My Writings. My Thoughts.
Command and Control Isn’t Dead – It’s All That’s Left
// November 24th, 2009 // Comments Off // Information Overload
Writing in the Economist, Carol Bartz of Yahoo suggests that “the online era has made command-and-control management as dead as dial-up internet” because distribution of information can no longer be managed in a traditional hierarchical fashion. In her management blog, Lucy Kellaway of the FT counters this by making the observation – with which I agree - that, in today’s organisations, people are responding to emails from their bosses and ignoring everything else. This behaviour often extends to the compulsive checking of BlackBerrys at all hours, principally to see if the boss or other high-status person has sent a message.
Bartz blurs the internal flow of communication with the external “deluge” of information and rumour that also has to be dealt with but she does not really tackle how you manage the internal issue. I would argue this is one of the leader’s most important roles – to stop the information overload productivity drain and ensure that people are engaging with one another effectively.
v3.co.uk Delivers 3-Day Summit on Information Overload
// November 13th, 2009 // Comments Off // Information Overload
On Tuesday, I was invited to be part of the expert panel discussion that launched the three-day summit on Information Overload run by v3.co.uk (previously known us vnnunet).
Given the nature of the audience, the summit as a whole has a technical emphasis and is sponsored by IBM. Having said that, there was a willingness on the panel I took part in to discuss the behavioural issues as well. If you have an hour to spare, you can watch the discussion here. For my part, I laid out how I felt organisations and individuals were being affected by the three main threads of information overload: email overload, digital interruptions at work and mobility (e.g. BlackBerry).
There is a wealth of other video debates and articles on v3′s site which is particularly rich in technical aspects of information overload such as storage and data centres. A comment article by Ian Williams, however, is a good expression of the view – which I share – that this is more about management than anything else.
Information Overload Summit – Tuesday November 10th
// November 5th, 2009 // Comments Off // Information Overload
On Tuesday I am off to Incisive Media’s Soho studio to be part of an expert panel in a live web broadcast at 11am; this event kicks off the V3 (pka vnu.net) Information Overload Summit which lasts for three days. On the panel with me are representatives from companies including IBM, The National Computing Centre and Freeform Dynamics. Much of the thrust of the summit will be about technology so I am looking forward to introducing the human element into the equation.
Dopamine and the Brain’s Hunger for Novelty
// October 30th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // BlackBerry
A really interesting post on Huffington by University of Texas neuroscientist Russell Poldrack throws a lot of light for me on the acitivity in the brain that drives so-called “addiction” to BlackBerrys and other PDAs.
Poldrack makes the point that dopamine is widely mis-conceived as a “feel-good” neurotransmitter when it is really a “gimme more” neurotransmitter. He cites some research involving rats are turned into slackers by blocking their dopamine.
Why should getting an email activate dopamine in the brain? My take-out from Poldrack’s post is that it’s about novelty. As he says himself, “from an evolutionary standpoint, we don’t want to spend all of our time and energy noticing the many things around us that don’t change from day to day.” There are also compelling evolutionary reasons for us being rewarded for finding new information; in the ancestral environment this might have identified a source of food or important gossip about someone in our social group.
So each time the BlackBerry flashes green or buzzes, we’re responding to the natural urge to see what’s new as it might be important. It invariably isn’t but that surge of dopamine can be very powerful…
Lily Allen’s a “Neo-Luddite” – Are You?
// October 23rd, 2009 // Comments Off // Information Overload
British pop-star Lily has reportedly turned her back on Twitter and Facebook and disposed of her Blackberry, PC and Macbook; all after her boyfriend demanded she choose between him and Twitter. Apparently, her last post on Twitter was: “I am a neo-Luddite. Goodbye.”
Clearly, some of this all-pervasive use of the latest communications technology has got out of control. But I would not consider myself a Luddite and have always used a BlackBerry quite happily. The key is knowing when to switch it off. Information overload can be reduced or eliminated with the right tools and disciplines.
Speaking of Luddites, I just finished reading Neil Postman’s prescient “Amusing Ourselves to Death” written in 1985. In it he writes: “We must not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite position.”
My guess is that Lily Allen won’t be that concerned…
BlackBerry Rudeness Reaches New Levels
// October 9th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // BlackBerry
I was struck by this article by Jill Haney on cincinnati.com as it tells the anecdote of two young salesmen having a meeting with a prospective customer. Since they had a well-rehearsed two-handed pitch, while one of them was speaking the other one was checking his BlackBerry for messages. When they switched, the other rep checked his iPhone. Haney also tells of a job candidate that went through an interview with his bluetooth earpiece still in place.
I have long been accustomed to the phenomenon of BlackBerry use by executives in meetings either with their peers or with people that are in some way lower in status (junior managers, suppliers etc.). What makes this anecdote interesting is that it suggests that the behaviour is now so entrenched among some young business people (the sales reps are described as “twenty-something”) that they perceive no rudeness or lack of civility. Presumably, they thought it quite natural to check for messages even in front of someone they were trying to sell to.
Haney explains this as “addiction” – personally, I don’t see addiction as a helpful way of approaching this behaviour but that’s for another post…
France Telecom CFO Blames Stress on Email
// September 30th, 2009 // Comments Off // Information Overload
It was refreshing to read the candid comments of France Telecom CFO Gervais Pellissier on round-the-clock emailing which were covered by Reuters. This got some dramatic coverage in some press reports as FT is experiencing a spate of suicides, some at company premises. While no one, including Pellissier, attributes the suicides directly to email, he does acknowledge that employees have more troubled lives than was the case before technology caused work to bleed so pervasively into personal life: “That is sprobably something we’ve not undertaken,” he says, “not only at France Telecom but, it’s more a global society issue, the impact of the new ways of working on personal behaviour.”
I could not agree more. As to what to do about it, I think it is entirely possible for organisations to reverse this trend, firstly by understanding what psychological drivers cause us to use new technology in the way we do and secondly, by putting in place organisational codes of practice that are adhered to with discipline.
Can we Innovate Ourselves out of Information Overload?
// September 22nd, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Information Overload
Paul Hemp’s excellent article in the September 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review, titled “Death by Information Overload”, has been followed by a couple of other pieces that include a number of technological approaches to the issue.
Philip Delves Broughton in yesterday’s Evening Standard cites Hemp’s piece and goes on to offer a few suggestions of his own. One that I particularly like the sound of is “Dark Room for Windows” which recreates the ancient experience of working on word-processing software and having nothing else running on the PC – like a blank piece of paper in the typewriter. That’s exactly how I started out as a student writing software user guides for a US bank in my holidays in their London office with just a PC on my desk and only a fixed phone and the physical post to interrupt me. Mark Gibbs in Network World offers Gist, something that aggregates email with RSS feeds, mails from LinkedIn, Facebook etc.
I am less convinced by Leechblock which you can set up to admonish you for spending too long on Facebook. With some of these new services, there is a sense that, like a hopeless herion addict, we need yet another drug to ease us out of our addiction. Personally, while I do use Xobni to make my inbox a bit easier to manage, I am not a huge enthusiast for heaping more technology on top of the surfeit of channels and devices that we already have. We can, after all, simply decide that we are not going to allow all these things to distract us – after all, is using Dark Room not the same as turning off all alerts and simply exercising our free will and focusing on a specific task?
For me this all boils down to understanding human psychology and its collision with a work environment that abounds with new channels which are increasingly location and time independent. Yet more technology has its uses but the route out of information overload is more likely to be found in the old-fashioned (and free) virtues of self-discipline and focus.
Senator on Blackberry during Obama Speech
// September 10th, 2009 // Comments Off // BlackBerry
Last night, President Obama delivered an important speech to the Senate on his controversial plans for healthcare reforms. Commentators including the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson have pointed out that the President’s job was made easier by the rudeness of some of his political opponents, one of whom shouted out “You lie!” at one point.
But it is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor that Robinson singles out for using his Blackberry during the speech. This behaviour is now commonplace for attendees of meetings and presentations when they should be paying attention to what’s being said in the room. I am reminded of research conducted by Glenn Wilson of Kings College, London University, who found that while nine out of 10 of his reseach subjects agreed that answering messages during face-to-face meetings or office conferences was rude, a third nonetheless felt that this had become “acceptable and seen as a sign of diligence and efficiency”.
How can something be perceived as both rude and acceptable at the same time? It surely has something to do with the perceived importance of the individual’s own messages and emails outweighing the possibility of social censure for rudeness. The persistent use of mobiles on “quiet” carriages in trains is an example of this.
There may be a groundswell forming against behaviour such as that of Eric Cantor – Luke Johnson writing recently in the Daily Telegraph announced that he was banning the use of Blackberries in all board meetings that he chaired. Good for him.
Is it Rude to Play Solitaire in Meetings?
// September 7th, 2009 // Comments Off // Meetings
Solitaire is, as it’s name suggests, a game intended to be played alone. This week, a number of legislators in Connecticut have been embarrassed by the circulation of a picture of them playing solitaire on their computers when they were in session and should have been legislating. Busted. See the photo on CrunchGear.
If, like me, you’ve attended conferences and seminars and watched delegates do emails and other things on their laptops, you really wonder why they are there in the first place. Leaving aside the lost notion of showing any courtesy to the speaker or chair of the meeting or session, research shows that dual tasking in this way overloads the brain and reduces our cognitive ability. Come to think of it, it’s probably not too good for your solitaire…
