1.3 New Yorker Cartoon
“Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint presentation?”
– JOHN SCHWARTZ18
FISH TANK FULL OF GLUE
It’s 1980 and you just walked into your office and you see the following scene unfold. The boss walks out of his office, past the secretary, down the hall to talk to a colleague. The employee and the boss talk, look at a document together, make a few changes, and then hand the document to the secretary for typing. The employee then calls the customer and tells her secretary that he will have the document to her by next Tuesday.
Don’t you get the feeling that all of these people are moving in slow motion? Yuck! It’s almost as if they are working in a fish tank full of glue!
Fast-forward to today. The boss in Chicago e-mails her associate in New York, attaching the document that has been edited with tracking. The associate, who is waiting in line at Starbucks, takes out his BlackBerry and pages a colleague in Hong Kong (where it’s 11 PM) with a quick request for some details. The Hong Kong associate, chatting with some friends in a local pub, feels the buzz of her Treo and responds immediately, after checking some facts on her company’s knowledge portal. The associate in New York then accepts the changes to the document and e-mails it to the client. The client, working from home that day, calls the associate’s mobile phone to ask him for one final change. The associate pages his boss, she accepts the change, and the client is satisfied.
Isn’t this much more exciting? Yes! It’s fast-paced, high-tech, and you get the feeling that all of these people are sipping espressos and wearing Armani suits (actually, they are).
The best software feature ever invented.
What is missing in this story? In the first part of the story, the pace is excruciatingly slow. It is so slow that it’s painful to imagine. What’s missing are all of the technology enablers that would get the job done faster and the urgency created by a more competitive environment, so the scene plays out in slow motion. What is present, though, is the increased interaction between the people. Because there is a lack of technology enablers, there is more time for interaction, for conversation, and for stories.
“So this is how we end up alone together. We share a coffee shop, but we are all on wireless laptops. The subway is a symphony of earplugged silence while the family trip has become a time when the kids watch DVDs in the back of the minivan. The water cooler, that nexus of chatter about the show last night, might go silent as we create disparate, customized media environments.”
– DAVID CARR19
This is not to say that today we lack all interaction. We have more interaction with each other than we have ever had before, and a lot of that interaction is a positive development. But, we make far fewer opportunities to share stories, and that’s what we need to change. We all seem to be much busier, and technology enables our busy lifestyles. But how do we bring back some of the richness without sacrificing the reach? How do we create relationships that go beyond transactions?
I’m not suggesting that we go back to the olden days. Not at all (I like a good espresso as much as the next guy). But I’m suggesting that we become more aware of our stories, and that we look for opportunities to embed our stories in our communications, because this is great a way to help us manage our information and increase our performance.
SMALL GROWS UP
The march of technology and its effects on our behavior is the same as the story of how “small” became “large.” Remember when a “small” was actually small? When you asked for a small coffee, it came in a cute little cup. When you asked for a small Coke, you got a small Coke. But then small grew up, got bigger, started putting on weight, and never looked back. Whether that “small” was a coffee, a soda, restaurant portions, football players, cars, or even suburbs, your first thought was probably, “Wow, this is great. I am getting so much more for my money!” So we order all of those smalls and larges and we feel like we are really getting a deal until we suddenly realize that none of our pants fit! It costs us $60 to fill up our gas tanks and our 25-minute commute is now and hour and a half. Maybe we’ve had too much. When did that become acceptable? And how long does it take us to realize that some of this stuff is bad for us?
The late Neil Postman once compared our inability to deal with the vast amounts of information pouring over us to the AIDS epidemic. He said the following in a speech in 1990:
“[That is,] we don’t know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don’t know how to filter it out; we don’t know how to reduce it; we don’t know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS.” 20
“In reality there has not been an information explosion, but rather an explosion of non-information, or data that simply doesn’t inform.”
– RICHARD SAUL WURMAN21
Anyone who has used a cell phone, pager, or BlackBerry knows what Postman was talking about. We have all felt the crush of information overload. Anyone who has gone into an hour-long meeting and come out to find 35 new e-mails has felt it. Anyone who has witnessed a 95-page PowerPoint presentation has felt it. And anyone who has had to explain to their spouse why they are bringing the laptop on vacation has felt it.
I put a slightly different (and more positive) characterization on our inability to deal with the deluge of information. I believe we have created for ourselves another incredibly widespread disorder called “story deficit disorder,” or SDD. Like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD or, more commonly, ADD), SDD causes leaders to jump from one communication or task to the next without thinking through the impact they are having on their own performance or the performance of their people.
“It’s hard to remember that movies were once just a high-tech gimmick under the control of the engineer. Movies didn’t flourish until the engineers lost control to the artists—the writers, actors, musicians, and directors (Heckel, 1984). Thanks to their imaginative manipulation of technology, a film’s content now transparently connects to our minds.”
– MARTY SIEGEL22
DEFINITION: Story deficit disorder (SDD), noun: 1. Common disorder caused by misuse of bits and bullets and resulting lack of stories; symptoms include disorientation, stress, information overload, numbness of the thumbs, immediate onset of narcolepsy at company meetings, rampant sarcasm, and cynicism. Recommended treatment: become a farmer. If farming is not an option, demand more stories in all aspects of your work and life.
Although a bit tongue-in-cheek, there’s a very real drawback to story deficit disorder. Because people bounce too frequently from one thing to another and their attention span is shorter and shorter, people pay less attention to the communications that really matter. And when, as leaders, we can’t reach our people with an important change, performance of the organization suffers and our own performance suffers.
BUILDING MUSCLE, NOT FAT
Over the past 20 years, we have figured out how to put most of what happens in business in a system of some
