Problem Practices | The Perfect Response

The ubiquitous conference call now routinely competes with other tasks: texting, cleaning out the inbox of our e-mail, checking online for some piece of ephemera, or counting the minutes until we can leave.

I have a good friend who flies a lot for work. He regularly commutes to the West Coast, Asia and Europe to meet with clients and other members of his firm. By all accounts, he’s very good at what he does. Even so, on those rare occasions when he momentarily alights in our part of the country, I find myself invariably asking him if he could save a lot of wear and tear by skyping or relying on the standard business tool of the conference call. He usually gives me a half-smile, once asking what I do when I’ve got time on my hands in a meeting that requires listening to disembodied voice through a box.

The truthful answer for me and probably most others huddled around a phone in a conference room is that we go into the human equivalent of a device’s airplane mode. We’re not really connecting. And most of us are probably not ready to play our “A” game. The person on the other end of the conversation is there but also not there. We hear them, but reacting to them is awkward. There is always a sense that the vital rhythms of listening and responding to the unseen person are irretrievably crippled. As my colleagues might say, there is no true synchronicity. Moreover, most of us are now so device-dependant that an extended conversation with the unseen is an open invitation to move on to other tasks: cleaning out the inbox of our e-mail, sending texts, or counting the minutes until we can leave.

Of course the price to pay for being in the same space is not always a picnic. Meeting face to face with an angry clients is taxing. And the logistics of flying long distance are now something to be endured. Crowds, connections and airline schedules have become mazes that can require more energy than the business reasons for the trip. Even so, my friend regularly endures a juggernaut of 8-hour flights and airport transfers to meet in person with clients and co-workers. He seems confident that he can bind those individuals to his agenda much more completely than would be the case if he relied on e-mails or conference calls.

Separated from those we want to reach, we begin to lose the incentive to transcend differences and work through difficult obstacles.

For all of the effort of being in the same space, what is gained? Any answer includes the obvious and the subtle. It’s clearly evident that we pick up a lot of meaning from body language, especially (but not only) the face. As has been said many times in these pages, eye contact matters. It gives us clues to the state of mind of the person we are trying to engage. Moreover, being within four feet of a person we want to influence means they will have an obligation for attention that is usually lost in distant connections. Attention adds energy to the exchange. Throw in the additional advantage of the obligation to actually listen, and the miasma of organizational sleepwalking that characterizes some conference calls can be defeated. My experience is that this ersatz format allows attention to fall to perhaps just one-half of what it could be. Separated from our interlocutor, we begin to lose the incentive to work through difficult obstacles.

Skype or some version of it is an improvement. And there is every reason to celebrate the family and personal connections it can help maintain. But in organizations where personal appearance and presentational skills count much more, making an impression at a distance is difficult.

In addition, knowing that oneself is on camera carries its own distractions. Self-presentation to a camera is restricting and unnatural. It’s more or less like holding up a mirror to ourselves as we speak. And most of us will do better not studying ourselves while we try to brainstorm ways to save the world.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

^{Wikimedia.org.japan}

Too much attention to where we have been can mean that we are perhaps missing beguiling possibilities just around the corner.

It’s a natural impulse to look to the immediate past to make judgments about the future. In a sense it is all we have. And yet for all the changing norms affecting how we connect with each other, it’s still too easy to become wedded to selective memories and romanticized histories.

I seem to recall ever-widening eyes while older members of my family rhapsodized about their own childhoods on horseback, or camped out for the summer near the family’s not very successful silver mine. The stories seem to come from a Technicolor world filled with older family members that were larger than life. One could imagine that they were not that different from those all-American stoics who patiently guided the Smith family through the giddy summer of 1904 in MGM’s Meet Me in Saint Louis.

By contrast, my adolescence seemed to unspool around a far less exciting existence seemingly shot in grainy black and white. To be sure, I have sense colorized it, especially the bits that took our family back to the wonderful mountains not too far from that old mine. But I still marvel at the elders I’ve constructed who lived unpredictable lives in fabulous times.

There’s a point to all of this. We tend to create memories that are equal parts history and fantasy. After all, we are not digital devices. Accuracy of recall is a strength of hard drives, not humans. We often select what are perceived simplicities of the past, especially forms of family intimacy that probably overstate the closeness we desire and the tensions we’d like to forget.

It’s worth remembering that too much attention to the receding landscape in the rear view mirror can mean that we are perhaps missing beguiling possibilities just around the corner.

It’s inevitable that new forms will rise and challenge the dominance of previously invincible media.

Nowhere is this more true than in our preferred ways of connecting with others. We know how and when connecting works for us. We understand our strengths, even as we puzzle over new digital platforms and their peculiar rules of engagement. But as the great media theorist Marshall McLuhan cautioned, media types and forms of address evolve ceaselessly and irrevocably, as relentless in changing the landscape as the flow of volcanic magma from Hawaii’s Mount Kilauea.

There’s no going back. Old forms of media don’t necessarily die out. They co-exist or become transformed. Think of radio today, sixty-five years after television captured its place as the nation’s preferred medium. Radio is still with us and doing reasonably well. But it’s inevitable that new forms will rise and challenge previously dominant media. In his day Plato decried the growing interest in written texts. Similarly, John Philip Sousa was none too happy to have his music imperfectly captured on noisy shellac recordings. And yet the work of both is alive because of the “new” media they reluctantly anticipated.

The challenge is to get the mix right for an individual life. We need to be more conscious of the expansion of social media and cell technology have cost us and what they’ve allowed. Choices must be made because our lives can easily be trashed and overwhelmed by media distractions.

One example: It’s easy to poke fun at online dating services. They are sold to us mostly by peddling notions of romantic love that haven’t been in vogue since the 50s. And yet just when we think we couldn’t push ourselves any further from authentic personal relationships, a friend beams with pride over the new person who has entered their life through a digital porthole. Cole Porter didn’t write love songs about online romance. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.

Comments: woodward@tcnj.edu

The Perfect Response

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Category Archives: Problem Practices

Sleepwalking Through A Conference Call