Reclaiming Conversation (31 page)

At HeartTech, a large Silicon Valley software company, employees I meet in focus groups complain about overprogrammed meetings. So
much is on the agenda that it is hard to get a chance to speak. I discuss this with a group of HeartTech managers, and they point out that alongside what is
said aloud
at any meeting, there is almost always a meme track, that parallel online visual conversation. The meme track allows people who have no way to participate in a conversation to keep up with it and make their presence felt. It gives them a way to critique the proceedings and other participants, even those senior to them. They can use humor, expressed in funny photos and cartoons.

The meme track begins as a compensation for not being in a conversation, but some at this meeting describe it as being just as important to them as the conversation itself. Or more important: “Perhaps it's even more expressive than talking.” “It's good for those who might not be comfortable speaking up.” “It's incredibly on point and provocative. . . . When you consider memes and traditional conversation, I wouldn't want to choose one exclusively over another.”

The conversation about memes—at HeartTech as elsewhere—follows a familiar pattern. A technological possibility—such as using memes to create a communications sidebar—is first offered as a substitution, something better than nothing. In this case, it responds to a problem: Meeting time is short and not everyone gets a chance to talk. But then, this accommodation is given new status. In this case, I hear that employees who might not be comfortable with the give-and-take of conversation now have a chance to participate. And then people fall back on the adage. Pictures are said to be more powerful than words. The meme track is deeply pertinent. “Perhaps it's even more expressive than talking.” Better than nothing is perhaps simply better.

I recall the enthusiasm about memes among the students at the Boston focus group who asked me to share their WhatsApp channel so that I could “see” what they were thinking. Like the HeartTech managers, they claimed that the images they shared were as important as the words they said. But this was among a group of young people who admitted that they weren't comfortable with telephone conversations or face-to-face talk. Do the memes do the job—or do they do a job we can't do?

In any organization, there are some kinds of ideas that only words
can convey. There are some kinds of conflicts that only words can parse and resolve. We have to think about preparing our students and employees to participate in these conversations. No matter how rich and even subversive, the meme track can take them only so far.

T
he president of a New York cultural foundation tells me that at a recent board meeting one of her members had spent the time consumed with a stream of images on his iPad. The board member seated next to him had been mesmerized, watching him shop online for a new car.

We all attend meetings during which we multitask and our minds are elsewhere. It turns out to be a stressful elsewhere. The multitasking life
puts us into a state similar to vigilance
, one of continual alert. In that condition, we can follow only
the most rudimentary arguments
. So multitasking encourages brevity and simplicity, even when more is called for. And the harm that multitasking does is contagious. We've seen that someone multitasking on a laptop
distracts everyone around the machine
, not just the person using it.

And we still call them meetings, after all. I get together with the director and production staff of the Seahorse, a small mid-Atlantic theater company. As we begin, with seven of us at the table, Claire Messing, the director, realizes that her phone is vibrating. She blushes but says, “I'm not sure I can continue until I deal with this.” We had gathered to discuss how technology affects the work of the theater. It has taken us months to coordinate our schedules. And now, we are finally together, all staring at Messing's phone.

At the Seahorse, it is standard practice to bring phones and laptops to staff meetings. Messing encourages this in the hope that technology will allow her staff “to stretch their time together.” So, during a staff meeting, one person might be online to review budget numbers and another might scan job applications from lighting designers. Messing's idea
is that if something important comes up online, the group can discuss it “live” while they are all in the room together.

But the strategy does not work. Once laptops are open, there is the temptation to look at email and attend to urgent messages. The director of education says that the meetings-with-devices make it almost impossible for her not to “cheat,” by which she means that she reads her email while others are talking. “So at a meeting, I'm not as present because I'm always cheating a little bit.” These are meetings that give the illusion of collaboration with all the drawbacks of distraction.

Messing describes the irony: “Even though we're in the business of creating live performance, we don't take advantage of our time with each other to have a conversation with each other.” She imagined that technology-enhanced meetings would multiply productivity, but everyone goes off in a different direction.

Messing had another idea for how to use technology to multiply productivity: The staff would prepare for meetings by reading materials in Dropbox, a file-sharing application. Messing leaves them scripts, biographies of potential actors, and financial reports. To begin with, her staff thought this was a good idea, but soon they were all leaving materials in Dropbox. Everyone agrees that Dropbox has encouraged magical thinking: If it is in Dropbox, it has been read. “Dropbox,” says the publicity director, “creates the fantasy that some of the work of a meeting has already been done.” But it hasn't been done. The publicity director says that she herself comes to meetings exhausted from trying and failing to read what's in her Dropbox. It's come to the point where she resents being asked to brainstorm at meetings. “I can't brainstorm . . . I'm too exhausted to brainstorm.”

A
lice Rattan, a manager at ReadyLearn, is teaching the business value of unitasking. She is no longer surprised that her young consultants want to multitask during meetings. They grew up on it; they
have to learn better ways. But she is always surprised that her
clients
want to multitask when
their
accounts are being discussed. And they want her to multitask as well. Rattan explains that clients expect quick turnaround on matters that she should take time to think through. She has to teach them that she intends to work for them
with the attention that their problems deserve
.

Rattan sees a disconnect. Her new hires, young consultants, are coming out of the best colleges and business schools. They have done amazing things both academically and in their extracurricular lives. But they are struggling with the simplest workplace conventions and conversations. She marvels: “They've designed their own apps, but they are socially inept.” They have a hard time showing empathy in the workplace. They don't seem to understand the perspectives of their colleagues or clients. In today's workplace, the first training often needs to be training in conversation. But it usually isn't given its rightful place as a business priority because we tend to assume that employees know how to listen and respond.

When a junior-level consultant went on Facebook during a client meeting, Rattan was at pains to explain to her why she had done something wrong. From the young woman's point of view, she had done her “part” of the client presentation. In college, she explained to Rattan, after making a comment, she “always” went online. Rattan's frustration shows: “I'm, like, ‘Okay, but you can't do that in a professional work setting.'” In this case, for Rattan, changing the consultant's behavior did not feel like enough. Rattan felt she had to work on her expectations, her approach to being in a conversation. As the consultant sees it: When people get together, they do their “part” and then check out. For Rattan, multitasking has left this young woman with work habits that make collaboration impossible.

After a few years of taking younger colleagues aside individually, Rattan decided she could not work in these conditions. She began to make new rules for everyone. Her first was a strict no-phones policy for all meetings. Now, she says, “there is a parking lot for smartphones at the door.” For each hour of meeting time, she gives her consultants two
ten-minute breaks. “That's when people can check their phones.” Rattan fondly remembers the first meeting on her new regime: “It was the most productive. We got so much done. And from that point on, that was the rule. And if you couldn't commit to that you could not attend.”

One of Rattan's colleagues, listening to her describe the young consultants' trouble with attention at meetings, is brought back to the days of her first BlackBerry and how its red light went off when she had a message. No matter where she was or what she was doing, she could not will herself to ignore that blinking red light. In order to keep her mind on her work, she says, “I had to put stickies over the light.”

Rattan has compassion for her young consultants. It is clear to her that they do their work assignments while doing other things on the web. That's how they worked in college and graduate school. They don't know any other way. But the impact of that work style is apparent to her. Their work is inconsistent; Rattan says that she can see the traces of their multitasking in the assignments they turn in.

So you'll see great thought, then you'll see crap, then you'll see great thought. . . . It starts out well, because they're concentrating. Then they get an interruption, an email, a call, a text. So then, just illogical comments. I can see the interruptions in their work product. And so I'll go back and I'll say, “Hey, I like where you're going with this, but it didn't finish up too strong.” And they just say, “Oh well, I got distracted.”

Rattan tries to teach her team to do one thing at a time. When she is on a conference call with one or several of them, she tells them that her attention is only on them. She is not doing email; she is not on her phone. Rattan makes it explicit. “On a call, I'll say, ‘Now I am looking away from my computer.' I tell them that the volume is down on my phone or computer so I can't hear that messages are coming in. . . . I sign off the company server.” At first, the young consultants are shocked, but then they get the message.

Rattan has had her own problems with focus. A few years ago, at
forty, she found that her life of always-on connection left her always distracted. She was unhappy and unproductive. She decided to take action. When she got to work, Rattan began to turn off the Wi-Fi and work in an empty office. She segmented her workday into times online and off. This helped her to unitask because she had long blocks of time when email and the web were no longer a temptation.

She suggests this strategy to others: Begin by admitting vulnerability and then design new behaviors around it.

This realism about vulnerability is a business “best practice.” Technologies have affordances—for example, a networked computer can put you on a continual, stimulating feed of information. Designing for vulnerability means avoiding what undermines your attention. That can mean a “parking lot” for smartphones and tablets before you start a meeting; it can mean a “one task only” rule when you have to write something important. It helps to come to the design process with compassion for yourself and others. For you may have to say the seemingly obvious to young colleagues: You can't update your Facebook during client meetings. This may be something they do not know.

The notion of unitasking was picked up when the magazine
The Atlantic
produced a video on the problems associated with multitasking and suggested one remedy:
a “Tabless Thursday
.” One day a week, you can work only on one thing instead of keeping multiple browser tabs open. It's a gimmick, certainly, but the basic idea is gaining traction.

T
he director of technology for a large financial services company, Victor Tripp, tries to get his New York team—around fifteen people—to attend a meeting. Only three show up. And it's hard to convince them to have in-person meetings with clients. Like the lawyers at AJM and like the staff at the Seahorse, they prefer to use email whenever they can. Tripp says that “typically, things get into trouble when too
much has been done by email.” One of his team will come in to him to complain about a client. “It's up to me to say, ‘Have a conversation, spend some face time, repair that relationship.' That isn't something they would come to themselves.” Tripp tells me that when he has to suggest an in-person meeting, “I'm usually facing someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem. And I just have to say, ‘Go talk to them.'”

Tripp explains that his younger colleagues have grown up thinking that electronic communication is a universal language. So when they think about choosing a communication tool, they consider such things as messaging, texts, Skype, email, videoconferencing, and memes. That's a lot of choices, and each carries its own “atmosphere.” But they don't really consider a sit-down meeting. It's not on their menu. That idea has to come from the “outside.” It is part of mentoring. Tripp sees this as his role.

For Tripp, the shared experience of people at a sit-down is like nothing else. It is the best way to learn how your colleagues think, how your clients think. And, he says, “When people are comfortable talking to each other, little disagreements don't grow into big problems.”

The stage director Liana Hareet, who has more than thirty years of theatrical experience, has a similar experience in a very different kind of meeting. For Hareet, all the in-person meetings that lead up to the production of a play matter in the same way that live theater matters. “You get the unexpected; you get chemistry.” She says, “I love design meetings . . . when we all sit in a room and we go, ‘How the hell do we get Hermione's statue to come to life at the end of
Winter's Tale
? Let's all talk about this. Here is my idea. Let's all brainstorm.'”