A Plea in Favor of Regulation

Yet another extract from my book ... this short extract from the 5th chapter explains why shared common rules are necessary. This is especially important since if one does not agree with this point, the concept of "sociometry" is a hard sell !

Whenever the global optimum for a collective action is different from the combination of individually optimal strategies, the idea to regulate comes to mind. If we do not regulate, inefficient behaviors occur, which appear annoying for some other employees, as is explained by Andrew Petersen and is frequently observed today. It is so easy to send an email (and even easier to “carbon-copy” to some-one) that mail boxes are cluttered. The same remark applies to telephony: the additional ease of use brought by the mobile phone has increased the probability to fill a voice mailbox with long messages which are difficult to handle efficiently. It is not only a matter of balancing the time load between the sender and the receiver. It is a more global matter, because everyone behaves depending on the expected use of the communication channel. In a similar manner, it has become increasingly easy to produce rich multi-media documents. The result may easily be an “ecosystem” in which the total production exceeds the whole “reading capacity” of the enterprise[1]. Yet another illustration is the multiplication of meetings. The overload saturates everyone’s agenda, which means that there is less time to prepare the meetings, and less time to produce and circulate a summary report. This leads to a vicious circle: meetings have to be repeated a number of time because they were poorly prepared or because the decisions that were taken the first time were not properly executed.
To avoid these possible difficulties, a company must take a global approach and publish rules and guidelines that favor collective efficiency. Three types of rules come to mind:

1. Usage rules aim at improving the efficiency of communication channels. They are different for each tool and each channel. This category contains rules that balance sending with receiving, rules that create taxonomies of communication flows, control rules, etc.
2. Preference rules amongst communication channels, depending on the current situation. Making this type of preference ordering into a corporate standard (with some flexibility) is an efficiency improvement compared to an individual approach (we all use our own rules implicitly). This category also contains rules about interruptions and expected answering behaviors. These rules govern the uniformity and the predictability of response time. For instance, should one glance at her/his mail box every two hours, every day or every week? Is it acceptable to leave a meeting to take a phone call? If it your boss? If it comes from the CEO? There are no “good” answers to these questions. For instance, it is both possible to require phones to be made silent during meetings, or to tolerate a few interruptions when they are limited to exceptions (anyway, the first approach will generate the physical interruption of an assistant coming into the room if the CEO really wants to talk with you). What matters, what makes everyone more efficient is when the rules are known and when they are (more or less) the same for all[2].
3. Knowledge capitalization rules improve the reuse of information that is exchanged. These include, quite logically, filing, back-up and naming rules.

A careful compromise has to be found since too many rules defeat the purpose. Rules should be introduced very slowly and in a progressive manner. A large part of these rules should transform into common usage, into folklore. This is how the “rule set” may be enriched while remaining small.
Defining usage rules is a key principle to obtain the full efficiency of communication tool. This is even truer for the new generation of tools that will be mentioned in the remainder of this chapter. Instant messaging is a good example: There are many ways to use IM in a professional setting. One may use the presence indication to use IM to know when to make a phone call. One may use IM as a text channel (which opens the question of its position with respect to the SMS and email channels[3]). If everyone makes his own discovery of the tool and uses it according to his own intuition, there is a cumulative effect on all possible reasons to reject this technology. Some will fear that the presence indicator is a “big brother” device; other will complain about the loss of concentration caused by the interruption of the synchronous text messaging window, and so on.

[1] To illustrate this idea with a caricature, let us consider a group of one hundred managers where everyone sends his documents to each other. Even if we factor in the ability to read much faster than writing, this requires everyone to spend much more time to read than to write (10 times more), which is inefficient not to mention impossible. This is the situation that occurs when the principle of the « bulletin board » is abused.
[2] There are few quantitative studies available about the negative impact of interruptions. The best that I know about is referred to in the 10th chapter of PeopleWare from T. DeMarco & T. Lister. The university of London has published a fascinating study that shows that employees who are subjected to the constant interruption flow from phones and Blackberry-type devices loose the equivalent of 10 points from their ID ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4471607.stm)
[3] The use of different competing communication channels has been studies by anthropologists such as Timothy de Waal Melfyt from Brown University (cf. the BusinessWeek article from 6/5/ 2006). With the help of a network of field interviewers, he has discovered that teenagers have an optimized approach to using the whole set of channels. Email is used for serious conversations, IM is left to informal discussions and SMS is used to reach someone that you do not want to talk to. On might take this as a proof that there is no need for regulation and that an optimized usage always emerges. The difficulty arises from the long time that is necessary to stabilize efficient usage within the company. The teenager network case cannot be taken as model for the corporation because of their impressive collective learning speed (cf. next chapter).