Grimsdyke Consulting

Tetris for Trauma Victims? – Implications for Multitasking

// March 29th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload

Friday’s Telegraph had a really interesting piece on some research by a team at Oxford University – the original research paper is well worth a read.

The team took 40 guinea pigs and subjected them to a harrowing 12-minute video of death and injury – this is apparently a standard analog for post-traumatic stress disorder. After a 30 minute break, half sat quietly while the other half…. …played Tetris. All kept a diary for a week and the Tetris players had significantly fewer flashbacks than the control group.

Why? Because the brain has only “limited visuospatial working memory resources” to consolidate experiences as memories and Tetris is, apparently, a great way of soaking up those resources at the expense of other – in this case harmful –  cognitive activities. So, as an alternative to drugs or cognitive behaviour therapy, this is being viewed as a potential treatment for PTSD sufferers.

But turn the idea on its head for a minute. What intrigues me about this is the brain’s powerful ability to constrain its own activity if multiple demands are made on its resources. For me it’s another powerful argument against attempting to multitask.

Microsoft markets Bing as “cutting through information overload”

// March 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload

Interesting positioning from Microsoft for Bing, its search engine to rival Google. According to Marketing Week, here’s how UK MD Ashley Highfield describes the TV advertising campaign they are launching in the UK this week:

“The ad campaign brings to life the concept of Bing as a decision engine, a tool that both cuts through the information overload and offers a new search experience. We’re confident that this will help grow our user base, offering advertisers an alternative search solution.”

As someone who watches almost no commercial TV (and what I do watch is recorded so I can fast-forward through the ads), I am genuinely interested in seeing this ad. It’s the first time since Xerox’s 2007 viral video that I can think of a technology vendor using “information overload” as part of the selling proposition in an above-the-line campaign. In fact, the only other instance I can think of is Xobni in their sales material for the enterprise version of their inbox plug-in.

Is this a cynical exercise on Microsoft’s part – tapping into the information overload zeitgeist – or is the company genuinely trying to demonstrate it is dealing with the issue? Certainly, Outlook 2010 has a number of new features that will help customers manage email better. If this is a trend, it is a welcome one. With past innovations such as the red flag and four different ways of letting you know a new email had arrived, there is some lost ground to recover on this one…

“Shorter working week inevitable” – really?

// February 18th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload

The New Economics Foundation put out a release on Saturday calling for a 21 hour week. Part of the rationale is that this would help address “lasting damage to the economy caused by the banking crisis”. What this utopian suggestion forgets is that the banking crisis was partly caused by homeowners mortgaging themselves to the hilt. That issue has not gone away so I can’t see hard-pressed homeowners voluntarily cutting their hours in order to help “distribute paid work” a bit more evenly or reduce their carbon footprint. Most need all the paid work they can get.

NEF is right in two areas – the country is becoming increasingly polarised and those in work are working ever longer hours. It reports that since 1981, two-person households have added 6 hours to their work week. As everybody will be asked to do more with less, this trend will continue upwards.

It is odd that nobody talks about the “Leisure Society” any longer. When the Edwardians stopped factory work on Saturday afternoons, professional football took off. Saturday working for manual workers stopped altogether in the 1950s when Churchill seriously thought he might be able to introduce a 4-day week for the working man. In 1981, when NEF base their research, I was a schoolboy working in a warehouse near Moorgate during my summer holidays and remember the foreman telling me authoritatively that we would all get Friday afternoons off before long.

So what happened? Firstly, those manufacturing jobs aren’t there anymore. We are increasingly becoming a nation of knowledge workers – the FT on Monday mentioned an IDC report which suggests that in 5 years’ time, only 10 percent of EU jobs will not require IT skills. (That warehouse in Moorgate is now a financial business of some sort – I walked past it the other day and a fleet of drivers in silver Mercs was waiting outside).

What’s happened over the last 20 years is that knowledge workers have begun to use new communications technologies such as email, mobiles, BlackBerrys etc. Paradoxically, we use these tools in such a way as to wind up working longer hours and carry our work increasingy into our home lives.

Taming Technology and doing more with less

// February 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Information Overload

Stefan Stern wrote a really excellent piece in last week’s FT in which he observes that “more with less” may become a management mantra. He makes the point that the real challenge is taming technology, establishing boundaries for its use and recognising that we will not achieve more with less if we are “always on”, 24/7.

I love his anecdote about someone posting on her Facebook page: “So much to do, so little time”.. Only to receive a prompt post reading: “Get off Facebook then.”

Read the article here.

“The Stress of Higher Status”

// February 2nd, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload

An article in the December 2009 issue of the American Sociological Review by Scott Schieman, Paul Glavin and Melissa Milkie analyses research conducted on US workers to establish the relationship between the extent of bleed of work into non-work life and the circumstances of the worker. They have found a “paradox” that has been apparent for some time i.e. that the more senior you are, the greater the bleed, in spite of also having greater control over a number of aspects of work. They coin the expression “the stress of higher status”.

The definitions of status are pretty soft and include social indicators such as having a degree so the organisational indicators you might hope for are not there. Also, the data is from 2005. However, it is good to see this issue quantified.

I am not sure how you could research it but my suspicion is that this level of “stress” is self-inflicted – the more senior we are, the more likely we are to work at all hours because, now that most other indicators of seniority have evaported, we have come to equate activity with status. If you don’t agree, seat yourself in the business lounge at any airport and watch…

The Death of Courtesy – Too busy to respond

// January 15th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload

I am really struck by Peter Bregman’s post on the Harvard Business Review site. He talks about a friend pitching for a piece of work and getting no response to follow-up voicemails or messages. This appears to be business as usual for a lot of people these days.

Peter asks (via email) the opinion of his brother, a film producer who gets 400+ emails a day. I think the response is really interesting:

“If Sam [the person being chased] has 400 emails to answer a day, 200 of which are crisis emails that he’s prioritizing and answering at, say, 2 AM on a holiday night — LIKE THIS EMAIL — then it’s not Sam’s obligation to write 200 more 30-second emails to people who Sam doesn’t need to write to. Alex [the person chasing] just needs to wait.”

I wonder about the nature of the 200 “crisis” emails? What’s happening in Haiti is a crisis. This sentiment is not untypical of a number of senior corporate people that I know who wind themselves up into a frenzy of self-dramatizing email activity in which nothing matters beyond the next incoming message. Of course, there’s no point bugging people like that – would you really want to work with them in the first place?

Groom Updates Facebook Status… During Wedding Ceremony

// December 8th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Information Overload

I was appalled when I first saw the headline about Dana Hanna on MSNBC. But if you watch the brief video of the ceremony (which he posted on YouTube) it’s actually quite sweet and everyone, including the bride and minister, appear to take it with good humour. I’m even prepared to believe there is a hint of irony in what he did.

Nevertheless, on an occasion where you are, in theory, surrounded – physically – by all your nearest and dearest, the electronic gossip wires still appear to exert a powerful pull. For Generation Y types, what is visible to the outside world digitally is possibly of more importance than what your immediate circle of family and friends might be experiencing. In terms of scale, it almost undoubtedly is since 350,000 people and counting have seen the video clip. But take the same behviour and put it in an organisational context and we have a partial explanation for the so-called “addiction” to BlackBerrys. That message probably isn’t something that affects your reputation in the digital universe – but it might be, and you won’t know until you check.

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.