Sometimes when I speak with clients or companies interested in understanding the future of work and collaboration it helps to put things into an interesting perspective. There are many people (including business leaders) out there who are still not up to speed on what is happening in the world of enterprise social software, collaboration, and the future of work. When speaking with these people it’s a bit harder to conceptualize what something like Jive, Yammer, Mango Apps, or Newsgator looks like or does. Inherently I find that people understand the collaboration problems they are faced (such as difficulty finding people and information, duplication of content, lack of communication and collaboration across boundaries, etc) and they would like those problems solved, but can’t grasp the solution.
Many of us are so stuck and focused on email that we have blinders on. Not only that but we continue to carry on the legacy mentality of how a company should be run (more on that later). Well, what if there was no email? How would you communicate and collaborate with your team. You certainly wouldn’t be able to call everyone all the time or go visit their cubicle every time you needed something, now imagine you work for a large global company.
The “email does not exist” mindset is one that I like to play around with when speaking with companies who are interested in collaboration and the future of work because it forces them to think of alternatives and makes them think about new technologies and new behaviors. Thankfully there are now more effective ways of working, communicating, and collaborating but our mindset hasn’t caught up to our potential for improving and evolving the workplace (at least not for most companies).
The reality is that the “how would you work without email” mentality should be the standard not the anomaly.
There is no email…
Funny really that apparently Mr. Morgan does not remember the times when e-mail did not exist, that mail was the norm, and telegrams were used for urgent messages. Letter had to be written and people actually took the time to think about what they wrote, the context and the manner in which it was expressed. Many even thought about how the person to whom the letter was addressed might react to what was written. In these days of “instant messaging” e-mail and heaven help us Twitter, little of these aspects of “communication” in the true sense of the word appear to be considered explicitly.
I do not pretend to know what Mr. Morgan means by “the future of work”, but perhaps some responses might be found in the manner in which some of us worked in the past, and continue to do so.
Yours from the age of Telex, radio, morse code and semaphore.
Christopher Carr
Hi Christopher,
Thanks for taking the time to write a comment.
I wasn’t alive during many of the times you mentioned. In fact I have no idea what it’s like to do business without the internet and without using many of the social and collaborative tools that exist today. My brother who is turning 21 this year is going to be on an entire different level and he is a part of the future workforce. The way we communicate and collaborate has evolved into better and more effective ways of doing things. Along with that many of the behaviors you described have also changed. Sadly from what I’m seeing, those who continue to work in the past within their organizations will eventually adapt or in some cases be replaced.
I do remember working life before the advent of email and the internet with people certainly taking more care over their writing but also waiting a week or fortnight to carry on the next part of the simplest “conversations” at a distance.
He introduction of email has had some drawbacks but has had far more positive impacts at work than negative ….. the internet has been transformational in every way.
The challenge now is for business and IT leaders to work out how to deploy and utilise the next generation of tools, social, cloud, collaborative to deliver the next level of available benefits. Like every technical innovation, these tools will face scepticism and denial. We will then observe the initiated become converts and gradually sell the benefits of change to enough of the deniers so that network effects simply take over.