About
twenty years ago, I was at a meeting of business executives complaining
about a new (at that time) technology they instinctively disliked. It
was voice-mail. Their view
was that it wasted time: If it was important, people would call back,
wouldn't they? They had assistants, of course, to sort 'important'
calls from the rest and block the riffraff from reaching them. Now
anyone could leave messages for anyone. What was the world coming to?
Earlier
this year, I was chatting with a group of young people complaining
about e-mail. Their view was that it wasted time. Far more effective to
deal with issues in real time, using chat or VoIP. If it was important,
people would call back, wouldn't they? Their e-mail was mostly spam and
impossibly long stuff they'd never get around to reading, and probably
couldn't understand without talking to someone about it anyway. So what
was the point?
It is human nature to communicate through
conversation in real time. This allows us to ask questions and get
context quickly through interactive discussion. It is also human nature
to want information just-in-time, not just-in-case. Forget your 'FYI',
please give me 'WYR' (What You Requested).
The problem with both
v-mail and e-mail (aside from the fact they're asynchronous, often
ill-timed, and usually devoid of context) is that they shift the power
from the recipient of communications (e.g. the right to decline
conversation) to the sender. We are all, of course, both senders and
recipients of communications, but most of us would prefer the power to
remain with the recipient. The popularity of 'no call' lists and our
abhorrence for spam attests to this preference.
E-mail is used for a lot more than 'conversation' of course. Last year I described 10 situations when it was not appropriate to use e-mail.
In seven of these (bad news, complex information or approvals,
complicated instructions, comments on a long document, achieving
consensus and discussing a new idea) a conversation
is called for. In two of them (recurring information requests,
recurring instructions) the communication should be embedded in the
business process, instead of repeated messages. And in one (FYI
communications) it makes sense to instead post the information where it
can be retrieved 'just in time' when needed.
In that article, I
suggested the only time you would need to use e-mail is to send simple
requests for info, approval or instructions, or to reply to a specific
request for e-mail. IM is a better vehicle than e-mail for both of
these.
But we're not going to rid the world of unnecessary
e-mails by training and persuading people to use it sparingly. As long
as the tool exists in its present form, and people acknowledge they
have to accept e-mails, we're not going to change anything.
What if we invented a new tool, an alternative to e-mail, that would have no inbox? The chart above suggests how it could work. Here's a walkthrough:
- Each
of us has a calendar that we use to block out time when we're open for
conversation requests. We can specify times for discussion of specific
subjects, or discussion with specific communities of people, and also
'open' time when we're open to discuss anything with anyone. The rest
of our calendar is 'closed': viewers see only that it's private,
unavailable time.
- If we want to send someone a message, we first ask: Does it require a conversation (to be meaningful)?
If it does, the tool will send us to a conversation engagement
calendar. If not, the tool will allow us to send it to the recipient's
library, as a gift, to be used when and if it is of value. If it's a
recurring information request or instruction, and the answer to the
question is neither, then it boots us out -- this is not the tool to
use for such systematic communications, which should be embedded in the
related business process technology.
- If it's an 'FYI'
communication, the sender indexes it (says what topic it's about) and
sends it to the recipient's library, to be used if and when it's
useful. The sender gets an automatic acknowledgement of their 'gift',
an instant 'thank you'.
- It's now up to the recipient, whenever
s/he wishes, to accept or decline this addition to her/his e-library of
documents and links on her/his hard drive. The recipient can choose to
automatically accept and have filed everything sent to her/him, or
decline everything, or decide each time, and/or re-index these
donations. The sender never knows -- it's not their business. The
technology of today's spam filters could be used to facilitate this.
- If
it's a communication requiring conversation, the sender is logged into
the recipient's calendar and shown available slots for a conversation
on that subject. If none of the slots is suitable, the sender can send
an IM requesting an earlier or longer slot. It's up to recipient to
respond, or not. The 'status' of the recipient is ignored in this --
those of you who use IM a lot know that this status means nothing.
- If
a suitable timeslot is available, the tool allows the sender to book
it, indicate the topic for the conversation, pick a medium for the
conversation (IM/text, voice/phone/VoIP, face to face), and attach any
pre-reading that will make optimal use of people's time during the
conversation. Ideally this tool could allow multi-party conversations
to be scheduled, finding times when all relevant parties are available.
The tool might even be designed to have certain times of day (when,
through an evolutionary process, we'd come to agree are optimal times
for multi-party conversations) specifically allotted for such
conversations, so, for example, a blog writer could allot a specific
time the next day for anyone who was interested to converse, in real
time, about the day's post(s).
- Regardless of what it said in
the calendar, the recipient has the final say -- s/he can decide to
decline a request for a conversation, and a message would then be sent
to the sender removing it from their calendar as well. A reschedule
would likewise be accommodated by the tool.
- At the allotted
time(s), the calls would be placed automatically -- no need to dial.
Reminders would be sent in advance at the discretion of each calendar
owner. The calls could be recorded, or not, at the discretion of the
participants, and the archives sent directly to the participants'
e-libraries on their hard drives, indexed appropriately for later
'just-in-time' use. You could even post follow-up "to do's" to your to
do lists, blocked into future time slots in your calendar, as the
conversation progressed.
This tool would not be hard to build
-- all of the technologies in it exist already. What is elegant about
it is that it mimics our real-life behaviour in allotting our time. It
is simple, intuitive, and real-time.
Imagine ending your day
with nothing in your in-basket(s). Imagine beginning your day knowing
exactly what conversations you are going to have with whom, so your
time is organized precisely, with no phone calls or e-mails to crowd
ahead of what you'd already planned to do. Imagine not having to read
and listen to volumes of stuff every day just to decide what if
anything needs to be done about it, now. Imagine reading what we decide
we need to read, instead of what others have decided we should read.
We
could start doing again what we did in the days before v-mail and
e-mail -- spend our time actually doing things, and in conversations
learning and understanding and consulting and making informed,
real-time decisions. This tool could get our lives out of the
asynchronicity that these time-wasting tools have wrought, and put our
lives back in synch.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
