Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail)



Such is the title of an article by Randall Stross in the NY Times (February 2010) where he describes the emergence of the post, and "cheap posting" in England and in the US (after a postal reform in the 1839 in England and a few years later in the US).
Stross highlights how many of the practices developed at the time can be compared to today's practices with emails and other media. He cites in particular the great book by Catherine Golden, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writting (2009) who was a great resource for us as we worked on The Power of Writing in Organizations. Among other things, one learns reading this book how frequent was the postal service with people in London complaining if a letter was not arriving in a couple of hours. "And, not unlike us, most Victorian letter writers seemed more concerned about getting a rapid response than a long one", notes Stross.
In this article, Stross notes that people were often forwarding newspapers rather than sending letters: it reminded me of the times where I forward an article, a call for a conference, an interesting piece of information with only a few words "maybe of interest", "FYI". One could also think of it as the ancestor of the attachment in particular when you read that "the  Victorians mailed all sorts of things besides words: tree cuttings, leeches, mosses and even manure, Ms. Golden writes."
Stross to conclude that "the only thing left for the modern correspondent to invent was the completely empty envelope — the Facebook “poke,” the sending of a greeting without saying so much as “hi.”
When one Facebook member clicks to “poke” another, of course, the receiver can poke back, returning the wordless greeting. Compared with a poke, even a brief e-mail message seems impressively articulate."
This article not only highlights how much one can learn from taking a historical perspective and realizing how some practices have been enacted in other times and with other media. It also stresses the diversity of the type of writing, reminding us that letter writing in the 19th century was a multiple genre as email writing is today.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Mobility makes us loose two key dimensions of writing: reflecting and specifying


Here is an interesting article on the impact of mobile technologies on productivity. It shows, just as we have argued, that productivity is closely linked to the ability to think and go beyond reactive answers.  

Is Mobile Computing Good For Productivity?

Consultant Deborah Lovich could be accomplishing the management feat of the mobile era. She's convinced hundreds of agile-thumbed, on-at-all-hours colleagues to put down their smart phones and stop working or checking e-mail all evening long.

True, the break happens only once a week. But Boston Consulting Group's "predictable time off" experiment has been a hit. Since it was widely introduced in 2009, more than 900 internal teams have taken part, and the program has become standard practice at most BCG offices in North America and Europe.

Lovich, head of BCG staff in Boston, developed the program with Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow, who in studies begun in 2005 found that BCG consultants felt burnout not only because of long hours, but because they could never predict or control when they might have a break from work.

The problem was BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. BCG workers felt pressure to respond to e-mails from a boss or client right away, even when it wasn't urgent. Responding to one message could set off a chain reaction of e-mails lasting until bedtime.


Monday, June 25, 2012

This book started as a conversation.... Why is writing seen as the "ugly ducking?"

We are both very excited by the forthcoming publication of our book with Routledge The Power of Writing in Organizations: From Letters to Online Interactions.
We believe it provides key insights on how writing's mechanisms is crucial in today's organizations where distributed collaboration is increasing and where there is a crucial need for creative thinking.

This book started as a conversation about debates in the academic worlds about the effects of technology on communication as well as our observations in our teaching and everyday life. On the one hand, we are writing more and more: post-it notes, emails, instant messaging, power point decks, and even texting on our phones rather than calling, yet, there is a disregard towards writing and a belief that face-to-face or variations of face-to-face like videos are better than writing for collaboration and relations.

We paused and wondered: Why this tension? Why is writing always seen as the ugly duckling when it comes to expressions of subtle emotions or complicated thoughts. Maybe it is because we are both academics, maybe it is because we have both been reading and writing for so many years, yet there is more than a personal story and our own biases.

We thought of specific examples that we knew: correspondences of famous philosophers, scientists and novelists - Descartes, Darwin, Einstein, Kafka, or Virginia Woolf - and we started reading them and analyzing them to figure out how writing supported the expression of emotions, the development of ideas and the building of relationships. We also discovered correspondences of many less famous ones which have been kept and played a key role in the development of distributed organizations such as Hudson Bay Company and East India Company.

Our reading of scholars in classical studies such as Ong and Havelock showed us the importance of the development of the alphabet and writing in Ancient Greece in the development of the thinking process as we experienced it. This was confirmed by the fascinating work of psychologists such as Maryanne Wolf who showed how the development of writing influenced the structure of our brains and allowed us to develop analytical and creative powers.

We then went from the historical correspondences to current online communities - Open Source, OpenIDEO and a public forum on Knowledge Management - to see what has changed. We realized that successful collaborations in these online contexts could be explained with the same mechanisms of writing than in the historical letters from the 17th, 18, 19th and beginning of the 20th century. This was really exciting and it confirmed our belief that writing was a powerful mode of communication, crucial for the expression of emotions, the development of new ideas and the building of relationships. It was also somewhat worrisome as most of the interviews we did with professional and managers showed that writing was becoming a weak mode of communication and with it, several key skills such as analysis, articulation of ideas, reflection - all crucial skills to thinking, were at the risk of disappearing. We do not think that technology does not allow us to use and develop these skills, but in many cases, it allows to be lazy and stop practicing them.

This book in that sense ends with a call for action: let's acknowledge what we can do with writing and let's cultivate it while enjoying all the potential unleashed by today's technology.