by Nick Morgan
84 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications CHAPTER SUMMARY
• We often forgive inconsistency with people we know well face-to-face, but we rarely forgive inconsistent online behavior.
• To weather the resulting online storms, we need to develop an online persona.
• A personal online mission statement is a good place to start.
• Begin by focusing your voice on a particular issue, passion, or idea.
• If you haven’t done so already, check your current online persona.
• And then make it a regular practice to review your persona at least quarterly.
• Once you’ve gotten behind an issue and started to develop a persona, begin publishing, find your community, and—most of all—embrace online consistency.
• The best SEO is to speak volubly online about your passion; consistency and passion count because they are measures of authenticity.
• And remember to forgive others as you would be forgiven.
Chapter_03.indd 84
13/08/18 10:58 AM
4.
THE LACK oF EMOTIoN
CAN YoU MAKE ME CARE?
Have you ever put a conference call on mute while talking to a colleague at your desk or while doing the dishes or checking Facebook? Then why do you keep booking hour-long conference calls and expecting people to stay focused the whole time? When we can’t see each other, we can’t rely on unconscious cues to let us know when the group is drifting and everyone needs a break.
Virtual communication requires us to make an extra effort to be connected in human ways to our colleagues and to think through when and how we’re reaching people—is this email arriving right before my colleague is sitting down to dinner?—because it doesn’t happen naturally in the virtual space.
One of the cardinal virtues of email and its descendant, texting, was supposed to be that it was asynchronous, meaning I could send you my note in the middle of night when I was unable to sleep, and you could read it comfortably over your morning coffee. But mobile phones and being always-connected means that, for most people most of the time, we are constantly being pinged by texts and emails and other forms of interruptions that demand a quick response. I’ve also noted that whereas in the past you could respond to an email, say, in a few days and Chapter_04.indd 85
13/08/18 11:04 AM
86 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications still be considered polite, now you’ll get a follow-up email a few hours later if you don’t respond almost immediately.
The failure to connect in real human terms goes both ways, and fundamentally, it comes from a lack of emotion. Research shows that most of us have trouble judging emotional tone in written communications.1 Being an effective, connected communicator means making an extra effort to try to understand where your colleagues are coming from. For example, you might begin the conference call with a check-in that allows everyone a minute to talk about his or her immediate state of mind and working conditions. In this chapter, we’ll explore the missing element of virtual connection—the lack of emotion—and how to reestablish it in ongoing team communications as well as in onetime virtual engagements.
The missing cues make online
communicating difficult
For the human who craves real connection—and that’s most of us—virtual communicating is deeply unpleasant. Why? The normal cues that we get in face-to-face communications are largely missing. The result is an emotional void. Let’s look a little deeper at why the two kinds of communication are so different.
Every face-to-face communication is two simultaneous conversations: the content (what you say) and the body language (how you say it).2 Both these conversations are essential to human communication, but they are very different. The content is the stuff of everyday chitchat, high-level planning, offers of employment and marriage, negotiations to end wars, and secret deals to share marketplaces around the world. The second Chapter_04.indd 86
13/08/18 11:04 AM
The Lack of Emotion 87
conversation is far simpler and far more important in one sense: if the two conversations are not aligned, then the second one always trumps the first. We’ve all had the experience of saying one thing and meaning another. Sometimes, we want to convey something else, and other times, we want to hide something.
Body language trumps content because body language is concerned with some very basic questions about our individual survival and the survival of the species. We ask ourselves, Is this person a threat? Then, if this person is not a threat, is he or she more or less powerful than me? Next, can I reproduce with this person? Then, can he or she reproduce with me? And finally, have I seen this person or pattern before, or is it new?
These are not questions that we vocalize explicitly, for the most part. Most often, we’re not even conscious of them; they are posed and answered by our unconscious minds to other unconscious minds and back again. But take these questions away, and suddenly our interest in the conversation becomes minimal to nonexistent.
Minimal to nonexistent—and considerably more savage than it would otherwise be. When you remove the second conversation—the body language—you remove the ability to experience the normal restraints of human connection.
That’s what happens in the virtual world. There is an emotional void, which is precisely the problem. The virtual world is inherently uninteresting because it takes survival out of the equation. It takes human interest out of the equation. And it takes emotion—the basis of pattern recognition—out of the equation. What’s left no longer engages our deep connections with other people. A virtual conversation is not important to our unconscious minds (survival), it’s not engaging (human interest), and it’s not moving (emotion).
Chapter_04.indd 87
13/08/18 11:04 AM
88 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications Fill the emotional void
And taking these emotions out of the natural human connection means that things get dark fast. We either get bored, or we get nasty. Or both.
Let’s look at the result by putting ourselves in a common scenario. It’s Monday morning. It’s time for the usual team conference call. You have them every Monday morning at 10:00 Eastern Standard Time because that’s 3:00 p.m.
(midafternoon) for the UK team, midmorning for the New York team, and not too early for the California contingent.
Actually, the 7:00 a.m. start was fine for Jake back when he was the only member of the team on the West Coast, because he drove into the office every weekday morning at 6:00 a.m.
to miss most of the notorious Los Angeles traffic. And as other teammates were added in LA, they were socialized to fit Jake’s—and the rest of the team’s—schedule. Now Jake has gone, but no one has bothered to change the habit, and the time has remained the same.
You’re the moderator and you start the call promptly at 10:00 a.m. from the New York office. The UK team is late signing on because of a work lunch that had something to do with a new group being added there. You knew this and decided to go ahead because you wanted to introduce the new marketing concept that is going to be so important for selling the new gadget and that everyone needs to understand.
The UK team members were instrumental in developing the slide deck, so you presumed that they could catch up easily enough.
You sign on to the company conference line, but because of a screwup, you have to change the invite to a Webex conference Chapter_04.indd 88
13/08/18 11:04 AM
The Lack of Emotion 89
bridge. This change delays things a bit more because you have to send out the instructions to everyone via email. Naturally, not everyone picks up the email in time; a few stragglers never do find out, and so the ultimate roll call is incomplete.
But you finally get the call going and ask if everyone has the slide deck. A few people in LA, and even one or two in the New York office, don’t seem to have gotten the memo. There goes another seven minutes
sorting that out.
Finally, everyone has the deck, and maybe it was even a good thing that the meeting started late because the UK team has rolled in from lunch at last and is in good spirits. The first thing one of them says is that the first word on the first slide is misspelled.
Virtual criticism stings more
than in-person criticism
You bridle. You’re a bit of perfectionist, and anyway, you want this rollout to go well and you want people to be impressed. If they’re obsessing about typos—heck, if they’re even looking for typos—you’re going to be in trouble.
They may be saying it with a smile, but you can’t see the smile.
“What do you mean?” you ask. “I’ve spell-checked this thing a dozen times. Where?”
Ian chuckles. “Color. C-o-l-o-u-r.”
Oh, he’s making a joke about English versus American spelling.
Great. Funny. The future of the company is at stake, and he’s debating Noah Webster’s attempts to modernize English spelling for Americans in the nineteenth century.
“Thanks, Ian,” you say. “Go back to sleep.” You wince. The comment just slipped out, but Ian will take it as a reference to Chapter_04.indd 89
13/08/18 11:04 AM
90 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications the time he fell asleep in a meeting in the United States, thanks to jet lag, one of the last face-to-face meetings the team could afford to have, a couple of years ago. People have been reminding him of it ever since, and it’s not really a joke. The president of the company dropped by just at the wrong moment, and Ian’s career chances took a sudden nosedive.
Because you can’t see each other, you can’t put a little psychic salve on the situation by smiling to show that you didn’t mean it.
Indeed, things go ominously quiet from the UK end.
You pause and take a deep breath. Maybe it’s a good time to ask all the team members what they think? No, it’s too early. You need to get back on track and finish the slide deck. You don’t even know if everyone has had a chance to look at the thing, so it’s essential that you go through it to get everyone at the same level.
But where are they in their attention levels and engagement? Recent studies show that on a typical conference call, over 60 percent of the supposed participants are doing email, other work, going to the bathroom, shopping, exercising, or eating—or even taking another call.3
It’s not a pretty picture. Over 80 percent of teams and 90 percent of projects have at least one team member not physically in the same location as the other workers. The number of workers who work from home at least one day a week has increased by 79 percent from 2005 to 2012.4
It’s a virtually isolated world
We are experiencing an epidemic of emotional isolation. But the issue is not simply that we can’t see each other because we’re not in the same physical place. If that were all there were to it, then Skype and Google Hangouts would solve all our virtual isolation issues.
Chapter_04.indd 90
13/08/18 11:04 AM
The Lack of Emotion 91
We’re only beginning to understand the full extent of how our unconscious minds gather information about the world around us and, specifically, the people around us. In the interests of efficiency and through the historical accident of invention, we’ve adopted a system of digital communication that is deeply unsatisfying for us humans, because it doesn’t allow us to gather and exchange the information that we want in the way that we’re used to.
But even more important, our digital communication prevents us from connecting emotionally with our fellow humans. That (largely) unconscious emotional connection is a key aspect of our human information gathering and sharing system. Indeed, it’s hardwired in us. Without it, the information is far poorer, far less generous, and far more often misunderstood. In fact, it’s usually incoherent, as we’ll see.
So why is emotional connection so important to communications? Why do virtual communications almost completely eliminate it, leading to all the bad behavior we see in the virtual world? And what other problems does the absence of emotion cause in the human exchange of information?
Why does human emotional
connection matter so much?
As an acting student, I had the privilege of witnessing a then-well-known Broadway actor demonstrate his facility with emotions. Actors think of themselves as expert in emotions; it’s their job, in one sense, to be able to conjure up emotions with ease. They are professionally emotional, if you will. The subject had turned to that gold standard of acting emotions, the cry-ing scene. We students were nervously admitting that we found it hard to cry on command, for a particular scene or situation.
Chapter_04.indd 91
13/08/18 11:04 AM
92 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications We wondered if we would be up to it when the need came along.
The actor didn’t say anything in response. He simply turned his back for a few moments and then turned around again—with tears streaming down his face.
It was a showy way of making his point. He wanted us to see that he had a wide range of emotions ready at a moment’s notice, and he wanted us to understand that it was our job to prepare the same (roughly speaking) set of emotions for instant recall.
He produced that emotion from one of the two sources of connection that humans possess. The first, but less powerful source, is our imagination—his method, in fact. He conjured up in his mind a memory of grief—a moment when he had been sad—and let the tears flow accordingly.
For years, researchers thought that imagination was the primary source of human emotional connection. Because we have experienced moments of joy, sorrow, excitement, and sadness, when we see one of those emotions in someone else, we compare, in effect, our memory of the emotion with what we’re seeing, match it up, and react accordingly. Human connection, under this theory, is essentially a memory-retrieval exercise.
But the second and more powerful source of emotional connection is the more direct one. It turns out that emotional connection is how we’re hardwired as humans. And removing that natural, easy, unconscious emotional data stream, therefore, as virtual communication does surprisingly well, is particularly crippling.
How does this second source of emotional connection work?
We can’t help trying to connect with one another A team of Italian researchers was studying the basic workings of the brain, using monkeys as subjects, in the 1990s.5
The researchers were interested in several aspects of the brain, Chapter_04.indd 92
13/08/18 11:04 AM
The Lack of Emotion 93
and as they worked with the monkeys, the scientists gave out peanuts—a snack the monkeys loved—as rewards for good behavior. The peanuts caused the monkeys’ pleasure circuits to light up, as the machines they were hooked up to showed.
One researcher ate a peanut himself rather than give it to the monkey, which could see both the offending researcher and the peanut. Rather than experiencing anger, as you might expect, the monkey apparently felt pleasure: the pleasure circuits of the animal’s brain lit up just as if the monkey had received the peanut itself.
This astonishing result led to much more research. In the end, the team discovered that when we (and monkeys) see someone else experience an emotion, that same emotion fires in our heads—thanks to what the team called mirror neurons. The far more powerful and important source of empathy, then, is these mirror neurons. Our brains themselves produce in our own heads the same emotions that we witness in people around us.
A set of clues coming to us in the visual and wider sensory field, and in the tone of voice of the people near us, causes us to mirror excitement, anger, joy, or terror back to the people who are experiencing it themselves.
Emotional connection is part of our wiring This is what human connection really is: the hard wiring in our brains forces us to feel the same emotion that other people around us feel. We crave this em
otional connection because we’re hardwired to experience it, and we suffer when it’s removed. In the virtual space, mirror neurons don’t fire, because they don’t get the information they need to do so.
How does this failure happen? Take away the visual field, restrict the tonal field, and you hugely hamper connection.
Chapter_04.indd 93
13/08/18 11:04 AM
94 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications You’re back to relying on the uncertain activity of the imagination.
Most of us are more like acting students in this regard than that Broadway star. We’re a bit tentative when it comes to the imag-inary projection into other people’s emotions; sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we imagine the wrong emotion or the wrong intensity. And sometimes we don’t bother at all.
What else happens when emotional connection is restricted?
Oddly enough, in addition to behaving badly toward others, we lose the ability to make decisions—especially group decisions—
as readily as before. Trying to establish the prevailing mood of the participants in a virtual meeting, in short, can become extremely problematic. The purpose of a virtual meeting is hard to pin down because, stripped down to the basics, decision making is about sharing emotions. Emotions allow us a way of weighing the relative importance of all the inputs involved. If you and your partner are trying to decide on a new floor in the kitchen, for example, emotions make the decision possible. You and your partner mirror each other, share emotions, and find out how important various aspects of the decisions are. You like the tile, but that reminds your partner of a childhood kitchen—
and that’s a bad thing. Or, it’s a good thing. Mirror neurons help you determine the difference. In the end, you go with the wood floor because it reminds both of you of that wonderful Airbnb place you stayed at six months ago. You just loved the rustic feel and the open, airy sense of space the kitchen had.
Humans base decisions on emotions
Most of the decisions we make are made like that flooring decision. Or they’re made even faster, with less reflection, and with an even greater reliance on emotions (and mirror neurons).