Why Stories are the Future of Team Communication
You can be connected to your colleague in high def video anywhere in the world for virtually nothing. You can do this while you’re scanning your inbox for something that may be important. While you’re doing this you feel confident that you’ll get a chat notification from your team if you’re needed for something. And of course you’re accessible by phone or text for those who know your number. Communication-wise, we live in an highly enabled future all of a sudden. We aren’t celebrating.
Tomatoes too. We can find them anywhere. However, tomatoes need to be shippable so we only grow those that can stand up to the bumps. The time it takes to ship also means they often ripen post picking and without any sunlight. These tomatoes are always available but when you taste a tomato from the garden you remember we’ve lost something great in our efficiency.
I’m optimistic about this. It’s an evolving process. We recognize things can be better and we improve. There’s opportunity in these trade offs. Coffee certainly has gone through this process of becoming an inferior product through mass production only to come back to its original deliciousness while still being accessible everywhere. It’s not a circle back to its roots but more like a spiral that curves toward perfection.
Communication-wise we’re experiencing incredible abundance but unfortunately we’ve lost things. We have urgency overpowering importance, agendas eclipsing authenticity, and chronic direction changes due to a communication recency effect (the phenomenon where people perceive recent information as more valid).
Urgent vs Important
Information use to be batched simply because of limitations in the medium. News would be delivered via newspaper at the beginning of the day or distributed via TV for the six o’clock news. Often none of the information was urgent but most of it important.
Now we get news as it happens. It’s great that technology can do this so we adopt it. We adopt it at work so we get emails or notifications as things change. Our colleagues can forward information, ask questions, get involved in discussions with anyone anywhere. There’s a great battle for our attention and urgency is the tool of choice to get attention. Jason Fried recently went into detail on this problem specifically with team chat tools:
App developers know this while they engineer for user engagement. The best notifications use urgency to introduce some degree of anxiety (via Danny Trinh and Scott Belsky):
We should not accept this.
We need to focus. There’s important work to be done. We ignore emails. We find quiet corners to get work done. We shut down meetings that pop into our schedules and chat notifications that pop into our view. We look for tools to force us into better habits (via Product Hunt):
But ultimately we still need communication to happen especially when working as part of a team.
Agendas vs Authenticity
App developers have an agenda. They want you to love their app and in some way spend more time and money with them. They use tools like notifications and urgency to drive their agenda under the guise of helping you.
We’ve all worked with colleagues that use similar techniques. Often they’re not trying to be manipulative. They’re doing what they’ve found to be successful for getting their work done. And most of the time we can’t empathize because we don’t know what their work is. We’ve given up having a deep understanding of our colleagues work so that we can communicate shallowly and frequently. We see many short persuasive statements pushing unknown agendas rather than authentic explanations unfold over time. Emails and chats rather voices and emotions.
The Recency Effect
The overflow of urgency in communication means that the most recent information often takes precedence. How could it not though? In addition to the use of urgency, old communication stagnates becoming incorrect over time. It appears antiquated and embarrassing. As managers we’re using this effect as a lazy shortcut to setting new directions.
Additionally, as we receive increasing amounts of recent communication our perception of old is shrinking from years to days to hours. Our task switching is escalating as we try to keep up. New information appears less compelling as it will soon be replaced. Technology has thrown you in a dizzying whirlpool which makes you feel like you’re drowning grasping for something to understand. The solution to this is not stubbornly committing to original ideas. It’s storytelling. Ideas want to be deeply understood and evolve naturally as they’re applied and retold. We’re out of practice but we’ve had the ability to do this for as long as we’ve been human.
We’re Storytellers
We’re on a curve of the communication spiral approaching perfection. We were once great story tellers evolving our ideas from generation to generation. Now with modern technology we’re consuming more ideas but have dramatically decreased retelling. This effect is boldly pronounced inside modern companies. Stories NEED to be retold. Stories evolve when they’re retold. They adapt to new people and circumstances.
Our work communication needs to dramatically ramp up telling stories about our work and where we’re going and listening to our colleagues stories. The system of record for your company’s knowledge is not in google docs, powerpoints, or gantt charts. It’s in the heads of all employees. Storytelling is the most effective collaboration tool to keep ideas synchronized and evolving.
How to Tell Stories
Cancel meetings, turn off email and chat notifications. To do this we need to build strong social antibodies (via Nir Eyal):
Go talk to people about what you’re doing. Ask them questions about what they’re doing. Listen. Incorporate stories from other colleagues into your own. Spend 80% of your time on focused undistracted work and the remaining 20 on telling stories and listening to them. It sounds time consuming but you’ll find that without the distractions of modern communication your focused time will be incredibly productive (ie Deep Work, Srinivas Rao):
Additionally you’ll have less need for planning and goal setting tools to keep everyone aligned and less time spent to continually keeping them up to date. Managers spend less time keeping everyone aligned. Best of all this habit will bring back a critically missing human element to your work day making a disconnected team feel like family. That’s progress we can celebrate.
Before you go…
If this perspective resonates with you then check out Catch. We’re building a video based tool for teams to build and share their stories.
