I talk about the under-the-desk hideaway with one of HeartTech’s architectural staff who knows all about it and is designing hiding spaces as part of the basic office plan. For now, employees are inventive. “In my group,” says one thirty-two-year-old engineer, “we put on headphones not just to keep noise out, but to signal when it is acceptable to talk to us.” When I visit with his team, they describe different ways of wearing earphones that signal how much privacy one desires. Earphones fully in ears: do not disturb. Earphones in one ear: can be disturbed but only for work. Earphones partly in ears: can be disturbed because I’m working on routine matters. But the group admits that even fully engaged earphones will not reliably get you undisturbed time. When you really need to concentrate, everyone agrees, you should probably stay home. There is an alternative: We can create environments where we expect that people will work uninterrupted, a “quiet car” for productivity.
Address the anxiety of disconnection. We work better together when we can also work alone. And we work best alone when we are undistracted. But studies show that on average, an office worker is distracted (electronically) every three minutes and that it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to get back on track. It’s hard to break this cycle because when we get used to interruptions, we learn to interrupt ourselves as well. It’s what has become most comfortable. The Fortune 500 vice-president became anxious at a quiet desk. It’s more familiar to be in a state of agitated calm: distracted and unproductive.
I have said that if we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely. If we don’t teach our employees to be alone, they will only know how to be isolated. And frantic. The most successful managers know how to model an approach to business that includes disconnecting. When an employee says, “My manager . . . is like Twitter: reactive, always on—her mind responds like a feed,” that manager is not demonstrating that she understands the importance of solitude for creativity and productivity. She herself may not have the capacity to be still.
We need to encourage the capacity for a solitude that is not isolating.
The Boston Consulting Group, a large international firm, tried an experiment in disconnection. It started small. One case team was given what the experimenters called predictable time off (PTO)—“afternoons or evenings totally disconnected from work and wireless devices, agreed-upon email blackout times, or uninterrupted work blocks that allow for greater focus.” But the time off was coupled with weekly face-to-face meetings. There, the case team discussed its progress toward its business goals as well as any personal or professional effects of the time-off program. They had a place, a sociable place, to address the anxiety of disconnection. Sociability increases productivity and creativity. But so does the ability to have privacy when you need it.
Those involved in the PTO experiment reported more job satisfaction, were happier with their work-life balance, and were more excited to go to work in the morning than other employees. BCG turned the experiment into a global initiative that after four years involved more than nine hundred teams in thirty countries.
Support the first steps toward solitude. Recall that the “pilot in the cockpit” did not retreat from the sociability of the law office to be alone. He withdrew to his network. Managers can make it clear that they consider solitude the partner to creativity and collaboration, the place where new thinking begins. But if you have grown up always connected, developing the capacity for solitude requires support. If you grew up in the world of “I share, therefore I am,” you may not have confidence that you have a thought unless you are sharing it.
Good management in the twenty-first century asks us to help our employees learn to tolerate the anxiety of being left alone long enough to think their own thoughts. If people always look to others for validation, they don’t develop the confidence to develop creatively. This is one reason why meditation has become so popular in business settings. It encourages people to sit with themselves. It is a path—but not the only path—to becoming comfortable with yourself in a hyperconnected world.
A Drink and a Handshake
As I’ve researched this book, I’ve spoken to hundreds of businesspeople and I always ask this question: “When, in your business, do you need to have a face-to-face conversation? When will electronic conversation not do?”
Answers are forthcoming and with very little hesitation: You need face-to-face conversation to establish trust, to sell something, and to close the deal. One executive says that you need it when you have to get to the “root cause of the problem.” You need to talk face-to-face when someone has lied to you. Sometimes people answer by telling a story of using an email in one of these situations and things not going well.
Professionals in service industries are particularly interested in this question. The success of lawyers, accountants, consultants, and bankers depends on being able to say that they do something different than all the other practitioners in their field. They don’t want their services turned into commodities. The best way to avoid being seen as a commodity is to offer a relationship. And that takes conversation.
Janeen Hilmar, a forty-year-old manager at ReadyLearn, expresses this anxiety about commodification by using an analogy to a Disney film. “In The Incredibles,” she says, “the evil guy wants to get rid of all the superheroes because if everyone is special then no one will be. And that, to me, is the crux. . . . If you can’t differentiate yourself, then all this technology just makes us go faster, but it kind of makes us anonymous; it makes us all the same.”
The fear of being commoditized is one of Audrey Lister’s anxieties about the future of her law firm. She fears that if young associates don’t form relationships, their product will be indistinguishable from the lawyers across the street. “And the lawyers across the street are very, very good,” Lister says. “You keep clients because of the trust you build over years of face-to-face meetings, not because you write them emails.”
This is the philosophy around which John Borning, the CEO of a large Los Angeles security firm, built his business. When business advisers urged him to expand his successful company across the country, he decided that being able to meet with and personally understand the needs of his clients was what gave him a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. But it is Borning who reminds me that sometimes, no matter what you do, you can feel like a commodity because all of a sudden someone treats you like one—for example, by turning down a conversation. During our meeting, he says that he needs to step away for a few minutes to take a call. When he returns, perhaps ten minutes later, he apologizes. He has just closed a big deal and that was his new partner on the line. But Borning looks upset rather than celebratory.
He tries to explain what’s bothering him: His new partner works only a few blocks away. Borning had suggested that they meet for drinks or dinner after work that day or later in the week. He wants to toast their success and plan first steps. His colleague declined and didn’t suggest another meeting. Borning reports their exchange: “He said to me, ‘Let’s just paper this.’”
Borning says something about the complexity of the business relationship they are about to launch. He is not content. He is already imagining endless emails from a partner who doesn’t want to begin their collaboration with a drink and a handshake.
The Path Forward
The Public Square
What Do We Forget When We Talk Through Machines?
You go on a website, you send in your money—that satisfied your requirement for being in the conversation.
—A PARTICIPANT IN THE ONLINE MOVEMENT #STOPKONY
Life on our new digital landscape challenges us as citizens. Although the web provides incomparable tools to inform ourselves and mobilize for action, when we are faced with a social problem that troubles us, we are tempted to retreat to what I would call the online real. There, we can choose to see only the people with whom we agree. And to share only the ideas we
think our followers want to hear.
There, things are simpler. Or rather, we can make them appear to be. And in that world we have called friction-free, we are used to the feeling of getting things done—generations have now grown up with the pleasures of mastering a game or a “level” and getting to a new screen. This history of easy dispatch is only one way that digital life shapes a new public self. It conditions us to see the world as a collection of crises calling for immediate action. In this context, it is easy to skip necessary conversations. What led to the problem? Who are the stakeholders? What is the situation on the ground? For on the ground there is never a simple fix, only friction, complexity, and history.
When the world of the computer was new, I used the metaphor of a second self to describe what was on our screens, because I observed how people defined themselves in the mirror of the machine. They looked at their computer desktops and felt ownership. The desktop was itself a new way to confirm their identities through the applications they had chosen, the content they had created and curated. This continues, of course. But now there is a parallel and less transparent movement. Now we know that our life online creates a digital double because we took actions (we don’t know which) that are acted on by algorithms (we don’t know how). Our life has been “mined” for clues to our desires. But when our screens suggest our desires back to us, they often seem like broken mirrors.
A State of Emergency
Elizabeth, the economics graduate student who struggled with multi-tasking, tells the story of her involvement in online politics. In 2012, online activists—a group called Invisible Children, Inc.—publicized the atrocities of Joseph Kony, head of a militant group with operations in Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic. Invisible Children made a thirty-minute video that highlighted Kony’s use of child soldiers. The video instructed people to send money in return for signs that had Kony’s face on them. On April 20, in a program called “Cover the Night,” the signs were to be placed on lawns and in community buildings. The organizers said that this would make Kony “famous” and would exert the moral pressure that would end his reign of terror.
Released on March 5, 2012, by July 2012 the video had over 91 million views on YouTube and over 18 million on Vimeo. In the days following its release, 58 percent of people aged eighteen through twenty-nine said that they had heard about it. Elizabeth was living in the United States when the video came out. She felt connected to the tragedy of the Kony story and became involved in the online movement.
Elizabeth’s mother is a lawyer from Nairobi; her father, an American, met her when he was in the Peace Corps. Elizabeth has always felt both tied to Africa and at a distance from it—she always wanted to do more, but never saw an opportunity. The Kony action felt like a chance. She was optimistic about its promise and annoyed, almost uncomprehending, at the skepticism of her African friends, who did not believe that people really cared about what was going in Africa. They distinguished curiosity—enough curiosity to watch a video— from significant concern. And indeed, on the appointed day, few people stepped out into the physical world to put up their signs. Elizabeth sums up what she learned from this experience: “You go on a website, you send in your money—that satisfies your requirement for being in the conversation. You show solidarity with a movement by going online, and then, that’s it.”
The Kony video itself provides ways to understand the ultimate inaction. The video voice-over states as its premise that social media is a political idea that will change the world:
Right now there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet two hundred years ago. Humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect. And now we hear each other, we see each other . . . we share what we love, and it reminds us what we all have in common. . . . And this connection is changing the way the world works. Governments are trying to keep up . . . now we can taste the freedom.
Freedom to what? The narrator of the video says, “Our goal is to change the conversation of our culture.” It encouraged people to feel that they are doing just that when they post a video online, or “like” a cause, or buy a sign. Or go to a Twitter feed—here, it was #StopKony.
There is nothing wrong with doing these things. They build awareness for your cause. But the difference between online support and putting up a real sign on your real lawn is this: With the physical sign you might have had to confront a person in your neighborhood who might have asked, “What are we supposed to do next about Kony? What is your commitment? What is the plan?” (As of this writing, Kony’s activities continue and the group that organized the website has dissolved.)
Friendship Politics: Things to Buy and Click On
The Kony 2012 video describes a “friendship model” for politics: “The people of the world see each other and can protect each other. . . . Arresting Joseph Kony will prove that the world we live in has new rules, that the technology that has brought our planet together is allowing us to respond to the problems of our friends.” So, this is the new ideal scenario: In the Facebook world, we friend, we share, and those in political power ultimately surrender.
Why should power surrender? According to an artist interviewed in the Kony video, power will be shaken by the simple tools of friendship. He says, referring to the promotional materials and the very sharing of the video, “Here are really simple tools. Go out and rock it.”
Elizabeth is chastened. As she sees it now, sharing warm feelings gave people the illusion that they were doing politics. The experience left her thinking that there are no “simple tools”—no things to buy, no links to click on—that can fix a problem as difficult as what Kony represents. The #StopKony action got people talking. But it did not begin to transfer their online “likes” to other actions. Expressions of interest in the physical world—for example, giving a few dollars to a cause when there is a neighborhood charity drive—can also lead to a dissipation of interest when the person who asked for money is no longer at your door. The difference, for Elizabeth, is that the scale of the online declarations (so many millions of likes!) was deceiving. It made her think that something important was happening.
For Elizabeth, the most important lesson of her Kony experience was that the connections you form with people you don’t know have significant limitations. They are good for getting people talking but not effective in getting them to do much else. She was intoxicated by the feeling of being part of a vibrant and growing movement. But the website couldn’t get people to put real signs on real lawns. It couldn’t get people to declare themselves to their physical neighbors.
It was a lesson, although Elizabeth didn’t put it in these terms, in what sociologists call the power of strong and weak ties. Weak ties are friends of friends or casual acquaintances. Strong ties are people you know and trust. They are people with whom you are likely to have a long history of face-to-face conversation. So Facebook connections, the kinds of conversations we have online, and in general what we mean by Internet “friending” all draw on the power of weak ties.
There are those who see the conversations of the Internet as a direct source of political change. Mark Pfeifle, a former U.S. national security adviser, wrote after the 2009 uprising in Iran, “Without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” and called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. When the demonstrations in Tehran began, the State Department asked Twitter not to perform scheduled maintenance operations so as not to take such a powerful political tool out of the hands of the protesters. We are, naturally, thrilled by the possibilities of a new, efficient activism.
But what do we forget when we talk through machines? We are tempted to forget the importance of face-to-face conversation, organization, and discipline in political action. We are tempted to forget that political change is often two steps forward and one step back. And that it usually takes a lo
t of time.
Malcolm Gladwell, writing about the strengths and limitations of social media in politics, contrasts online activism with what was needed during the American civil rights movement and comes to this formulation: If you are in a conversation with someone you don’t know well—and these are most of your web contacts—the basic rule is to ask little. As in the Kony 2012 example, web activism works when you are asked to watch a video, give a thumbs-up, or buy a poster. Most recently, a fun gesture—dumping a bucket of ice on your head and asking a friend to do the same (and hopefully send a donation to the ALS Foundation)—has raised over a hundred million dollars for this cause. The power of weak ties is awesome. Quite literally, it inspires awe.
But if you want to take on political authority, says Gladwell, if you want to take those risks, you need ties of deeper trust, deeper history. You will have moved beyond gestures and donations; you will need to reach consensus, set goals, think strategically, and have philosophical direction. Lives will depend on your deliberations. Perhaps your own life. You will need a lot of long conversations.
To make this point, Gladwell tells the story of the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in that opened a new chapter in the civil rights movement. It was something that a group of friends had discussed for nearly a month. The first young black man who asked to be served a cup of coffee at the lunch counter “was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.” They had the strongest of ties. They needed these to organize against violent opposition, to change tactics, and to stay the course.
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