short bursts of communication, and reserve replies to longer messages for the PC… but of course, the temptation – some say, addiction – of cleaning out one’s email in real time is too strong to allow such distinctions to catch on… 
I was giving a workshop on Information Overload and an attendee proposed that email is more effective when you precede it with a phone call. His thinking was this: if you first discuss the matter at hand on the phone, and only then send an email to confirm or flesh out details, then there will be no lack of clarity because both parties are aligned. This means less back-and-forth emails to seek clarification or correct misunderstandings.
Now, this actually makes a lot of sense, and in fact I use this system when I need to broach a subject or a request that may meet with resistance – first do the delicate introduction by phone, then promise to send materials to help the other party decide. But is it a good idea for more ordinary communications?
This may seem to many to be ineffective; a phone call can take longer than tapping out an email, so why not use the faster method? One can always pick up the phone to do damage control if the email is misunderstood. And yet, this may not take into account the total, cumulative time of the first email and the subsequent ones that may result.
What’s worse, I have no doubt that many people prefer email because they want to avoid clarity; there are many indications of the use of email to put a barrier between sender and recipient, as when someone delegates an action item or just passes it along with the hope and intent that the recipient will be stuck with it. To such people, email is a tool of choice. But to those of us who actually want to collaborate with our coworkers to the benefit of the organization or the mission we share, paving the email message’s way with a preliminary call is often the preferable choice…
What do you think?
