America, the most netted-up nation on earth, is increasingly the land of the loner. In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor Robert Putnam shows how Americans have become increasingly disconnected. Family dinners have apparently dropped by 43 percent in 25 years; people are 35 percent less likely to have friends over to their houses; and bowling alleys across the country are increasingly used by individuals competing against themselves.
Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn we are accruing vast numbers of “friends” we’ll never meet. In many cases live meeting is actively discouraged. Even my eight-year-old son knows not to show his face on screen and to use a coded name when talking to his mates in Seattle or Brazil about the latest Lego craze.
It’s all very flattering to have a huge network, but drain the digital bath of drive-by acquaintances and people trying to sell you something, and how many real relationships do you find?
The other day someone I haven’t seen for 20 years—and barely knew back then—waved to me at a concert and wished me Happy Birthday. How the hell did she know? Apparently my Wall told her. Walls don’t just have ears any more. They have mouths. I didn’t feel flattered. I felt stalked.
Clearly there is a dissonance between the media we have available to connect with others and our success in using them.
Nowhere does technology facilitate nearly meeting better than our busy, busy businesses. Co-workers email each other rather than look around the computer screen and talk. Meeting tables come ready plumbed for laptops, so face time and screen time inevitably compete.
I am looking forward to the time when someone recommends the face-to-face meeting as a wild new innovation. I suspect it’s not far away. Especially when people are making such a fuss about new technologies which are—drum roll—in 3D. Our lives are in 3D, if only you’d rip your eyes away from your 2D screen long enough to notice that!
I’m struck by how we are using all sorts of very tactile, kinetic verbs—ping, prod, tweet, twang—to describe interactions that are totally disembodied. How funny that we talk about using technology to stay in touch when there’s no touching at all. OK, I give my Apple the occasional loving stroke, but …
If I am sounding Luddite, I don’t mean to. Technology enables businesses to cut down on the time and cost involved in physically bringing their people together. And let’s not forget, this is also in the interests of the planet, minimizing the carbon carnage of those unnecessary international flights.
But virtual meetings are—as their name plainly advertises—not real. They encourage us to almost, just about, nearly meet. It’s a real challenge to make and keep real human connection with disembodied voices or truncated torsos across continents and time zones. We’ll look later in the book at how to make the best of the medium and “create intimacy at a distance.”
Bottom line: just because technology can connect us, it doesn’t mean we do really connect.
A colleague told me a poignant story about a friend of his, a top-flight corporate lawyer who spends her time jetting around the world, constantly in touch with clients on one of her two BlackBerries by text, BMS, email, and MMS. Recently, on a fevered dash from one meeting to another, she flipped her car and was nearly killed. Staggering out of the wreckage and just glad to be alive, she reached for her phone to tell her loved ones that she was all right and realized she had no one to call.
The ability to really connect is natural, but requires practice or it withers, with predictably negative effects on both our business and personal lives.
We nearly meet because … that’s what we want to do
Let’s face it, other people are hard work. They have this annoying habit of not agreeing with us. They have their own ideas and agendas. They don’t, for some reason, think we are always marvelous. They are complex, demanding and just plain tiring.
Why would we want to meet them? Better by far to pretend to meet. Nod but don’t hear. Smile but don’t mean it. Keep “them” on the outside and save your energy.
When I am not in London—or on a plane—I spend as much time as I can in rural Italy. As a lifelong city dweller I am acutely aware of how few people you see on a normal day in the north Italian countryside. The scarcity of the people seems to put them into high relief. You notice them. They notice you. Your eyes meet. You raise your hand. You briefly discuss the ripeness of the tomatoes, the likelihood of rain, the latest aches and pains and whether Juventus are likely to scrape through this season without pouring shame on the team/the region/the nation. It is the sort of setting which encourages connections with others. London is another story. As I take the plane, taxi, or tube back into the center of the metropolis, I feel my mind becoming overwhelmed by potential connection. There are just too many people. I start to screen them out, like the iris of your eye shutting down to protect you from a blast of bright sunlight. Within minutes I am in a bubble where I can walk through a crowd of people on Oxford Street and see—no one.
This ability of the mind to filter out information is a key to our development as a species—and our survival as modern humans. The ability selectively to screen out background sounds so we hear what is being said to us is key to our communication. It is similarly crucial to our survival that we can separate the features of a landscape we don’t need to know about (the green stuff) from the things we might need to know about (like a saber-toothed tiger).
There is growing concern at the connection between the use of digital music players and fatal accidents. The London authorities have started talking about “iPod zombies” and San Francisco has spent millions on a media blitz warning against the screening-out effect of earphones. “Do you want Beethoven to be the last thing you hear?” one lugubrious ad asks the city’s joggers.
We nearly meet because … we confuse efficient and effective
As the doyen of management consultants Peter Drucker once said, “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Many companies are focusing on making their meetings more efficient. That doesn’t mean they are any more effective.
I have a friend who is a world-class management consultant. I’ll call him Ron—not his real name—for the sake of discretion and to prevent his clients taking out a contract on me. He has a great example of a client who has become exquisitely efficient and wildly ineffective at the same time. It’s all to do with paper. The client generates hundreds of thousands of sheets of contracts and agreements at each of their branches every week. The company has had to become supremely talented at moving all this paper around as well as storing and retrieving it. They have invested in ergonomically designed paper-carrying equipment (I think this means strong suitcases), transportation systems, and document logging. They were thrilled with themselves until Ron asked the unasked question: “Why do you need all this paper?” They were ready for this. “Because the regulator requires that we get our customers’ signature.” Ron pressed on: “Yes, but why does that signature have to be on paper?” he asked, no doubt making a lifelong enemy of the Logistics Director. In this digital age there are many legally acceptable forms of signature, of which a mark on paper is only one. There’s a tick on a form, a digitally scanned signature, a thumbprint, even the iris in your eye. Ron’s point was that while the paper is being dealt with efficiently, the more effective course of action would be to invest a tiny fraction of the time, energy, and money into talking with the regulator and finding a paperless solution. Efficient, yes. Effective, no!
I have seen efficient meetings—meticulously planned, immaculately laid out and run perfectly to time—that had no positive effect whatever. (We’ll look a little later in the book at how to redesign meetings so that they are both.) These are classic “nearly meetings.”