Reclaiming Conversation (30 page)

Gchat makes Jason's group seem “on topic” even as their minds wander. But it doesn't leave room for what I've said I want when my students collaborate. I'll call it intellectual serendipity. It may happen when someone tells a joke. Or daydreams and comes back with an idea that goes in a new direction. None of this is necessarily efficient. But so many of our best ideas are born this way, in conversations that take a turn. I want my students to have this experience.

But given an opportunity to collaborate, my students glide toward the virtual. Some tell me that anything else, regardless of the merits, is totally impractical in today's college environment. Everyone is too “busy.” I can't help but think that talking in person is one of the things they should be busy with.

In my interviews with college students, most insist that they will
know
when they have to schedule a face-to-face meeting. They will
know
if something comes up that they can't take care of over Gchat. But my experience is that you really don't know when you are going to have an important conversation. You have to show up for many conversations that feel inefficient or boring to be there for the conversation that changes your mind.

When the economist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize, he was, like every winner of the prize, asked to write an official Nobel
biographical statement. One section of his biography is a tribute to his late colleague Amos Tversky. Kahneman explained that the ideas for which he won the prize grew out of their time spent working together. In the end, his Nobel biography
amounted to a love letter to conversation
.

We spent hours each day, just talking. When Amos's first son, Oren, then fifteen months old, was told that his father was at work, he volunteered the comment “Aba talk Danny.” We were not only working, of course—we talked of everything under the sun, and got to know each other's mind almost as well as our own. We could (and often did) finish each other's sentences and complete the joke that the other had wanted to tell, but somehow we also kept surprising each other.

Here we see conversation as not only an intellectual engine but the means by which colleagues were able to cross boundaries that are usually only dissolved by love. Conversation led to intellectual communion. When I explain my current project, people often say, “You're so right to study conversation. For communication, it has the broadest bandwidth—it's the best way to exchange information.” Kahneman and Tversky teach us that while this may be true, it is far from the whole story. Conversation is a kind of intimacy. You don't just get more information. You get different information. The bandwidth argument leaves out this essential.

What also is striking in Kahneman's Nobel address is his description of the pace of his work with Tversky. In 1974, Kahneman and Tversky wrote an article for
Science
that went on to be
one of the founding documents
of behavioral economics. It took them a year, working four to six hours a day. Kahneman writes, “On a good day we would mark a net advance of a sentence or two.” So the people who support conversation because they think it will make things go faster (“Don't email me, it's faster just to come to my desk and ask me!”) are seeing only a small part of what makes face-to-face conversation powerful. For Kahneman and Tversky, conversation wasn't there to go faster, but to go deeper.

College should be a time to invest in teaching students about the
long-term value of open-ended conversations, but in today's environment, it is hard to argue the value of conversation for learning because it is hard to measure its value with productivity metrics, especially in the short term.

Adam Falk, president of Williams College, has given it a try. He argued that what really matters in a college education is learning “to write effectively, argue persuasively, solve problems creatively,” and “adapt and learn independently.” He and his colleagues investigated where these skills blossom. It turns out that they correlate with the amount of time students spend with professors—
not virtual contact, but live contact
. Given Falk's findings, it is painful to hear faculty complain that
students don't show up for office hours
.

T
he year after MacVicar Day was dedicated to educational technology, it turned its attention to mentoring. Instead of a packed auditorium, the hall was half full. Considering student-faculty relationships is less flashy than presenting new tools. In the mentoring discussion, faculty talked about students standing them up at office hours and not coming to events designed to bring faculty and students together. The year before, everyone was excited to talk about apps that might fix everything. It's tougher to confront problems for which there is no clear solution. And mentoring is one of them.
Students avoid faculty
in large part because students are anxious about the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation.

Zvi, a college junior from New York City, explains why he prefers email to a live visit with his professors. He is not comfortable with conversation and he doesn't see office hours as a time to practice. Here is Zvi on his policy of strategically hiding from the people who might have the most to teach him: “I'm much better emailing professors than [seeing them] in person. I find that I don't represent myself well. . . . I am not
natural with serious conversation [in person] yet. I'd prefer to be able to do that in email.” He says that in email, he can edit and the editing will be invisible.

When asked when he might learn to have serious, in-person conversations, Zvi admits, “That's a good question.” He feels it's a skill he'll need to develop soon, not just to talk to professors, “but also for people I'm hoping to work for.” He thinks that he might try to talk with professors in his final year of college. But then he considers the reality of actually sitting down with a professor and despairs: “It's too late for that. I don't know—when do you grow up? It is a question.”

When students tell me that they want to email me rather than see me in person, they usually say that it is only in email that they can best explain their ideas. And so, they explain, an email from them will put me in the best position to improve their ideas. They cast our meeting in transactional terms and make a judgment that the online transaction will be of a higher quality. Zvi, too, uses a transactional language to describe what he might get out of office hours. He has ideas; the professors have information that will improve them. But there's more to gain from a visit to a professor than improving your ideas, although this is certainly to be desired. You get to be with someone who is making an effort to understand you. You form an intellectual friendship. You may feel the support of an adult and of your institution.

When students are afraid to talk, they prefer to think that office hours are for a transfer of information that can happen by email. And with little or no experience of face-to-face conversation with faculty members, students don't have the data that might convince them that conversation offers more than information.

Zvi admits that he stays away from professors because he doesn't feel grown-up enough to talk to them. His professors might be able to help him with this, but not because they'll give him information. Studies of mentoring show that what makes a difference, what can change the life of a student, is
the presence of one strong figure
who shows an interest, who, the student would say, “gets me.” You need a conversation for that.

Is This a Meeting?

My younger colleagues at the firm, the young associates, are pilots in their cockpits. They assemble their multiple technologies—a laptop, two iPhones, an iPad. And then they put their earphones on. Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits. And then they are isolated. You wouldn't want to disturb the pilot in his cockpit. You wouldn't want to disturb this lawyer in his bubble. It's not how it used to be. . . . It used to be that associates were available to be interrupted . . . but in a good way. You could talk to them. They were there to be worked, very hard, to be engaged and mentored. Now, the feeling is that you are only getting the most you can out of them if you leave them alone in their cockpits.

—A SENIOR PARTNER AT A BOSTON LAW FIRM

A
udrey Lister, a partner at
Alan Johnson Miller and Associates
, has worked at this large Chicago law firm for more than twenty years. She joined the firm straight out of law school. Lister talks about her early days at AJM, when she and her colleague Sam Berger were just starting out together. The two young associates would knock on each other's office doors and visit all the time. Lister says that this kind of close relationship made “work feel like family.” But the meetings with Berger were not purely social: “Business was done in those
meetings, exciting ideas were hatched, ideas for clients.” Together, she says, “we discovered the nuances of the law.”

These days, informal meetings are not as frequent. Lister says, “Young lawyers feel they can accomplish more if they sit and work in front of their screens.” People get together for catch-up meetings that are prearranged by text or email. But Lister doesn't think that these scheduled meetings are doing the work of her impromptu chats with Berger. Once you have an agenda, she thinks, you are not as likely to play with ideas. For that, she says, “You need a conversation that is truly open-ended.”

H
er early days at AJM, Lister recalls, were marked by many conversations without an agenda. There was the time with Berger, of course, but there were also long lunches and late nights in the cafeteria. The young lawyers would call out for food as they worked on cases. Lister remembers their conversations as wide-ranging. Now, she observes that junior associates tend to work alone in their offices even when they are all working late. Everyone is at a screen. Lister isn't even sure they are working. “They may just be taking some personal catch-up time, some quiet downtime alone with their email.” These days, when we think of downtime and reducing stress, we don't usually think of relaxing with peers but of getting some control over the crowd that the net brings to us.

Lister remarks that the new office practices (fewer informal meetings, less time in the cafeteria, more time alone at screens) impact her firm's sense of community. Speaking of the lawyers she began with, Lister says, “We helped each other. We were competing but we became devoted to this firm. That doesn't happen anymore. You never used to see partners being hired away from our firm. You see that now.”

She is right in her intuitions about the business impact of time spent in conversation. Studies show a
clear link between sociability and
employee productivity
. But these days at AJM, screens are getting in the way of sociability—and courtesy. It is common practice for lawyers, even at the most senior level, to keep phones and tablets out during meetings. Lister comments that she was recently asked to give a presentation on intrafirm communications, and “I gave my presentation to a room of people who on and off were texting and emailing.” The irony did not escape her. She had been asked to talk about better communication and few were listening. “It made me think,” she says, “‘Why did I bother?'”

Lister does all she can to encourage her firm's young associates to meet face-to-face. For example, she asks them to join her in her office when she has important calls with clients. She wants them to hear her negotiate, to learn how to shape a conversation. Lister says she will often put a client call on mute so that she can talk to her junior associates and explain her strategy. For her junior colleagues, sitting in on one of these calls is a master class as well as an opportunity to build closer relationships with her and each other. But increasingly, the junior associates tell her they would rather listen to the call in their offices. Lister knows why: If they are alone, they can listen to the call and continue to work at their screens. They will miss the face-to-face conversations but they'll be able to multitask.

No longer surprised when her invitations are turned down, Lister recognizes that young lawyers believe that what maximizes their value is multitasking at their computers. This means that they set aside far less time to talk.

At AJM, the tendency to avoid face-to-face meetings now cuts across generations. Many partners no longer entertain clients by taking them out to meals or sporting events. At the holiday season, instead of having dinner with a client to celebrate a good year, a chance for a conversation, the lawyers are in a last-minute rush to buy a gift, something expensive. Younger associates (of course, with fewer funds available to them) also hold back from entertaining. Lister notes that to be fair, clients hold back as well. She says, “Everyone—including clients—prefers to send emails rather than be on the phone, prefers to send emails rather than go out to lunch.”

For a time, the partners at AJM were divided as to whether all of this online activity was the future of legal practice or simply bad practice. Finally, the firm got curious about the relationship of face-to-face meetings and money. It turned out that the lawyers who spent more time with clients face-to-face brought in the most business. Now, how much lawyers socialize is part of their performance review. And now, Lister says, “people think twice when they put off having lunch with clients so they can work alone at their screens.”

Lister's firm is not alone in recognizing the power of face-to-face conversation. Ben Waber, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, designs technology to study collaboration. With MIT Media Lab professor Alex Pentland, Waber developed a tool he calls a “sociometric badge.” The badge allows researchers to track employees' movements through an office as well as a range of measures about their conversations: who they talk to, for how long, on what topic, with what pace of speech, with what tone of voice, and how often they interrupt each other. The badges can analyze intimate aspects of conversation such as body language, interest and excitement, and the amount of influence people have on each other.

Waber quantified the previously unquantifiable, and his results were stunning. To sum up a large number of studies, face-to-face conversation leads to higher productivity and
is also associated with reduced stress
. Call centers are more productive when people take breaks together; software teams produce programs with fewer bugs when they talk more. And Waber's studies had disappointing news for those who equate email and talk:
The “conversation effect
” doesn't work the same way for online encounters. What matters is being together face-to-face.

Waber stresses that it is hard for people to really believe that for productive work, conversation counts, or at least as much as it does: “We think of productivity as . . . sitting in front of the computer and banging out emails, scheduling things; and that's what makes us productive. But it's not.” What makes you productive is “your interactions with other people—you know, you give them new ideas, you get new ideas from them; and . . . if you even make five people a little bit more productive every day,
those conversations are worth it
.”

I visit Waber when I learn of his work, and he explains that his findings are not always received as good news. They complicate the lives of businesses that have tried to cut costs by breaking up their “brick-and-mortar” operations and whose employees work mostly from home. And they complicate the lives of individuals who feel most productive when they sit alone in front of their screens or who find this the best way to feel in control of their time and information overload. Supported by the impression that this is when they are doing their “real work,” many employees feel justified in avoiding face-to-face conversation. And because they avoid it, they don't understand what it can accomplish. Leadership can break this cycle. Fortunately, those who would lead a culture of conversation in the workplace now have research on their side.

There is a business case for conversation. But there are significant roadblocks to reclaiming it. For one thing, we are all tempted by meetings that are not quite meetings because we can be both at the meeting and on our phones. In response, sophisticated organizations design physical and social environments that support face-to-face conversation. But the most artful design will be subverted if a work culture, at its heart, does not understand the unique value of conversation.

A
t ReadyLearn, a large international consulting company, face-to-face meetings are increasingly rare. Over the past ten years, in an effort to streamline operations, ReadyLearn has reduced office space wherever it could and
asked employees to work from home whenever possible
.

Caroline Tennant, a vice-president at ReadyLearn, reports to a physical office three days a week. The other two days, she has Skype meetings from her home. Whether she is at home or at the office, she participates in eight to ten meetings a day. Sometimes, on “home” days, Tennant wakes up at four in the morning for a Skype call that involves
an international team. She notes drily that men are always at an advantage at these meetings because she feels the need to put on makeup before she takes her position in front of her computer. Technology makes it possible for Tennant to schedule a full day of international meetings. But the pace doesn't leave her time to think. She says, “The technology makes me more productive, but I know the quality of my thinking suffers.” It's a telling formulation. What she is saying is that technology makes her
feel
more productive despite a lower quality of thought.

Eight to ten meetings take up Tennant's entire workday. So, to meet the demands of her job, every day Tennant has to pick two or three meetings where she will do other work. The question simply becomes which meetings. The obvious contenders are conference calls. At these, Tennant explains, she tries to say something from time to time, but her mind is on her email. She is not alone in this practice; at ReadyLearn, it is assumed that when you are on a conference call, you are available for email and messaging on the side. Increasingly, the assumption of divided attention is also made for in-person meetings, particularly status meetings where people catch up with ongoing projects. There, Tennant says, team members show up, greet each other, and soon turn to their email. At ReadyLearn, there are a lot of meetings that are not quite meetings.

Tennant describes her behavior at a status meeting. It is a workplace variation on the college students' “rule of three,” where friends try to keep conversations going by making sure that some small quorum is participating at all times in a kind of round robin. Tennant says, “The meeting leader knows that she is speaking to a roomful of people doing email. . . . As for me, I try to do my part . . . to look around and make sure that the meeting leader is speaking to someone.” In other words, no head down for her unless she sees some heads are up.

The situation at ReadyLearn is not unusual. The world's largest conference call provider, used by 85 percent of Fortune 100 firms, studied what people are doing during meetings: 65 percent do other work, 63 percent send email, 55 percent eat or make food, 47 percent go to the bathroom, and 6 percent
take another phone call
.

Darius Lehrer, a thirty-six-year-old manager at ReadyLearn, sums
up meeting etiquette: “You come in, get some coffee, work on your laptop, listen for your name to be called, make your contribution, and then go back to your computer. A good meeting leader will give you a ‘heads-up' signal about five minutes before she calls on you so that you can close out your email and get ready to speak.”

At AJM, Audrey Lister asked herself why she was bothering to present to colleagues who were doing their email. At ReadyLearn, Lehrer has come to the same question: “The system is demoralizing for the meeting leader. And if you are presenting, there is little motivation to do a good job. You're saying to yourself, ‘What's the point of my even doing anything? No one is listening.' People are speaking ‘for the record.'” When people speak for the record, they usually don't listen to what comes before or after. Meetings are performances of what meetings used to be.

Nelson Rabinow, a forty-four-year-old manager at ReadyLearn, talks about how he handles the “falling away” of attention that characterizes most meetings. “At a meeting, I know that other people are dropping in and out, not just me, so when I speak, I make sure to summarize the little that I've heard and I encourage other people to do the same.” In other words, Rabinow suggests that a group of people not paying full attention try, in effect, to collaborate on a project in collective intelligence. If all the people at the meeting contribute a summary of what they have picked up, hopefully, some “meeting markers” will rise to the surface and become the group's shared memory. Like Hansel and Gretel, you drop bread crumbs and hope they will be found.

Rabinow says the meeting markers can be “summary slogans.” Or people can create markers by sending around photographs or other images that stand in for ideas. A trail of images—a meme track—can help communicate the high points of a meeting during which people have slipped in and out of attention. Sometimes the meme track can serve as more than simple bread crumbs. Sometimes, they are how people expect to contribute to the conversation.