Noise

Email bites back

For a while now I’ve been of the view that a long term goal of any organisation is to reduce massively the volume of email it generates. My reasons are various and range from breeding a culture of communication dependency to swamping employees with unmanageable volumes of information to locking organisational knowledge in inaccessible places. Coincidentally, today’s Times carries a great article about this very subject and suggests that the heyday of email may well be passing.

But sifting through employee comments made in a recent communication survey, email was most certainly biting back. The client in question has put significant effort into developing and encouraging the use of various collaborative tools and whilst those are gaining traction, it has created a more complex environment that presents employees with a potentially bewildering array of communication choices. Consequently, a quiet but discernible voice requesting that the Inbox once again become the communication portal supreme was clearly audible.

It’s been a while since I heard anyone suggest that more email might lead to better communication so I’ve given some thought to how I (and my client) might respond and arrived at three thoughts.

• Change takes time. It’s a fact of life that people adopt at different rates, whatever the change. This means we have to handle any shift away from email in the same way we would any other; by managing the change curve, finding and exploiting early adopters and above all making the change meaningful and of benefit to people.
• Clarify channel roles. My colleague Alan Richardson is writing a series of posts about the roles for different channels so I’ll leave that to him. But what’s obvious to me is that we have to be very clear about the role of any new channel we introduce and ensure people engage with it. We also need to be ruthless about switching off channels we no longer require or whose purpose has changed.
• Transform the role of the Inbox. I think it highly unlikely that today’s workforce will abandon the Inbox as the portal supreme although their offspring might. So instead of looking at alternatives to it, what about seeking to change its role from repository (where my information is stored) to navigator (the compass which directs me to the information and interaction I want).

It’s not an exhaustive list and I’d love to extend it further. So let me know what you think and indeed, whether you agree!

Recently, we’ve been talking to a lot of people about their hopes for Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Something that may surprise heavy proponents of social media and collaboration technologies was the number of tech-savvy users who were less than enthhusiastic. Whilst these hesitators often valued the tools, they all feared an over-proliferation of channels and noise. This prompted me to ask myself: how many different ways can people can reach me, today, for a conversation?

Actually, I began by mapping my situation in 1999, looking specifically at routes to communication. These are more granular than a channel; for example: instant messaging (IM) may be a channel for communicators, but if I have accounts with 2 different IM providers and contacts on both, those are 2 different routes to conversation for me. The distinction is important because at a practical level those are 2 different services I must log into and monitor (however passively).

Some simple rules for the diagrams: I focused only on routes to conversation and ignored broadcast media, the press etc. I also allowed duplication by virtue of device (if I could get email from the same account on my work and home desktops, that counted as 2 routes). Then I colour-coded everything: blue for work-only, green for mixture of work and personal, and orange for personal-only. Here are the results for me in 1999, when I was a project manager:

NB You can view the above diagram in full-screen (this will open a new window). Zoom in / out buttons will be on the bottom-right of the new window.

Back in 1999 I had around 25 different routes to conversation. That surprised me (I had guessed at 5 or 6). Here are some ways that breaks down:

Three quick observations and recollections:

• Most innovation was happening at work and then being adopted for personal use, thus the high proportion of mixed-use routes.
• Instant messaging was in its infancy, which is reflected in the bias towards asynchronous routes such as email or faxes, which do not require participants in a conversation to be present (physically or virtually) at the same time.
• Mine was an immobile world: most routes were tethered to desktops and physical connections.

However complicated my 1999 set-up seemed then, it looks primitive (but attractively simple) when compared to the picture in 2009. In a decade my routes to conversation have almost tripled to 72. For the map below I used the same rules; the only tweak was that I included bookmarked conversations and IRC channels in which I participate at least daily:

NB You can view the above diagram in full-screen (this will open a new window). Zoom in / out buttons will be on the bottom-right of the new window.

The true number of routes to conversation is probably higher, but I excluded rarely used social networks. Either way, that’s a staggering increase. Here are some ways that breaks down:

Three more quick observations and thoughts:

• Innovation has shifted to the consumer space: the routes I have as a private citizen are often superior to those at work; my proportion of mixed-use routes may also be inflated because as a consultant I have more control over my systems than a typical corporate employee.
• Synchronous routes of all sorts have overtaken asynchronous ones, although the majority are text-based and not as intrusive as voice calls – allowing me to multi-task (there is a case to be argued that IM is actually semi-synchronous).
• The mobile-centric future which we envisaged when I worked at Vodafone a few years ago is definitely begining to take shape, although there’s still a way to go.

So is my communications world too noisy? Suprisingly, not yet. However, what these maps do not show is the relative usage of each route – that’s a really different picture. In a follow-up post I’d like to write about that, as well as how and why I haven’t (yet) fallen victim to noise, but for now I just wanted to share these illustrations and this thought:

Rewinding to my earlier definition of routes to conversation (as opposed to channels), I’d suggest that this is something communicators should acknowledge more. Talking about a channels mix made perfect sense when there was an almost one-to-one relationship between official channels and how an employee interfaced with her/his organisation, but as collaborative functionality proliferates the reality for the individual becomes more complex. And the extra twist is that many of these new routes are beyond the direct control of communicators.

More on this later, but for the moment I would really like to hear from other communicators: today, how many ways can people have a conversation with you?