Social Isolation is Crushing Strategic Thinking

Like many in the technology industry, I’m blessed to be able to work from home. I’ve been working from home for over 2 years now. Prior to COVID I probably spent anywhere from 25% - 50% of my time on the road for various meetings, customer sessions, interviews, and the like. In the weeks immediately preceding COVID I spent 6 out of 8 weeks travelling (in January of this year I slept 11 nights in my own bed). For a time, I welcomed the opportunity to spend a bit less time at airports and hotels and to recover from the fatigue of traveling.

In fact, 40% of our workforce was already virtual before the crisis. In many ways we are as well equipped as any company to continue operating our business through the COVID era with minimal impacts. Within several weeks of the beginning of the crisis we noticed that even the staunchest of work-from-office organizations settled into the new routine of remote work and were able to continue day-to-day operations much the way they had before. And the term “day-to-day operations” perfectly describes exactly what we’ve been doing...what I imagine most organizations have been doing.

It is only in recent weeks, as I’ve tried to make progress on some more strategic initiatives, that I’ve noticed how excruciatingly transactional our work has become. Every day driven by the relentless dictator that is the calendar and an endless series of Zoom meetings where I’m constantly reminded of the inadequacy of video chats as an effective means of collaborative communication. The lack of real, actual collaboration is crushing our creative spirit, ingenuity, and ability to move strategic initiatives forward. Strategy, as they say, doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Zoom Fatigue

At the end of one particularly long day I sat down at the dinner table and my wife was attempting to convey some seemingly important piece of information to me. I strained and struggled to listen - focusing all of the attention I could muster to hear and comprehend the words. “This seems important, I should listen.” I kept telling myself. But no matter the struggle, I couldn’t do it. I stared at her, hearing every word but being unable to get my brain to process what she was saying. Eventually I just said “honey, I’m sorry. I’m really trying to listen because this sounds important, but I can’t right now. Can we talk after dinner?” She graciously obliged and we were able to talk after dinner and after I spent about 30min on our porch doing absolutely nothing.

I don’t believe anyone can spend an extended amount of time on a video chat platform and not feel similarly. There is something uniquely taxing about relentless 30 - 60 minute video chats. Perhaps it is the strain on the eyes and the ears of having to process both sound and light through artificial means? Maybe our brains are exhausted from trying, and failing, to pick up on the non-verbal queues we’re accustomed to in our day-to-day interactions? I don’t know what it is, but I know it is uniquely more difficult than in-person meetings and, as such, the amount of time we can spend focused on a video call (or series of video calls) is decidedly limited. Which leads to...

Life-sucking virtual workshops

Several times per year I gather various members of my teams together in the same location to spend several days collaborating and thinking through our strategy for the upcoming quarter, half, or even the entire year. We typically cover a variety of topics and use a lot of best practices I’ve learned over years of facilitating customer workshops and strategy sessions. In fact, we were scheduled to do one such session at the end of March this year, which clearly did not happen as my company and many others have restricted or prohibited all non-essential travel.

So this leaves us with 2 unfavorable options - lengthy “virtual collaboration” sessions that are incredibly difficult to schedule (and subject to the Zoom fatigue above) or a multi-week series of shorter meetings where we attempt to coalesce around smaller segments of an overall strategy. I can safely say both of these approaches are near universal failures, though for different reasons.

Lengthy virtual collaboration sessions do have their place and we use them effectively for things such as long range planning, discovery sessions, or other requirements gathering or elicitation type of activities. These meetings are tactical in nature. Put another way they are puzzles not mysteries - the desired outcome is reasonably well defined and you have a structure for getting there. Strategy sessions, on the other hand, are inherently mysteries. While you might have some loose definition of the goal in mind when you start, nobody knows what the end product will look like when you’re done (which, to my mind, is also the beauty of this kind of work). I’ve found that attempting to do these types of sessions virtually over a lengthy period of time is an abysmal failure for several reasons:

1. It is impossible to truly facilitate the meeting with asynchronous means of communication - the moderator cannot use the usual non-verbal cues and cannot see the entire audience at one time. I cannot point the whiteboard marker at someone who looks like they want to talk. I cannot tap the marker to my chin indicating I’m considering the idea. I cannot walk closer to someone as a subtle queue to stop talking. The only tool in the moderators toolbox is some form of abrupt and awkward interruption...which usually happens far too long into a rambling conversation.
2. You cannot view the audience and content simultaneously nor are there any good means of collaborative communication (such as taking turns on a white board). Yes, we’ve tried all of the virtual tools out there, but they are plagued by the same clunky interactions and visual space limitations
3. You cannot take “productive breaks”, those incredibly valuable times when the team breaks, but you continue a thread of the conversation over a drink in the kitchen or a light snack.
4. The meetings are draining not invigorating or thought provoking because so much mental energy is being expended overcoming the communication medium that little remains for the message.

For all of these reasons, and more, I’ve largely given up on the idea of trying to hold virtual collaboration sessions for any kind of strategy work. It simply is not time well spent. So this led us to try another (and I suspect more common) strategy:

Time box collaboration

The idea behind time box collaboration is a seemingly good one - take what would be an all day or half-day meeting, and stretch it to a series of 60 to 90min virtual sessions where you attempt to coalesce around smaller pieces of your overall plan. We’ve tried supplementing this approach with independent work streams in between where members of the team will think through and document a particular idea or approach between weekly sessions. I can safely say this, too, has proven largely ineffective and maddeningly frustrating, for its own set of reasons.

1. Context setting (and switching) has to take place before every meeting. It takes at least 10-15 minutes for everyone on the call to leave their previous meeting behind and get into the relevant headspace to tackle the topic at hand. Even then, we’re still starting behind the 8-ball because it’s nearly impossible to remember exactly where we left off, so we may spend another 5minutes recapping and setting the stage.
2. Ideas and thought patterns get bifurcated when stretched across multiple meetings. As a moderator (already hampered without the usual tools at your disposal), you have the difficult choice of constantly deciding whether to keep the session on topic to actually accomplish something in the hour, or to allow more free-flowing ideas that may (or may not) touch on other parts of your strategy.
3. Thoughts have to find their way onto a medium in order to be conveyed. In order to preserve ideas between meetings and effectively evaluate them, they must be converted to some kind of digital/viewable medium. This wastes an extraordinary amount of time and mental energy. During an in-person session I can scribble a quick concept on a whiteboard or discuss it with someone as the idea arises to me. In a virtual setting it’s not enough to have the idea at hand, I have to convey it to some medium to share and then wait until the next meeting to do so.

These are just a handful of the issues I’ve seen in the past several months that we’ve been thrust into this fully virtual world. By any objective measure of productivity (tickets closed, story points completed, slides created, sales won, customers satisfied) we’ve seen basically no drop-off in productivity and in all likelihood probably a marked increase in the past several months. But to my mind, this is hiding the real problem that forced social isolation is causing - the ideas have gone missing.

The collaborative visioning and strategy that sets a company’s direction for the months and years ahead and truly enables great companies to compete and win in the market place is at best severely hampered and, at worst, gone altogether. We’ve turned into task-driven, tactical automatons, rowing away relentlessly below decks, none of us able to walk up to the bridge to get our bearings and figure out where we’re headed. I don't think this bodes well for the future of our schools, companies, organizations, and the economy writ-large. I hope I'm wrong...