Office communication could learn from online gaming
Hi!
I started my workday with a message on my friendly office communication tool (Dingtalk), where a colleague asked me for some information on a document I had worked on. After I replied, his reply was "oh no that's really bad", followed by radio silence. I spent the next 2 hours wondering what was wrong, only to find out later that there was really no big deal.
Communication tools in the workplace are more prevalent now. Slack, O365, Skype, Basecamp, or Whatsapp group chats make it easy to talk to co-workers at any time. Being the most convenient mode of transmitting information, more and more knowledge work is moved onto these chat platforms. However, the nature of instant messaging is that communication tends to be first, informal - lacking in structure, context, details, or sufficient information; and second, erratic - happening at the whim of the sender and recipient, with various peaks and lulls without proper explanation.
This feels great for action-biased types, who must always feel like they are actively doing something to meet their goals. They can quickly send a message without much effort, and hopefully get an immediate response. Yet I wonder whether this is actually counterproductive as it threatens scaleable processes and deep thought.
Knowledge workers might do well to learn from online gaming in designing these systems. In earlier days, in-game communication was limited, it took too long to type. We were limited to pre-made signals the games provided (I can still remember how "fire in the hole" sounded like in Counterstrike), and codewords developed by the community. Everyone learnt their roles and learnt how to adapt without having to say too much. Today, it is too easy to have real time voice chat in games. We can finally coordinate complex plans with less misunderstanding. Yet, not everything moves onto voice. If you want to succeed, you still have to put in the background work of knowing yours and others' roles well, and make use of other in-built methods of communication depending on the context. The most convenient layer (voice) is reserved for the most important layer (fast paced adaptation). Even if that voice layer were removed, most gamers would still be able to function reasonably well.
I think the more successful workplace in the future is not one which manages to push all communication into one platform, but is able to create a work culture which integrates multiple platforms. Where each person sorts their work into the platform with the highest impact. In this system, the most convenient mode of communication will be kept for the most important, fastest pace items, or resolving breakdowns in other systems, where it works best.
***I use gaming as an example since I know that best, but I imagine many other fields such as aviation have even better lessons on how to structure communication***
Have a great week!
James
About Ideothetic Flow
Ideothetic Flow is a small passion project following my own thoughts about living life better. Every 2 weeks I share something I find interesting, usually related to mental models which challenge common expectations or ideas.