Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 63, by Joe Podolsky:
From: JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 96 13:19:30 -0700
Subject: Reach Out and Touch Someone
Last week, HP Quality held a symposium for Quality Maturity System reviewers. The day before the symposium began, we were offered a seminar by Bill Daniels, a consultant on communication and meetings. Bill divides meetings into two types: "task forces," where experts meet to discuss complex issues; and "regular meetings," where people gather to exercise some facit of organizational power. As the name indicates, most meetings are or evolve into "regular meetings." Bill has fascinating insights into the conduct of these meetings, and I'll probably write about his ideas in a future jotting. If you can't wait, get his book: William R. Daniels, _Orchestrating Powerful Regular Meetings_, San Diego: Pfeiffer & Co., 1993. More to the point of this jotting, however, is a statistic Daniels quoted. He said that in any interpersonal communication, 55% of the meaning is transmitted by non-verbal body language, 38% is transmitted by the intonation of the voice, and only 7% comes from the actual words being sent. He backs this up with some studies, and I'm sure that these general numbers hide lots of specific exceptions, but his point feels right on. We've got five senses, but only physical presence gives us the benefit of smell and touch, arguably the most primitive and powerful of the senses. (For the sake of propriety, I'll leave out a discussion of taste as a communication media, but sharing taste sensations at a meal has a long history as a way of creating bonding relationships through which communications occur.) Yet, we are the first settlers in the cyberspace frontier, a land of words and graphics and, sometimes, sound. But cyberspace is only a 7% solution. We know the smell of a physical road; we feel the heat of the pavement and the wind of rushing cars; but we touch only the keyboard and mouse as we hike on the Internet. Except for a few poets and novelists, words are a very inefficient medium for communication; telephones are better, but being digital is not nearly as good as being there. In his _Forbes ASAP_ column on June 3, 1996, Tom Peters makes this point with several quotes: "90% of life is just showing up" (Woody Allen); "The necessary complement to the Net is the 747" (Sun Microsystems CIO, Bill Raduchel); and, "You can pretend to care. You can't pretend to be there" (author Texas Bix Bender). Peters uses these quotes to talk about a start-up he's involved with in India. It was falling more and more behind schedule, in spite of frequent e-mail messages and passionate phone calls, until he made the 12,000 mile trek and demonstrated his concern with his physical presence. This isn't exactly news. Most of us know all about the need for face-to-face meetings and have the frequent flyer miles to prove it. But I'm not sure that we think through all the implications of our common need for physical contact. For example, someone (I don't remember who) observed that a leader must be physically present for certain responsibilities and can not delegate them: a crisis, deciding policy that affects organizational culture, tough personnel decisions, and symbolic acts. These are all situations that require credible caring (see Texas Bix Bender's quote above). Even more interesting, much of our information products are aimed at replacing physical contact. Fred Brooks (of _Mythical Man-Month_ and University of North Carolina fame) received the first ACM Allan Newell award, and his acceptance speech was published in the March 1996 issue of _Communications of the ACM_. In that speech, he asks us to focus "on the gift of work, on the capability and call to make things." (It may be, for example, that the current bumper crop of personal Web pages is a sign of our individual need to leave a creative mark in cyberspace.) Brooks observes that television, for example, arguably the most pervasive information product of the past half-century, is a passive, frantic, non-social environment. He fears that in our quest for artificial intelligence (AI) information products and people-replacing systems, we are moving toward the television model. Brooks believes that the concept of AI should be replaced with the goal of "IA, intelligence amplification." Brooks says, "...at any given level of systems technology...a machine _and_ a mind can beat a mind-imitating machine working by itself." Bringing that close to home, for example, to what extent are we spending resources to enable our new order fulfillment systems to replace the work of field sales people and configuration specialists rather than developing systems that depend on but enhance their human skills? This brings me to one of my favorite topics, human-computer interfaces. In the March 1996 issue of _ACM Interactions_, Pamela Mead and Chris Pacione write about their research in "Time and Space." Most of the things we do with systems takes place in what the authors call "representational space," where we use various techniques (such as perspective) to create a "window" that makes us comfortable with what we see on our screens. "Abstract space," on the other hand, allows us to create virtual cyberspace worlds that violate the learned spatial literacy rules, rules that define, for example, "front/behind,""over/under," and "near/far." But while abstract space gives us the power of virtuality, neither space concept substitutes for being there. Neither gives us the smell of a place, the background noises, the images at the periphery of our vision. In abstract space we can create textures that do not exist in our learned view of the real world, but they are surfaces that we can only see with our imagination, never our fingers. Time creates still other, perhaps fundamental issues. "Monochronic time" is linear; it's the time of clocks and calendars and Von Neumann computers. But our reality is that of "polychronic time" where several things happen at once, where our perceptions of time are relative. Time flies when we're having fun, but drags when we're bored; years are long when we're young and fly by as we age. Information systems can create virtual worlds where many things seem to happen at once, but, in the real world, we are unconsciously aware of the relationship between the linear clock of astronomy and our personal biological journey from birth. Our continuing challenge is to develop technologies and systems that involve more of our senses, that move us up Daniels' scale so that electronic communication gets closer to full meaning. We need to build systems that involve people, not exclude them, that allow them to switch between representational and abstract space to gain the benefits of each. But, there is no substitute for being there. Yes, we need to be mindful of work/life balance issues. Yes, we need to understand the cost and inefficiency of business travel. And yes, to the extent possible, we should use our technology for routine collaboration. But we also should be realistic about the limitations of electronic communications and set our expectations accordingly. In the end we each instinctively know that our most precious asset is our time. Investing that asset in face-to-face contact will always be appreciated as our most sincere and visible sign of caring. What systems can you tell us about that move us closer to full sensory communication? How do you feel about the need to "be there"? Joe