CHAPTER 2

THE SILO EFFECT

In May of 2000, the then-president of Disney, Michael Eisner, spoke to the graduating class at the University of California at Berkeley to an audience that consisted of many technically oriented new graduates. In an era when the dot-com boom was still hot, he surprised many by saying some rather unflattering things about email. He viewed it as a technology that would pose a danger to the success of companies and organizations, due to the very thing that made it popular—its immediacy. Mr. Eisner said that this would lead to a flood of unscreened emotion, with messages being sent before they were ready and information being mailed to the wrong people.

… email is not perfect. Because it’s spread so fast, it has raced ahead of our abilities to fully adapt to this new form of communication. Consider the way we learn about traditional interaction. It takes years to hone communication skills in a classroom, at a party, or when mingling in diverse company. It takes years to learn that there is a way to talk to your peers that differs from talking to your boss or your parents or your teachers or a policeman or a judge. And now here suddenly comes email … and, to a frightening extent, we’re unprepared.

With email, our impulse is not to file and save, but to click and send … once we hit that send button, there’s no going back.¹

He was right, of course, and since that speech was made, the environment in which work is done and business transacted has grown, with new tools, techniques, and relationships appearing regularly. And that’s where the problem lies. It has to do with the way in which speed, combined with the act of tending to surface-level priorities, discourages innovation. It reduces our ability to find new and better ways to do things, to win customers, or to enhance productivity, simply because there is so little time for reflection, communication, and shared learning. I call this overall concept the Silo Effect, since it represents a blinding of intellectual capacity and a reduction of the potential for full productivity. In this chapter, I wish to illustrate the main components that go into building our silo, so that in later chapters we can set up some realistic plans to break the silo down and capitalize on the human and technological brilliance of our age.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

Information overload is not a new concept. Most people are aware of it, have experienced it, and accept that it comes with the territory. It’s part of work. One of the primary carriers of information overload is, of course, email. It, too, is accepted as part of work, both as a tool for getting things done and as an obstacle to that same goal. But few know how to deal with it properly, or why they should. It’s just there, and we use it.

The problem lies not with the connectivity aspect, but with its speed. Email is written fast, it is sent fast, and the expectation is that we must respond to it fast. Not only do people tend to overrule the importance of their current tasks in order to respond to the demands of email, the momentum that this creates carries through to other activities until they are all processed and dealt with in a similar, hurried, surface-level fashion. Reflex and reaction start to count more than anything else.

Most people work with their email system always on, and although typical volumes of inbound messages vary from person to person, what everyone has in common is that they arrive at unpredictable times, they announce their arrival with some sort of distracting signal, and, like a tantalizing unwrapped present, they demand to be opened. Consequently, it’s not a surprise that the Infomania study described in Chapter 1, with its headline-grabbing parallels to marijuana use, highlight a sobering fact: It’s not just addiction to email that is costing us; it’s the mental erosion that comes from being an information junkie that is causing the longer-term harm. People are just not able to think clearly when their brains are impaired through constant high-speed distractions.

Is email all bad? No, not at all. It’s a great tool, just as a hammer is a great tool. But when it becomes a source of distraction, it descends to the same level of inefficiency as a hammer does when used by a clumsy carpenter—painfully unproductive.

There are many people, of course, who would argue strongly that email is essential to business, and that their job depends on timely response. That may be. But then again, it might not be, entirely. When people are asked to consider the nature of their email messages and what impact they have on their day-to-day success, they are often able to place the mail into two groups, with messages that are truly urgent making up the minority, and those that are not urgent making up the majority. The real answer may have more to do with a person’s sense of “customer service urgency,” or perhaps their fear of repercussions if the expectations of the sender are not met immediately. (The terms “customer,” and “client” are used in this book to define not just external members of the business community who pay for your products and/or services, but also those on the inside—people you report to, who report to you, or with whom you interact on a regular basis.)

Great customer service is about getting back to the customer promptly, certainly, but it is also about getting back to him with a solution, an opportunity, something that will continue to substantiate in the customer’s mind the value of doing business with you as opposed to your competitor down the street, around the world, or in the next office. Excellent customer service requires something that will further the relationship and open up new avenues of opportunity together—in a word, depth.

Information overload caused by speed also tends to obscure the notion of what customer service actually means. It’s essential when defining this term to make sure that in addition to our own definition of the term, we clearly understand how our customers would define it. This is what Michael Eisner was referring to in his email speech quoted earlier. It takes time to learn how to communicate with, and then know a customer. In other words, great customer service must be based on great customer comprehension. Let’s look at an example: Does answering an email the moment it comes in, or answering a ringing phone before the second ring constitute great customer service? It might, but then again, in some professions such reactions might be an indication that you’re not busy enough, and therefore you’re not the best in your field. What about people who respond to an emailed inquiry on their wireless PDA at 10:30 p.m.? Will such an action be indispensable to your customer, or will it tell him that you are working over-long hours, potentially burning out, and therefore likely unavailable for a long-term quality relationship? The point is this: Do you know where your customers sit on this issue? Have you taken the time to ask them? Or are you too busy to find out?

Speed is not the sole indicator of quality. When you go out to dinner at an upscale restaurant, you would expect the waiter to serve you immediately, because that’s central to his role. But you would not expect your order to be delivered immediately. Instead, we hold to the belief that a professional, competent chef will take reasonable time to prepare and plate the meal properly, with the attention to detail that makes the dining experience at this restaurant much more enjoyable than at the fast food joint down the street. The strength of your company’s reputation no doubt rests as much on the quality of your products and services as it does with the relationships you have with customers. It would be expected, therefore, that the company work to maintain this level of excellence. Information overload distorts our ability to do the research and make mindful decisions to uphold this standard. It forces people into a mental state in which they feel they must reciprocate at the same pace as the incoming stimulus, and that’s what gets them stuck inside the silo.

Case Study: The Funeral Caller

Leanne is unhappy. Over the course of one evening, between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., a certain client called her three times, leaving three messages and later, two emails, each with the same message. Upon returning her calls the next morning, Leanne spoke to this client, who voiced his dissatisfaction that it had taken her so long to respond. The next time the client called her, it was during the day, during a funeral that he was attending. Again Leanne felt guilty about not being sufficiently available.

What would you do with a person like this? How does this tie in with the ideas of customer service? What advice would you give?

Leanne’s reaction was that perhaps she should be available 24/7, in order to avoid ruffling this customer’s feathers again. My advice to Leanne was the opposite. I suggested she not let this trend continue. There will always be demanding people in the world, people who work at a different pace and different hours. But to fall in line unquestioningly means giving up autonomy, and worse, conditioning this person to expect the same type of treatment every time. No evening or weekend will ever be safe again. This, to me, is not customer service. It’s an example of Boxer’s “death-in-harness” brought about by speed. I suggested she explain to this customer that she would be happy to deal with late evening issues if they were truly emergencies, but that the high quality of work that he is paying for is best produced during the day. I would suggest also that she ask this client for more information about his timelines and priorities, in order to manage his expectations in advance rather than as they happen. By taking the time to learn more about her client, possibly identifying him as a workaholic, or merely a stressed or disorganized businessperson, Leanne would be in a far better position to anticipate his needs and prepare accordingly. This is the kind of communication and understanding you just can’t get through email.

My second piece of advice was for Leanne to pause and take some time to assess this customer’s overall value. Sometimes the cost of maintaining a client can be too high. Leanne was not able to grasp this until I explained that the cost should not be viewed in terms of the relationship with that particular client, but in terms of what it is doing to all of her other client relationships—the ones she can no longer maintain correctly owing to the incessant demands of this one individual. This is typical of the way in which the silo effect brought on by information overload wreaks its havoc by preventing us from seeing ourselves from the outside.

THE NEED TO STAY IN THE LOOP

The addiction to speed goes further than just the hard-wired need to respond to individual messages and clients. It has insinuated itself even further under our collective skin to the point that even when there is no email or voicemail message demanding immediate response, a craving still lurks. It’s the need to stay “in the loop.”

This is an obsession, a very human one. As I described earlier, a great many people yield to the temptation to check in and read their email moments before going to bed, simply because they have the technology to do so. Or they check it during their kid’s school recital, or during a meeting, or in a restaurant or movie theatre. Some call in to the office for messages while driving. (This latter example, of using a cell phone while driving, has been proven to deliver the same degree of functional impairment as does a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent, which is the standard of defining impaired driving in most states and provinces.²) The call of the loop even makes a walk between point A and point B feel like wasted time if our wireless PDA or cell phone is not activated and used along the way.

These people will even check into the office while they’re on vacation, sometimes sending the rest of the family off to enjoy themselves, while they stay in the hotel room, tending to the loop. Surely this isn’t because they find their work to be preferable to spending time with their children. It’s because they fear the repercussions of not being there. Work or customer issues might escalate into problems in their absence, and then one of two things might happen:

• Either the problem gets worse because they’re not there to fix it, which is going to cause further problems after the vacation is over, or

• The problem gets fixed in their absence, thereby exposing them as less-than-absolutely-essential parts of the corporate machine.

People who feel the pressure or the desire to always stay in this loop should take care to note that a loop is much like a hamster wheel, with no beginning and no end. It does not guarantee progress. Instead, it guarantees a constant revisiting of the same surface-level problems and delays, eliminating along the way any possibility for longer-term creative resolution. Such a loss of control can actually result in the obligation to stay in the loop actually being imposed by others, not just by yourself. Consider the following case study.

Mary’s Interruptions and the Escalation Factor

Mary works for a large organization. Like many of her colleagues she receives a large number of emails per day from customers who have questions or requests. Many of these people send their messages with the “Read Receipt” feature attached, which informs them the moment Mary has opened and read their letter. Mary already knows that it makes sense to assign all but the most important emails to specific time blocks in the day, rather than answering each the moment it arrives. She knows all about the value and power of focus. Unfortunately, her customers don’t. If they do not receive a response back within five minutes, they pick up the phone and call, and if Mary doesn’t answer, they go straight to her manager. And that’s Mary’s fear. “If you don’t stay inside the loop,” she says, “the problem merely escalates to another level.” Hence, the fear factor. Mary’s fear of stepping out of the loop creates a silo, in which she feels obliged to respond, not just because of a hard-wired biological reflex, but because of the dangerous implications inherent in not answering. Who needs the hassle of annoyed clients, colleagues, or managers?

How to Manage the Loop

What is the solution? Well, what if Mary were to take a different tack? To use an outdoorsy metaphor, instead of spending 100 percent of her time fending off mosquitoes, would it not make more sense to buy a tent? Would it not be better if she reduced the pace of her busy week (at select times, anyway) and invested some of her time in sitting down with her manager (the one to whom the calls get escalated), to explain the reasons for her time allotments, the value of the work she prefers to focus on, her strategies for returning the customers’ calls, and her plans for satisfying their needs, even if it’s a few minutes or half an hour after their call? Could she not seek to get her manager on side, or perhaps collaborate towards a joint strategy? Could she not also spend a little time touching base with her mentors, either inside or outside the organization, to compare notes and to learn how others keep both their job and their sanity in the face of relentless expectations? This solution would be eminently possible, for Mary, as well as for the vacationers, and all other prisoners of the loop if they were to cool down and use the power of slow to maximize their use of human-to-human communication as a practical antidote to the speed of expectation.

Tips on Managing the Call of the Loop

• Recognize that few things are important enough to need all of your time, all the time.

• Appoint and train a “deputy” who can take and manage your calls for you in your absence.

• Leave suitable instructions at your key clients as to when you are and are not available—help them construct their days and projects around you rather than simply reacting.

• If escalation is a problem, educate your manager—get her on side.

• Always face every project by identifying the worries and concerns that your customer might have and seek to address them in advance.

• Recognize that no matter how valuable you are, the company will survive until you return.

• Remember the old phrase, “nobody ever laid on their deathbed wishing they’d spent more time at the office.”

• Recognize that rest and refreshment will make you a more competent and valuable professional.

PRESENTEEISM

The ripple effect of Information Overload, combined with the fear of being out of the loop, has led to a productivity loss phenomenon known as presenteeism, in which people come to work even though they are fatigued, ill, or overstressed—partly out of the fear of losing their job, and partly, once again, of not being in touch with the expected momentum of their work. Presenteeism is a term coined by Manchester University psychologist Cary Cooper. He describes it as like absenteeism in all respects except for the fact that the employee in question is physically at the workplace instead of home in bed.

Employees do not have to be actually ill or paralyzed with stress to experience presenteeism. Consider:

• Secretly tending to email on your wireless PDA while in a meeting

• Attempting to focus on having a conversation with someone while your cellphone rings in your briefcase

• Trying to maintain a telephone conversation with someone, while continuing to type on your computer keyboard

• Trying to focus on a meeting or project after having worked late the night before, or while suffering from jetlag

• Trying to complete one project with the pressure of another looming clearly in your mind

• Trying to work on office-related tasks at home, while the kids are watching TV right next to you

These are all examples of presenteeism that combine our fear of repercussions with a perceived obligation to keep going inside the loop. This has led to legions of professionals showing up at their place of work every day, and despite their best efforts, they just can’t function fully. The short-term results are sometimes obvious, for example, when meetings go off track or tasks are not completed on time, but sometimes they are less so, since it’s not always easy to perceive optimum and sub-optimum performance when standing in the midst of it.

The Tachometer on Your Forehead

In Chapter 1, I used the example of early morning gasoline in reference to the viscosity of the thinking process at select times of the day. It is appropriate to extend the automotive analogy at this point by drawing attention to the gauge that most cars have on their instrument panel, called a tachometer, which indicates the number of revolutions per minute the engine is doing. There is an optimum zone at which your car has been designed to operate best, usually when it’s in top gear and cruising along an open road without needing to stop and start constantly.

If we, as human beings, were able to incorporate a similar gauge on our own foreheads, one that registered the amount of our mental potential and throughput, we would hope that it stayed most of the time in a similar type of “optimum zone,” perhaps within 75 to 90 percent capacity. We could really do with a gauge like that because we lack any other reliable form of quantifying mental capacity on a minute-by-minute basis. We would be surprised to learn, however, just how often the needle dips down into regions much lower than that. Distraction and disruptions force the brain’s own thinking patterns to regularly re-set and rebuild. Presenteeism, caused by speed, fatigue, stress, and worry, forces the needle backwards to a zone far below what is desired and expected. Such a gauge would clearly illustrate the cost of our reaction to high-speed expectation. It’s the human equivalent of driving with the handbrake on.

Can you identify presenteeism in yourself? In your colleagues? If a colleague was suffering with a fever and was obviously fading fast, common sense would tell you to send that person home. Presenteeism is not so obvious, however. It needs to be identified and dealt with, in yourself and others. This is a practiced skill.

Tips for Identifying Presenteeism in Others

• Review timesheets or other evidence of people staying overly long at their workplace.

• Observe the timestamps on emails and other messages—when are they being sent? What time of day or night?

• Observe whether your staff/colleagues are taking breaks for lunch and even to stretch and move (if their job is sedentary).

• Consult the company medical department and ask, within the bounds of confidentiality, whether there has been an overall rise in headache, stress-related, or even breathing-related complaints.

• Review the frequency of contact between workers and their managers.

• Take note of the quality of participation in meetings and conversations as well as the quality of spelling and completeness in emails.

• Take note of the same symptoms in yourself.

INTELLECTUAL ISOLATION

The fourth silo effect at work is that of intellectual isolation. This problem is best illustrated by another book, A Whole New Mind, by Daniel Pink, which, when paired with The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman, helps paint a clear picture of the cost of improperly adapting to the changing demands of business. Specifically, Pink outlines the need for a new mindset. He demonstrates how the “other” side of the brain, the creative side, is more necessary than ever, even amidst traditionally logical detail-oriented professions such as accounting and law. He writes:

It is an age animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life—one that prizes aptitudes that I call “high concept” and “high touch.” High concept involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.³

Pink and Freidman point to the rapidly emerging technologies that make up the wired and wireless world. These are flattening the world out, they say, allowing business to be done anywhere and anytime. And that’s great, for some things. It’s faster and cheaper to send digital blueprints by email than to courier the originals, but what of the synergies that would come up with a building’s conception and financing in the first place? What of the human elements that go into anticipating and understanding the intangibles that always occur in every project?

Case Study: Mass Transit Chaos

Recently the mass transit rail system of a major North American city noticed something disturbing: More and more of their engineers were calling in sick on Fridays than on any other day. And when the engineers don’t come to work, the trains don’t roll. Though a few of these engineers could have been legitimately excused as ill, many of them had excused themselves simply because they were too tired and stressed, and believed that they could not operate their trains safely. As a result certain scheduled runs had to be cancelled, and thousands of commuters had to find alternate ways to travel. The economy of an entire city was affected.

Now on the surface this case study appears to only be about absenteeism. But it’s important to observe why and how such absenteeism was allowed to develop and flourish in the first place. What if it was discovered that all of the scheduling of these engineers had been done through email or electronic calendaring? Such tools are convenient, yes, but they are also sterile. They are made up of digitized text and numbers. This creates a situation in which the managers who allocate the routes or the shifts, managers who themselves are likely overburdened, are forced to assign tasks to people they cannot see. This is not communicating. Human communication is an organic, interactive thing. It requires more than just words. As sentient creatures, we human beings take in most of our knowledge through a combination of senses. In terms of human communication this means body language (non-verbal communication), eye contact, inflection, and vocal tone, in addition to the words spoken.

A manager who is allowed the time to visit with her staff, or even talk to them by telephone might be able to pick up on subtle pauses, tonalities, or other cues that twig her to the fact that even though her employee says “yes” to a job request, the non-verbal element of the conversation tells a different story. This is an example of the “high touch” ideal that Daniel Pink refers to. It takes more time to execute, but saves more in the long run.

Case Study: How a Busy Lawyer Escapes Intellectual Isolation

Amy Schuilman, a partner in the law firm of DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, is one of a dozen high-profile executives who were interviewed by Fortune magazine for a feature entitled “How I Work,” which sought to identify just how these successful people get through their day. Ms. Schuilman revealed a terrific insight into the nature of email, cell phones, and true human connection. Even though she herself answers hundreds of emails a day, she has a system and a pair of assistants to help control this influx and keep it manageable. She says:

I don’t leave my cell phone on. I’m often in meetings or with clients, and I don’t want people to assume that they can dial my cell phone and get me, unless it’s an emergency. You can’t leave it on if you’re in a meeting with the CEO or a witness. It’s really important to focus on the problem at hand. You get into a rhythm of a conversation, and you have to honor that rhythm. People get anxious when they feel they’re going to be interrupted. What a good lawyer brings to a problem, in addition to creative solutions, is a quality of attentiveness. You can’t listen with half an ear.”⁴

You see that? Rhythm! Not just book smarts, but rhythm! A knowledge of how people act and respond on a level separate from that of just words. Ms. Schuilman takes advantage of the principle of rhythm, not merely to express her own ideas, but to ensure that the person with whom she’s talking does not feel stress through anticipation of being cut off. That’s true human insight.

Of course, it is much easier, physically, emotionally, and time-wise, to electronically dispatch a request, a problem, an issue or an assignment to another human being, but there is no room in such a unidirectional messaging system for true discussion. And this is what I’m really getting at here. The pressure we feel to deal with issues quickly and to avoid having to take time to explain them or give them further depth makes us want to turn to fast communications first. But those very technologies actually tend to prolong the exercise or even deny its successful completion.

Case Study: Email Badminton

Bruno and Karen work for a financial services company. They both have full schedules and tight deadlines to meet. Around 3:00 p.m., Karen emails Bruno and asks him for his thoughts on a project scheduled for the spring. Bruno looks up from his work when the email arrives. The subject line says only, “Spring Promotion ideas,” but since it’s from Karen, his boss, he feels obliged to look at it right away. He breaks completely away from his current train of thought and opens the email. It asks Bruno for his thoughts, so he dutifully starts to pound away at his keyboard. Some of the ideas, he knows, may go against Karen’s own plans, but others might hit the mark, and at any rate he feels safer putting them all in the message. “At least then, it will be on record that I suggested these things,” he thinks to himself, “even if Karen shoots them down.”

The email takes about half an hour to write, proof, correct, and then send, amidst other distractions that add to an already backlogged day. Finally, Bruno sends the email. Since Karen is currently stuck in back-to-back meetings and will be for the duration of the afternoon, Bruno’s response sits in her inbox for two hours until she returns to her desk at 5:40 p.m. Too tired to read it now, she opts to save it for the train ride home, when she can read it at leisure from the inbox of her wireless PDA.

The train, as usual, is packed, and far from quiet. Karen starts to read Bruno’s letter, but cannot think clearly. Fatigue from a long day and too many loud conversations around her make it hard to stay focused. She opts to respond to it later, after the kids are in bed. Finally, late in the evening, Karen gets around to responding to Bruno’s thoughts. She keys in some thoughts and ideas of her own, some in agreement with Bruno, some with politely phrased reservation. The email is dispatched to Bruno at 11:15 p.m., and Karen goes to bed. Still wired from working into the late evening, she tosses and turns for an hour or more.

Bruno gets in around 9:00 a.m. the next morning, and checks his email. He sees the response from Karen, and sees that it’s a long one. But he has no time to read it then, as he’s already late for a 9:00 a.m. meeting. The message waits until 10:30 a.m. And so the saga continues. Over the next two days, the sequence of soliloquies bounces back and forth, carefully addressing points of contention and attempting to summarize what looks to be a very large project. Each response requires time to type and time to wait. Days pass. And both Karen and Bruno remark to their spouses how they don’t know where the time goes. They say there’s just too much to do and that they’ll have to spend part of the weekend, probably Sunday, catching up.

Meanwhile, over in a different department of the same company, a different manager, Lisa, decides she needs to talk to one of her own people, Vern, about their own Spring campaign. Lisa picks up her phone and calls Vern. Seeing that it’s his boss on the phone, Vern picks up. Lisa’s tone conveys her need to talk about this spring issue; it carries layers of urgency and empathy that resonate well with Vern. It pleases him that his manager, as busy as she is, recognizes the work he is putting into their various projects, and her acknowledgement feels good. She says she needs to talk to him this afternoon and would he be available sometime in the next half hour.

Vern says, “Let me finish my train of thought on this other project, and I’ll come to see you in exactly 10 minutes.” Lisa has always liked Vern’s exactness with regard to time and knows he will be true to his promise to arrive in exactly 10 minutes. Since she knows exactly how much time she has, she takes the opportunity to return a couple of matter-of-fact emails confirming upcoming travel arrangements.

Ten minutes later, Vern arrives at her office. They discuss the spring campaign for 20 minutes. Taking subtle cues from eye contact, body language, and vocal tone, they are able to address the more contentious issues and arrive at an action plan that is workable and mutually pleasing. In fact, they enjoy a five-way communication structure:

1. Vern hears and sees what Lisa says, through her words, gestures, and body language.

2. Lisa hears and sees what Vern says, through his own words, gestures, and body language.

3. Vern hears himself as he speaks and is able to correct and refine his ideas on the fly.

4. Lisa is able to do the same as she hears herself speak.

5. Together they review their whiteboard writings, which, although messy, outline a strategy that will lead to the successful roll-out of the campaign. For safety’s sake, Lisa takes a digital picture of the whiteboard. She will email it to Vern later as confirmation of their ideas.

The total time spent from initial phone call to conclusion: 30 minutes.

The silo that Bruno and Karen find themselves in is a creativity silo, based on the misconception that speed is the optimum answer for issues requiring human creativity. Further, the fear of the loop makes them think that all communications must be done via email in order that they become part of the “paper trail” or “audit trail,” a concern otherwise known as the “CYA (Cover Your Assets) Factor.”

The dividend that Vern and Lisa enjoy is obvious: greater productivity, shortened timelines, heightened understanding, and reduced stress. They incorporate the CYA factor only at the end, as a confirmation and summary of their mutual creativity.

Let’s suggest, realistically, that the exercise that Vern and Lisa went through saved them just 50 minutes each (they probably saved more than that). Later, we’ll return to this number and see what those 50 minutes saved can now do for them.

CANDID REACTIONISM

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate some of the larger scale costs of living and working at high speed. It proposes that a solution can be found through slowing down, or cooling down enough to inject a greater amount of person-to-person communication, which leads to greater control, vision, understanding, and productivity in the human-work relationship. Later chapters will deliver additional concrete examples of how to incorporate this into your life, but let’s close this chapter by observing how high-speed results in one final form of theft, caused by candid reactionism. This can be illustrated using two different scenarios: the first, being robbed in a train station and the second, attending meetings.

Robbery through Reactionism

For the professional pickpocket, one of the best tools he could invest in is a wall-mounted sign that reads “Beware of Pickpockets.” With this unlikely device, he needs simply to hang this sign on the wall of a railway or bus station and then sit back and observe as legions of well-meaning people casually pat their pockets or purses, reassuring themselves that their valuables are where they should be, all the while giving the thief clear instructions on where to find the goods.

This is because reaction, especially when done in self-defense, is quick, candid and innocent. By its very nature, reaction happens when a living being responds to a stimulus in an attempt to maintain the stability of its situation. When we react, we are not seeking to control a situation but merely to protect our existence within that situation. If, by contrast, you seek to control or change that situation, especially when it’s to your benefit, then you are no longer reacting. You are proacting.

Hopefully, you might never get robbed by a pickpocket. But do you attend meetings? Do you meet with other people one on one, in groups, or on the phone? If you do, the same type of theft may be taking place.

When a meeting is called, the top priority often becomes the identification of the earliest date and time in which all team members (as well as a suitable room) are available. Assuming, then, that all people involved have agreed upon the meeting’s necessity, who needs to attend, and the duration of the meeting, the event is then calendared and mentally shunted aside since there is too much else for everyone involved to do in the interim—too many other meetings, messages, and crises. When the time for the meeting rolls around, people arrive, perhaps on time, perhaps late. They receive the agenda, read through it, and slowly warm up their minds to the issues at hand. The odds are that such a meeting will be okay but will likely not meet the productivity potential (and cost) of all those people in attendance.

A chairperson’s primary obligation is to recognize that all the people around a meeting table are expensive and that the chief objective of the meeting is to produce something that will justify the cost of these people. No matter what their hourly fee, whether it’s $20 or $250, if people are sitting around a meeting table, they’re not doing their other work, so, in fact, whatever their hourly rate, it’s going to cost the company twice that (the cost of them being at the table plus the cost of what else they’re not doing). As a result, it would be desirable to have all of these expensive people producing something that has a value greater than the double cost of their bottoms on the chairs.

Now, if we took all of these people around the table and morphed them, metaphorically, into one athlete, let’s say an NBA player or an Olympic swimmer, it would be foolish to ask this player to hit the court or the pool without warming up first. Muscles might tear, ligaments might snap if we were to skip the tedious, slow ritual of stretching and warm-up. Yet in many organizations, meetings just start when they start and proceed as best they can, partly because we’re too busy—there’s too much to do during the week to strategize beyond the immediate.

But what if we were to cool down a little and take some time to ensure the meeting actually pays for itself? For example:

• What if the chairperson were to prepare and distribute the meeting agenda (an agenda that identifies the topics that are to be discussed, and therefore what is not to be discussed) a full day or more before the meeting? What might that do to help warm up the mental muscles? How much more productive might a meeting be if the attendees had had time to mull over these issues, even subconsciously, for a time, rather than reading them for the first time upon sitting down at the meeting table?

• What if the meeting chairperson were to choose who should attend, and who need not attend, and perhaps even position certain personality types at select places around the table (through the use of name tent cards), so as to dilute the potential for disruptive behavior or power cliques?

• What if the invitees were reminded and encouraged to slow down enough to actually read the agenda a full 24 hours prior to the meeting in order to capitalize on the warm-up described above and to re-instill in them the sense of importance surrounding the event?

Such approaches aren’t just feel-good practices any more than stretching and warm-up are for an athlete. That’s not what they’re for. They’re there to bring about progress, profit, and success. Careful planning and production of a meeting also allows for more subtle, cerebral leadership skills to work their magic; ones that otherwise might get lost in the rush. Skills such as:

• Recognizing that just getting through a meeting’s agenda does not constitute a successful meeting. A shrewd chairperson listens to what is being said and to what is not being said; she takes note of eye contact, body language, subtle and not-so-subtle gestures, and steers the meeting accordingly.

• Allowing silence for reflection, in order to allow ideas to percolate and to counter the actions of aggressive or domineering speakers. Silence is a scary concept for speed-oriented professionals. The desire to fill the air with words seems to soothe the high-speed mind by providing it with evidence of apparent progress—not always accurate evidence. This is a term that I call ambient momentum, and it will crop up again in a different situation in the next chapter. Silence, by contrast, allows creative thought to crystallize and grow. For example, a chairperson should be sure to count to seven after asking if anyone has questions or comments. Seven seconds is a painfully long time to spend staring at the faces of people around a table or in an audience. But that’s how long the average person needs to both think of something to ask and to marshal the courage and/or energy to ask it.

• Factoring in time for the preparation of minutes. This overlooked and seemingly tedious part of the meeting process is essential to its ultimate success. Since the candid, reactionary nature of modern business forces all people, including the chairperson, to think “event to event,” it is easy to envision a meeting that is scheduled to end at 2:00 p.m. to run the full length of that time, possibly more, after which everyone scurries off to their next appointment. By contrast, a chairperson who schedules an extra 15 minutes for herself and the minute-taker after the meeting has concluded to go over the minutes together, to keep them short, clear, and accurate, stands a better chance of seeing the meeting’s action items actually come to fruition.

Do we have the right to such luxuries? To take the time to plan meetings, to browse the agendas beforehand, and to allow time for follow-up? Yes. Both a right and an obligation. We must push through the dust cloud that the culture of speed has thrown up and recognize that far from being luxuries, these techniques represent a realistic follow-through and prioritization of the workload. When we don’t cool down and prepare for meetings, they run longer and are less focused, resulting in reduced productivity and greater overall expense—just as it is with so many areas of life.

Though this chapter has used meetings and email as primary illustrations of the Silo Effect, the concept goes far beyond just these at-work scenarios It applies to the way we plan projects, the way we do homework, and the way we make purchases. It impacts greatly the life of professional relationships, such as between a manager and her employee, or a supplier and a client. There is a great temptation, for example, to hide behind email during situations of conflict, discomfort, or when we are just pressed for time, and to leave voice mails when a discussion would be more appropriate. Ultimately such shortcuts diminish the skills of clear communication that professionals of all stripes need to draw upon if they are to keep up.

KEY POINTS TO TAKE AWAY

• Michael Eisner identified how technology is starting to erode the ability to understand human contact.

• The Silo Factor happens as a result of speed and results in significant intellectual isolation.

• Information Overload can lead to infomania, which results in lost productivity.

• We have a professional obligation to slow down and weigh the cost of immediate response against its benefits.

• The cost must be viewed in terms of all client relationships, not just specific ones.

• The need to stay in the loop is another human obsession based on a fear of being left out or of losing out.

• Presenteeism refers to people who expect to be able to work even though they are fatigued, ill, overstressed, or distracted.

• Intellectual isolation refers to the danger of ignoring or losing the sentient components of human communication, such as body language and speech rhythms. Teleconferences and videoconferences are somewhat less efficient for this reason.

• Pickpockets can teach us the value of not falling into reactive mode and being proactive whenever possible.

• The Tachometer represents the idea that people’s mental state of energy and alertness is not always where we think it will be. If we had actual tachometers on our foreheads to measure our effectiveness, our awareness of the cost of speed and the value of slow would be much easier to accept.

• Meetings are a day-to-day example where speed and event-to-event thinking diminish the productivity of the meeting itself.

**HOW TO COOL DOWN: THE SILO EFFECT**

Putting Email Aside

Though email is an essential tool of business, it comes with a false illusion of priority.

• How possible might it be for you to close down your email for an hour? Or two? Or two separate hours in the day?

• What benefits in productivity might this deliver to you?

• What dangers might this pose?

• What might the reaction be from colleagues?

• What might the reaction be from your clients or customers?

• What might the reaction be from your boss?

• How might you sell this idea to these different types of people?

Responding to Email After Hours

• Have you felt the need to respond to a client after hours?

• Have you ever stopped to consider the deeper implications of doing this? What message do you think it sends to the client?

• Have you ever asked your clients about the perception it gives them of you?

Consider the types of communications you send by email each day. How many of them might have come to a quicker resolution if a phone conversation had been arranged instead?

Staying in the Loop

• A wireless PDA can actually be turned off. Are you willing to turn yours off? Why/why not?

• By succumbing to the temptation to read and respond to messages far outside of work hours, you will be conditioning others to expect the same behavior consistently and forever. How does this sit with you?

• Would it be possible for you to establish parameters for the times that you are available and not available to communicate, and to discuss these parameters with the people who need to know (clients, managers, etc.), being sure to reinforce in their minds the value this will bring to them in terms of having your undivided attention?

• How much do you fear being left out of the loop?

• What might happen if you were to take a day off from work? Do you have any fears about what you might miss?

• How about a week’s vacation?

• What can you take from your fear statements above that might help eliminate your fears? Who might you talk to about them? What would you say?

The Sound of Silence

• How often do you reach for a phone or PDA when silence or downtime hits?

• Is this the best use of your downtime?

• If you didn’t have any of these tools, not even change for a payphone, what would you do?

Human-to-Human Communication

• What is your own preference for communicating with others? Do you prefer email, voice mail, live phone conversations, or face-to-face meetings?

• Why do you prefer one over the other?

• Why do you think that is?

• What fears or reservations (if any) would you have if it were suggested that you deal with most work issues face to face from now on?

Escalation Issues

• Have you ever experienced a situation where a client called your boss because you did not answer promptly enough?

• What were the repercussions?

• What could you do to deal with escalation in the future?

Fire Your Weakest Client

There is an old adage taken from the 80/20 rulebook that suggests that people in sales should regularly review their client list and fire their “weakest client.” The weakest client is the one whose demands and needs outweigh the value of the business they bring in.

• Regardless whether you are in sales or not, how might this principle apply to you?

• What are the “weakest clients” in your world, e.g. tasks, colleagues, technologies, expectations?

• What could you do to rearrange your daily structure to eliminate or at least minimize your weakest clients?

Presenteeism

• Have you ever been at work at a time when you really should have been home? For example, when you were ill, jetlagged from a recent trip, or just mentally overloaded from too many projects?

• What are your reasons for coming in under these conditions?

• What did you achieve?

• Might there have been alternatives?

• What would your boss say if you were to ask him about strategies for reducing presenteeism in other employees as well as yourself?

• Have you ever called in sick when you weren’t sick but were just too tired or stressed to work?

• Have you ever called in sick just to play hookey?

Meetings

• How well do your meetings run? Are they quick and efficient or long and drawn out?

• What systems do you have in place for quantifying the value and profitability of a meeting?

• What impact do you think you would have on running meetings more efficiently even if you aren’t the chairperson?

The Tachometer

• How are your energy and concentration levels during the day?

• How capable/empowered are you to assign certain tasks to coincide with your strongest/weakest times?

Eisner, Michael. “You’ve Got E-Mail, So Use It Wisely.” Remarks by Michael D. Eisner, chairman and CEO, the Walt Disney Co. at USC’s 117th Commencement, Alumni Memorial Park, May 12, 2000. http://uscnews.usc.edu

Strayer, David L., Drews, Frank A., and Crouch, Dennis J., A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver, Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, June 2006.

Pink, Daniel H., A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, Berkley Mass Market, February 2006.

Murphy, Cait. “Secrets of Greatness: How I Work,” Fortune Magazine, http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/02/news/newsmakers/howiwork_fortune_032006/index.htm

WHEN ONE TRAVELS FAST,
TREES BESIDE THE ROAD BECOME
A WALL MADE OF LEAVES.