Fantasy Feature: The FYI Button for Email

Some features are revolutionary, others are evolutionary. Often, "minor tweaks" (like the one described here) are overshadowed by more significant changes to our technology landscape. Hoping there's inspiration for you in incremental improvement - and the overwhelming number of people's lives that can be impacted by a small change.

Like many, I'm conflicted about email. It spans the personal and the professional. It affords the means to communicate across different organizations instantly. It allows for unsolicited communication (mixed bag there). In most organizations, it seems to be returning to its roots as a "lower urgency" form of communication, while Slack, Teams, and Google Chat emerge as preferred options for more immediate responses. Email is also a place where formal communications happen (i.e. the place you look for "evidence" in a follow up conversation about what really happened).

A friend of mine who connects with people for a living likes to say, "Email is where conversations go to die." I think he's got that right -- it's a terrible way to have a conversation.

But email remains a pretty solid place to initiate and conclude a conversation. And most conversations are actually connected to OTHER conversations.

Let's take a quick example (inspired by actual events in my life):

• A customer escalates an issue to me as an operational executive. Sometimes it's via email, sometimes via text.
• I grab the contents of the message, and put a group of individuals from different departments into a Slack channel
• We jump on a zoom to talk through the issue, and plot a strategy to address the issue
• We agree to messaging for the customer
• I draft the communication, check that we're all aligned, and send the email

And here's where my dilemma comes in -- this was just the beginning of our work. I certainly don't want to invite all of my collaborators to the direct conversation with the customer -- that's noisy, and dilutes the strength of communication with the customer, and, to some extent, the intimacy of the communication. Sometimes, keeping the conversation narrow helps drive progress.

What I need is a way to keep others informed easily. Ideally, my formal communication to the customer is better linked to my internal collaboration.

Today, I'm old school about it. I go back to my sent, and forward to my collaborators and jot a quick "FYI" at the top of the email.

Before describing my fantasy feature, it's worthwhile to dive into the details of existing functionality. Today in email, we have three fields: To, CC (carbon copy - ah, nostalgia), and BCC. To and CC are visible to all who receive the email. The CC field is used to indicate that CC recipients are being informed of the email, rather than being invited to participate in the conversation. From a product perspective, CCed individuals can still reply to the sender, or reply all to those in the To and CC fields. The BCC (blind carbon copy) allows an author to send the message, but no one other than the sender is aware of a BCC. Even BCC recipients don't know about each other. And yet, a BCC can still reply to the sender or worse, reply all (revealing that they were BCC'd). So, while BCC could help with the internal collaborators, those individuals can't continue internal collaboration -- they don't even know if everyone internally received the email!

So, I think it's time to add the FYI button - to share the email with a number of stakeholders who can all reply to one another, but without the possibility of replying to the intended "To" and "CC" recipients.

In decades past, I wouldn't expect this level of convenience. But, today, email is smarter than it used to be.

At work, my email routinely looks at my recipients and suggests additional ones. [It's also kind enough to correct me when I've erroneously chosen the wrong person.] It's never annoying and it is rarely incorrect.

So, my fantasy feature (in stages) - bridge the gap between communication and collaboration:

• Stage 1: Add the FYI button, which, when you've added email addresses, will send a copy of your email with all of those folks in the To. This lets you make sure your internal collaboration is in sync with external messages.
• Stage 2: Suggest great names for the FYI with the people I need to keep informed
• Stage 3: When inbound email addresses are available for my slack channels, teams, and google chat groups - enable FYI to post the email there (or maybe even start the email there), so the conversation continues rather than sitting in email
• Stage 4: Make it easy to collaboratively draft emails in slack/teams/gchat and make it easy to send (no missing formatting, etc.).

Maybe I'm just dreaming, but I think the FYI button is a bridge to connecting conversation-starts and conversation-conclusions with the collaboration tools of this decade.

Would love to hear your thoughts!