The Corrosive Effect of E-Mail

In com-plex social sys-tems, tech-nol-o-gy always unfolds unex-pect-ed side effects. When IBM intro-duced an inter-nal e?mail sys-tem in the 1980s, the very high cost of com-put-ing pow-er at the time made it nec-es-sary to ana-lyze very pre-cise-ly how peo-ple were com-mu-ni-cat-ing with mem-os and phone calls. It was assumed that this com-mu-ni-ca-tion would shift to the e?mail sys-tem and, based on this, the main-frame com-put-er was gen-er-ous-ly sized. Nev-er-the-less, the sys-tem was already mas-sive-ly over-loaded in the first weeks. ( Cal New-port, When Tech-nol-o-gy Goes Awry. In: Com-mu-ni-ca-tions of the ACM, May 2020, Vol. 63 №5).

Because it was so much eas-i-er to com-mu-ni-cate via e?mail, employ-ees obvi-ous-ly used this tech-nol-o-gy much more than one would have expect-ed for their actu-al work. This would also be under-stand-able if this addi-tion-al com-mu-ni-ca-tion had been nec-es-sary or at least ben-e-fi-cial for their actu-al work. Unfor-tu-nate-ly this was not the case. In his arti-cle, Cal New-port quotes Adri-an Stone, an engi-neer on the team respon-si-ble for intro-duc-ing the e?mail sys-tem at IBM: “Thus — in a mere week or so — was gained and blown the poten-tial pro-duc-tiv-i-ty gain of email.”

Most knowl-edge work-ers believe that email is a pas-sive tool they choose to use to make their real workeas-i-er. But […] this tech-nol-o-gy is not pas-sive; it instead active-ly changes what we mean by “real work.”

Cal New-port. A Mod-est Pro-pos-al: Elim-i-nate Email. In: Har-vard Busi-ness Review, Feb-ru-ary 18, 2016.

And that was just the begin-ning of a major mis-un-der-stand-ing, to which we still owe immense pro-duc-tiv-i-ty loss-es. Most knowl-edge work-ers see e?mail pri-mar-i-ly as a tool that sup-ports them in their actu-al work. In fact, e?mail has changed the way we col-lab-o-rate sig-nif-i-cant-ly. Where-as in the past, work-flows had to be planned more pre-cise-ly, today all it takes is to send an e?mail quick-ly to get rid of the prob-lem. The unin-tend-ed side effect of this tech-nol-o-gy is there-fore an unstruc-tured work-flow. To a large extent, every-day life now con-sists of send-ing, check-ing and reply-ing to an ever-increas-ing flood of mes-sages so that the work some-how progresses.

What was orig-i-nal-ly intend-ed to sup-port the work, thus unin-ten-tion-al-ly became the very essence of work for many knowl-edge work-ers. In this respect, new-er tech-nolo-gies such as group chats in Slack and Co. should also be treat-ed with cau-tion, because they fur-ther fuel the struc-tur-al loss in work orga-ni-za-tion by mak-ing com-mu-ni-ca-tion even easier.

Meet-ings are by def-i-n-i-tion a con-ces-sion to defi-cient orga-ni-za-tion. For one either meets or one works.

Peter F. Druck-er. The Effec-tive Excec-u-tive, p. 44

Sim-i-lar-ly, with the sec-ond plague of large orga-ni-za-tions, name-ly cal-en-dars stuffed to burst-ing with meet-ings. Of course, meet-ings are not new tech-nol-o-gy per se, but cal-en-dar soft-ware like Out-look and shared cal-en-dars have made it much eas-i-er to set up a meet-ing for every-one. What used to require a lot of plan-ning and phone calls from assis-tants is now done at the touch of a but-ton and is there-fore used exces-sive-ly. Now, with the increased amount of dis-trib-uted work in the home office due to the pan-dem-ic, this is even more so because video con-fer-enc-ing no longer requires phys-i-cal presence.

Nei-ther e?mail nor meet-ings are a prob-lem per se, but rather their cor-ro-sive effect on struc-tured work-flows. Their sim-plic-i-ty leads to a col-lab-o-ra-tion that essen-tial-ly works by call-ing out. So it does-n’t real-ly help to start with these symp-toms, but rather with the ques-tion of how col-lab-o-ra-tion can be bet-ter orga-nized than through sta-tus meet-ings and e?mail ping-pong.

One answer to this is pro-vid-ed by meth-ods from agile soft-ware devel-op-ment, in par-tic-u-lar Scrum. Work is clear-ly struc-tured in back-log items, which are either phys-i-cal-ly described on cards or man-aged vir-tu-al-ly in tools like JIRA. Which of these items are actu-al-ly worked on in the next sprint is decid-ed in the sprint plan-ning. What is to be done in detail is described in indi-vid-ual tasks per back-log item and record-ed on a Kan-ban board (phys-i-cal-ly or dig-i-tal-ly). Every day in the Dai-ly, the team talks in front of this board about which tasks have been com-plet-ed and who does what next and who needs help with what.

In my opin-ion part of the suc-cess of Scrum is due to the fact that the work-flow is struc-tured quite rigid-ly and much less to how this is done. When you get into it, this struc-tured work-flow elim-i-nates many e?mails and many meet-ings. And that leaves more time for what soft-ware devel-op-ers, like all oth-er knowl-edge work-ers, need to do a good job: focus and concentration.

Originally published at https://fuehrung-erfahren.de on October 26, 2020.