Forgetting How to Hitch Up a Plough

I remember the last time that I went to a tech sector convention. It was in San Francisco and was a big one. There were 22,000 delegates there. It was so big that the flood of attendees rushing from their hotel rooms to the main convention center in the morning required help from the police to halt traffic to allow for the crowd to move. This was in the years before the pandemic of course, and it’s one of the areas that I wonder about in terms of how it might change going forward. But this episode is not solely about trade shows. It is about something really surprising I learned about these types of events from regular attendees, which I think will have a significant impact on work life going forward, including the most important component of all, your personal network.

Before I go back to talking about conventions, here’s a different, but related observation: Every day in online newspapers such as the New York Times, there are stories about how bad it will be for professionals – especially young professionals – if they choose not to come back to the office, but instead opt to work from home. Thinly veiled threats seem to emerge, such as the suggestion that they’re throwing away their opportunities for promotion, they’re losing vital face time with the boss, they won’t be able to build their vital network, and they are jeopardizing their career path.

When I read such statements, I picture two farmers in the 1920’s watching their neighbor bringing home a new-fangled motorized tractor and expressing schadenfreude-laced regret that this neighbor will soon forget how to hitch up a horse to a plough, which will not be good for the farm.

For all of human history, people have viewed change with fear and negativity. For example, there was a time when trains were feared because it was believed that travelling faster than a galloping horse would suck the air out of your lungs. There’s a million examples I could use here covering any range of areas of human life, and there will always be a couple of farmers leaning against a fence, saying, “it was better in the old days.”

When companies start to make statements about how working from home will be bad for young employees, I think yes, that’s true, if you frame everything about career and office life from the perspective of how it has been for the last 40 years or more: commuting to a central building to work in a cubicle, meeting in meeting rooms and being overseen by the boss. “You can’t network on Zoom,” they will say, “You can’t even meet properly on Zoom.”

That’s true. You can’t. There’s a lot of physical and physiological difficulty in relating to people over video chat. Here’s a quote from a peer-reviewed academic paper published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior in February, 2021, by Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL). He ?identified four causes of video call fatigue.[1] In brief, they are:

1) Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact – it is highly intense. The act of staring at people’s faces on the screen, or of staring into the camera eye involves much more and longer-held “eye contact” than we are used to in face-to-face conversations.

2) Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Bailenson compares this to someone constantly holding up a mirror so that you have to keep seeing yourself. This, he says, is unnatural and distracting.

3) Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility. People feel they must stay rooted to the spot and are not able to move around as we would in a live conversation.

4) The cognitive load is much higher in video chats. The lack of gestures and nonverbal cues make it harder to send and receive signals, meaning we must work harder to understand the meaning of what is being said.

There is also the notion of focus and engagement. Conversations over the phone allow for a particular type of engagement that is encouraged precisely because you do not have to be looking at someone. You can look at documents or at your computer screen, out into the middle distance or even out the window, but there is something in the passive visual distractions of a phone call that allow greater focus and engagement.

Back in the days when all phones were landlines, a great many conversations involved seemingly absent-minded actions like twirling the phone cord, doodling, or playing with a pile of magnetized paper clips. These, too, are actions whose significance should not be overlooked. Actions like these allow humans, who are by nature, active and kinesthetic, to redirect energy that is otherwise being held hostage by the phone conversation, and even more so by a video meeting. This is currently a gaping hole in digital transformation for employees and school-age children alike. Fidgeting is part of learning. Moving is part of life.

So like I said, when people say, “You can’t meet properly on Zoom,” that’s true. We can’t. Or more precisely, we can’t use the techniques we use to meet in person, to meet over video chat. We need new techniques. The good news is, they are on their way and some are already here.

This argument, though, about not being able to network properly over video chat directly echoes the conversation of the two 1920s farmers I mentioned earlier. “You can’t farm the same way with a new-fangled tractor like you can with a horse.” That’s true. There are different techniques for ploughing with a tractor. The same thing happened with radio, television, and the internet. They all started out by being applied to techniques devised for another medium before growing into their own.

The managers and newspaper op-eds have a specific sentiment – that career growth is based on networking and interaction with others, and I agree also that sometimes it is really nice to just get out to a social setting and enjoy being in the presence of other people, especially after what we have all been going through throughout the pandemic.

But I can’t agree that the only way to do that is to come back to the office. So many of the networking, team-building or professional development events that companies put on were less than practical or inspiring. People often missed them because a meeting was running late, or because they simply couldn’t face up to awkward small talk in a brightly lit conference room at a box hotel out by the highway. These are not natural meeting places. Natural meetings happen more casually, and are more intense. A chance conversation, finding something in common, this is the pleasure of meeting people and growing a network. It can happen more easily using the chat feature of Zoom or a side channel on Slack than it can in a staged event, at the end of which you find you have a pocket full of business cards of people you know you will never call.

So back to the big San Francisco trade show. I remember an interview I listened to within the last year on a tech sector podcast, which was talking about some of the biggest industry conventions that were happening that year. These are trade shows that – at least prior to the pandemic – would routinely pull in 20,000 or more attendees from all over North America and some from even further away, who would wander through the convention space and attend an impossible number of breakout presentations. Certainly, a great educational experience, but the message I got from the podcast was consistent among all the guests: when you go into the convention space, stick to the booths around the walls – not in the middle. The middle was reserved for the companies with the biggest budgets – Cisco, Microsoft, IBM and so on, but the really interesting people were off in the small booths, where the foot traffic was thinner and the opportunity for meaningful conversations was much larger.

What an interesting observation. People would travel hundreds or thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars to attend these huge trade shows. The exhibitors would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up and staff a high profile booth. And for what? To be mostly ignored by bored delegates, already overloaded with swag, and video demos, and who were most likely waiting for the food to be served.

This is not to say that going to a trade show or convention in any industry should be avoided. It’s just that the best parts for most people happen on the periphery – talking to the presenters in an outside track booth, or meeting a new person in the café.

I will always relate this paradox to the value of networking overall. Networking should never be just an exercise in visiting as many booths and collecting as many business cards as you can. Nothing will come from that. But instead it should be about striking up one or two memorable conversations. These are the people who will become professional friends and valuable connections.

Sure, this can be done by flying a thousand or more miles to San Francisco or Las Vegas, but it can also be done far more efficiently by going to virtual events. As I described in my previous episode, we’re not talking about sitting on a Zoom call here. I’m talking about using virtual spaces to walk around, chat and interact the way you would in real life, without all the travel and boredom in between.

Networking is about human connection. Striking up a conversation with someone and deciding they are someone you want to stay in touch with. And that’s the difference. New techniques offer new opportunities. In just the same way you don’t see many farmers ploughing their fields with anything but tractors – many of which carry a great deal of sophisticated mobile technology on board, I might add – so you don’t have to rely entirely on massive trade shows for corporate networking and industry education.

They will have their place, certainly, and it’s still fun once in a while, to travel somewhere you have never been, but just like all other forms of learning and interaction, they do not have to only be done inside the walls of a single building anymore.

At conventions and at regular work, professional people can still network and manage their careers from their home office. They can still have impromptu one-on-one conversations with the boss by walking across a virtual floor and knocking on the door of the boss’s virtual office. It can all be done from anywhere. And that’s the difference. I discuss this in more detail, by the way in my article The Unbearable Lightness of Being Virtual.

Those who have not experienced virtual presence only think they haven’t experienced it. In fact every time they talked to someone on the phone, they were experiencing a virtual interaction. The person on the other end of the line could be anywhere in the world while they are talking into your ear.

So yeah, whenever I see one of these newspaper articles filled with gnashing of teeth and pearl clutching over the future of the working person, I picture those farmers watching with evident disdain as their neighbor brings home a new-fangled tractor machine. But I need not wait long because usually the next day, that same newspaper carries an article about a Gen-Z or a fifty-year-old who has now discovered the joys of the remote work experience. Networking and career management are both evolving arts that move with the times and innovate naturally, which these stories sometimes mention, far below the headline and the drama. And the biggest irony of all of course is that I have not physically held an actual newspaper in my hands for more than a decade. I read my news on their online version, from the comfort of my home office.

This is the transcript of the CoolTimeLife podcast entitled Forgetting How to Hitch Up a Plough. If you would like to listen to it or review other podcasts in this series, visit my podcast page at steveprentice.com/podcast.

[1] ????Bailenson, Jeremy. “Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue” Technology, Mind and Behavior. Volume 2, Issue 1. American Psychological Association. Published February 23, 2021. Retrieved from https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/2. Accessed August, 2021.