Collaboration sucks – by Charles Cook is a great article. It emphasizes not micromanaging in the name of collaboration and providing feedback on deliverables.
However, there’s something else that’s just awful, and I’d like to highlight it: online meetings.
Online meetings can’t eliminate the need to be in the office
It’s obvious, but in-person meetings are better than online meetings, and online meetings are better than Slack. It’s simply because they are more seamless. Those of you who are engineers understand how important seamlessness is, as it is with your development environment or editor. Communication is no different.
Both chat tools like Slack and online meetings like Zoom are just inferior versions of in-person meetings. Mainly due to the pandemic, we couldn’t meet face-to-face, so we just made do with inferior substitute solutions.
Structurally, it is clear that in-person meetings are the best. Therefore, as long as we rely on chat and online meetings, a return to the office is inevitable. Everyone prefers seamlessness.
The limitations of meetings
What are the downsides of meetings in the first place?
I’m not saying that meetings themselves are bad. There are benefits, and eliminating them completely is unrealistic. But currently, they are overused. We’re too dependent on a single method.
Meetings are inherently high-cost. I call it a constraint; they constrain time, place, and topic. Of course, context switching occurs twice: before going to the constraint and after being released from it. Unlike interruptions, meetings are often “planned in advance,” especially “set up regularly,” but because of this, it’s hard to get deeply focused.
It’s nothing short of terrible. It’s obvious to use them as little as possible. Yet, we overuse them because there are no other options. That was the case in the past, but now it’s different. There are various technologies, methods, and tools available.
We need to break free from the meeting model
Even as engineers, we are still dependent on meetings. We need to free ourselves from this primitive and high-burden model.
There are already numerous hints. I’ve organized them in the form of Full-Four.
As a Knowledge Architect, I assist organizations in creating and circulating knowledge, and breaking away from meetings is a frequently proposed theme.
Yes, breaking away from meetings is essentially about initiating a paradigm shift in the source of information.
Traditionally, meetings have been an Image Based Origin—in other words, the original exists in each person’s brain. To sync this, dense conversation is necessary, hence the use of meetings.
Instead, it is necessary to make it a Record Based Origin—that is, the “information put out externally” should be the original. It is often expressed in terms like sharing information or writing documents, and that’s what it means. As engineers, we speak through outputs like code and documentation. We conduct reviews based on this. This output-based model is applied to communication in general.
For this, diverse methods such as asynchronous communication, linguistic skills, tools, and platforms to write or read information are required. This is where the specialist profession of Knowledger comes in, and Knowledge Architects like myself exist to ensure organizations do this properly.
Managers wanting employees to return to the office is negligence
Recently, an article by Matz, the father of Ruby, became a topic of discussion (it’s in Japanese).
This argument is similar to the initial “Collaboration sucks.” Furthermore, Matz says:
Well, those who want such wet connections, please, go ahead and pursue them. Just don’t impose that value on everyone.
Although spoken half-jokingly, I fully agree.
One of the reasons top positions, like managers, want employees to return to the office is abuse of authority. They’re using their subordinates to fulfill their loneliness or boredom. Such needs should be fulfilled privately. We are colleagues at work, not friends. Do not mix personal and work life.
In Japan, where the Gender Equality Index is low, women have been poorly treated, with men using female employees to reduce their sexual desires for a long time. Women were routinely used as companions, as part of the reception team, or required to wear revealing uniforms, and such practices are not entirely gone even today. This could be seen as an abuse of authority to fulfill sexual desires. Wanting employees back at the office is structurally similar. It’s an abuse of authority to fulfill boredom or loneliness.
Conclusion
Isn’t it time to break away from meetings?
To do so, we must escape online meetings. They are an inferior version of in-person meetings, and as long as we are stuck in this model, meetings will not disappear.
The paradigm shift away from meetings is quite challenging, but that’s why we must pursue it. Many of us have an inkling of this issue, and achieving it could potentially give us a significant advantage.
