Can You Hear Me

by Nick Morgan

  Do you take a different route to work to miss the traffic? Do you Chapter_04.indd 94

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  decide to go out to the movies? Do you say yes to your boss when he or she offers you that new project (more responsibility, more work, but do it well, and you might get a raise)?

  You can draw a straight line from emotions to decision making to mirror neurons. These three elements are essential to a coherent life.

  Neuroscientists point to a landmark case in their field. A man had suffered a stroke that damaged the hippocampus. This part of the brain has an essential role in handling emotions. The man could no longer make decisions about anything; he lived in an agony of indecision and immobility, frozen in his inability to act.

  Why? He had no basis for choice.6 No emotions tugged at him to say, choose this way, because it will make your spouse happy.

  Or, choose that one, because it will make your boss respect you.

  And here’s the rub for the virtual world. Without emotion, communications become, if not impossible, at least far more difficult. People with autism experience something very like this.

  It’s what I experienced for a few months when I was seventeen, as I described in my previous book Power Cues.7 A brain injury had temporarily disabled my unconscious ability to read other people’s emotions in the same instant way that most humans can.

  Without human connection via unconscious emotions, we live in a void

  And from my experience with a brain injury, I can tell you that when you take away the emotional connection, not only does it become difficult to understand other people, but the whole project of life seems less interesting, less engaging, and less important. While my brain recovered, I drifted, unable to take my normal interest in the things going on around me and my seventeen-year-old (damaged) brain.

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  96 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications Mirror neurons enable us to understand and entertain another person’s point of view or another person’s pain. Without mirror neurons, negotiating successfully with other people is more difficult, if not impossible, because it’s hard to engage in sympathet-ically understanding the other party’s emotions. You can’t decide how important one bargaining chip or another is. You can’t tell whether the other side is bluffing. You can’t gauge where every-body is on the issues.

  That’s the virtual world. What’s missing is the human emotional connection. Taking it out makes communication infinitely more difficult.

  And we can get a little more specific. Some emotions—

  namely, the most basic ones, such as anxiety, fear, happiness, and joy—are more contagious than others. Take away the empathy, and these emotions are the first to fall. The reasons most likely have to do with the basic hardwired questions we humans ask ourselves, questions that are highly dependent on our unconscious minds, a quick read, and empathy.

  What happens in the virtual world when you make experiencing these basic emotions—and sharing them—more difficult? Anxiety and fear top the list of emotions that get lost. And you might think that’s a good thing. But negative emotions exist to keep us out of trouble and, once we’re in trouble, to help us escape it as fast as possible. Dull the fight-or-flight response, and you dull your survival abilities. That’s not helpful in organizational life or anywhere else.

  Next up are happiness and joy, with the triggers of laughter and smiling. Take those out, and life and work become a lot less interesting and a lot less fun.

  Finally, there’s attraction. Take out love and friendship, and you have a much harder time getting anything done.

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  Without the motivating power

  of the voice, what’s left?

  But it’s not only the visual field that’s impaired in the virtual world. Surprisingly, what we hear suffers as well.

  One of the most extraordinary abilities we humans possess is one that we rarely think about consciously. I would even wager that this moment may be the first time you’ve ever thought about the following strange fact. We humans can instantly recognize—without any apparent effort—hundreds of individual human voices.8

  Our loved ones, our friends and colleagues, famous people, politicians, the corner grocer—we can conjure up the identity of the speaker in an instant. We do no conscious work, except in the rare instance when we have to think about the voice for a moment longer because your mother’s voice and your aunt Sally’s sound so much alike on the phone. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

  That rapid recognition comes from our unconscious mind’s uncanny ability to analyze the aural fingerprint of the voice.

  The human voice is a mixture of the pitch it is speaking at and the overtones and undertones at thirds, fifths, octaves, and so on, above and below the actual pitch. If you recorded a voice on an oscilloscope, it would look like a fuzzy line going up and down—like a recording of ground vibrations on a seismograph.

  Researchers used to believe that those undertones and overtones were random—just part of the unique sound of your voice or my voice or Winston Churchill’s. But it turns out that they are far more important than that, especially in two ways.

  First, the undertones in particular convey emotions. So remove the undertones, and you make human conversation much less interesting. And remember the man who could no longer make Chapter_04.indd 97

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  98 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications decisions when a stroke removed his ability to process emotions?

  Removing the undertones from the human voice makes it much harder to reach decisions.9

  You can’t lead people over the telephone Besides hindering decision making, removing undertones from human speech has other effects. In fact, those undertones also allow people to choose their leaders. When you get a group of people together in a room, one of the first things they do is unconsciously elect a leader. It takes no more than fifteen minutes, and—incredibly—we elect a leader and signal our followership by matching our undertones to those of the leader whom we’ve elected.

  Take away the undertones, and we take away the innate ability to create a leader, an authority, and followers. And, of course, the titular leader can’t assume the assigned chores with any real, unconscious power, because the clues are all missing.

  But that’s precisely what virtual communication does; it prevents us from selecting a leader or leading. To create the telephone in the early days, engineers figured out how to compress the human voice (and still make it comprehensible) by removing the undertones and overtones beyond a basic range of pitches. The compression was essential in the early days to convey the voice (roughly intact, as far as anyone knew) over those primitive copper wires.

  Now we have fiber optics and the ability to convey vast amounts of information virtually, but guess what? We still compress the voice. Because, why decompress it? It would take up too much bandwidth. There’s never been a good time to suddenly make something as basic as the voice much more costly Chapter_04.indd 98

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  in information terms to convey across the wired and wireless networks that span the world.

  The result is that the virtual world removes not only the emotional components that create connection but also the unconscious signals that create leaders, followers, and decisions. It’s amazing that we can get anything done at all in the virtual sphere.

  As I hope you’re now beginning to see, the virtual space we’ve created is uniquely set up to make it difficult for us to conduct our human business in the way that we’ve done for thousands of years. We think we’ve created something convenient, cost-

  effective, and efficient. Instead, we’ve created something that is stultifying, expensive in terms of emotions and decision makin
g, and wildly inefficient.

  As emotion goes, so goes communication

  I was leading a group of special ops officers in body-language training. These were some of the toughest dudes on the planet—

  big, trained in the martial arts and other kinds of hand-to-hand combat, and ready to lead. To lead them, and for the purposes of the training, I quickly noted that I had to step up my confidence through posture and voice or risk becoming discounted by this group as a wimp.

  I found myself standing taller, puffing out my chest, and pushing my voice into a lower register in a (probably vain) attempt to make myself a bigger, badder dude than I really was. The team was all men, and there was an air of both camaraderie and jockeying for top dog. I found the interactions fascinating to watch—and couldn’t help joining in—until it became clear that I was never going to be the alpha male in this group.

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  100 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications I had to settle for somewhere in the middle of the pack. Now I know, thanks to our understanding of mirror neurons, that my best move would have been to observe the behavior and then subtly mirror it, without trying to be the number one male in the room. Just joining the pack, on some days, is good enough.

  And my lower voice helped a little, but probably not as much as I wanted it to, because I had almost undoubtedly pushed it too low to maximize my authority and become the leader.

  Just joining the pack is good enough. And, in fact, essential.

  And yet, virtual communications robs us of this aspect of the relationship and this kind of connection. Because that’s what tribal belonging is—emotional connection on a group scale.

  Online communication often fails,

  but you can help ameliorate it

  Are there ways to improve the experience of connection in virtual situations? Can we buck the communications tide and reverse the downward spiral of misunderstanding, boredom, and ineffectiveness? Cogito Corporation, a spinoff of MIT’s media lab, is working on precisely that question.10 Practically, what can we do to restore some of the connection that the virtual world takes out?

  There are a couple of ways to improve the dismal experience of audioconferences, webinars, and even “telepresence rooms” and other forms of visual virtual connection. We have a whole set of unconscious behaviors that help regulate the flow of ordinary conversation. We make eye contact, we nod, we lean forward, we wave our hands—and we do all these things without being aware of them, and without being aware of others doing them too. But these behaviors are extraordinarily helpful in making Chapter_04.indd 100

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  conversation seem smooth, avoiding endless interruptions, and allowing everyone a chance to feel heard.

  Without those unconscious clues, you need to develop an equivalent set of conscious ones. You need to become exceedingly conscious about taking turns and allowing others to do so. People signal each other, for example, in ordinary conversation when they are nearly ready to stop talking. In effect, they’re telling the other person, “Almost done. Get ready, because it’s almost your turn.”

  Lacking that visual clue, you might put it into your conversation consciously. “I’m almost done here, so let me turn the conversation over to you after one more comment.” Something like that. It might seem hopelessly artificial, but the alternative is something we’ve all suffered through—the endless interruptions, apologies for interruptions, and awkward silences that make up a team meeting on the phone.

  Substitute conscious communication cues

  for the missing unconscious ones

  Similarly, you can help determine the pacing and give-and-take of a virtual conversation with deliberate clues about the length of turns and the handoffs. “Let’s each take about one minute to comment on this point that Geoff has raised, going around the team in order by time zone. Jane, do you want to start?”

  Again, that sort of mediating may seem like hard work, but the alternative is far more irritating for everyone. And exhausting. People regularly report on the creative ways they have come up with to tune out audioconferences, from personal grooming to exercising to even flipping back and forth between more than one conversation.

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  102 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications Second, the emotions we can convey effortlessly when we are face-to-face can to a certain extent be added back into a virtual conversation by consciously varying the pitch and pacing of your voice. We signal excitement (and stress) by speaking faster and raising our pitch. By slowing down and lowering your pitch, you can indicate the opposite—authority and calm. You can do this consciously, with some effort and a good deal of practice. Learning to put back in the emotions that the virtual world strips out of our communications is an essential survival skill in the twenty-first century.

  Practical fix

  The virtual temperature check

  Research shows that most of us have trouble judging tone in written communications or any form of virtual communication, even phone calls. Being an effective, empathetic communicator means making an extra effort to understand where your colleagues are coming from. For your team, create a simple three-stage “temperature” check you use to begin each virtual communication. Green could mean “good, ready to go.” Yellow,

  “I’m having a crappy day and need to be cut a little slack.”

  And red could mean “I’m close to a meltdown and should be approached with extreme care.”

  How would this checkup work on your weekly team call? First of all, you need agreement on the importance of starting on time.

  Tardiness is a problem in face-to-face meetings, too, but at least in-person chitchat while you wait is easier. On a conference call, without the nonverbal cues, it’s very difficult to make unplanned, casual conversation as relaxed and natural as it should be. So keep it to a minimum by enforcing precise starting times.

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  Once everyone has joined in, the convener of the meeting should immediately ask for a temperature check-in around the group. Call each name, and get a clear response. Green indicates a participant who’s in good spirits, well-rested, ready to participate and pay full attention with no significant stressors pulling the person away. Yellow means that all is not right in this person’s world—perhaps the individual is facing a significant deadline or issues from outside work, like a sick child, that are making life more difficult at the moment. And finally, red means that the person is having a day from hell—significant problems either at work or at home—and needs to be dealt with as gently as possible or should be excused entirely.

  The color responses then should guide you, as the moderator, to offer the participants the chance to say more about their particular state of mind or to keep their issues off the table. You’d say something like, “Laura, you reported in as yellow. Do you want to mention what is causing you to have a less-than-stellar day?” Red responses should provoke an offer to be excused from the meeting—if humanly possible—and be assisted as needed.

  And green responses should allow the moderator to ask about any good news to share.

  The whole exchange should only take a couple of minutes and will give the virtual participants a chance to state their emotional temperature—precisely the sort of simple check that would easily and naturally be carried out by the unconscious mind in face-to-face meetings. This kind of analysis can also be charted over time if recorded to provide valuable data about the emotional attitudes of workers and their fluctuations as the work year progresses.

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  104 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications CHAPTER SUMMARY

  • We humans crave emotional connection, but the virtual world can’t easily provid
e it.

  • The emotional connections in the virtual world—if they exist at all—are more fragile and prone to error.

  • Mirror neurons enable us to connect emotionally in person, but the mirroring process doesn’t work online.

  • Without these emotional tools, we fail to connect—to communicate the emotions we need for connections—and to make decisions.

  • Leadership becomes much harder with only virtual communication tools.

  • We need to replace the unconscious connection tools with virtual conscious ones.

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  5.

  THE LACK oF CoNNECTIoN

  AND CoMMITMENT

  ANYoNE HERE FROM DUBUQUE?

  How can we build connection—and make it last—online? We humans crave commitment, a happy state that is increasingly rare online. In this chapter, I’ll talk about the difficulties inherent in online connection and commitment—and what to do about them.

  Ultimately, whether you’re communicating face-to-face or virtually, you want to know that you’ve made the connection, sealed the deal, gotten the commitment. But in the virtual world, you have fewer ways to judge the reality of the commitment than in the real world. Trust is more fragile, and people are more inclined to kick the tires—with suspicion—in the digital world.

  How do you know what you’re getting?

  In the virtual world, you can’t accomplish the same kind of gut check that leads to a handshake deal in the real world.

  So maybe you decide to trust reluctantly and provisionally, or maybe not. It’s much harder to get closure in the virtual world, Chapter_05.indd 105

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  106 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications especially when the stakes are higher than, say, buying a paperback book on Amazon.

  We need to learn a new mode of transparent behavior with our clients and customers, our teams, and our more distant colleagues to build a new kind of virtual engagement, one that leads to commitment in the end. We further need to open the door for approaches that combine both the virtual and the physical in our engagements. Though still in its infancy, the research shows that the combination can become a powerful way to keep people engaged.