I was taking part in a “learning opportunity” (old money: training course) last week. In typical Microsoft-style, most attendees took along a laptop (they always say they’re taking notes, but we know…).

Anyway, in a break from the norm, the facilitator suggested that it was a bit rude – or at least might be construed as a bit rude – to do that when he and his esteemed guest had gone to the bother of creating the course and coming along to deliver it. “A bit tetchy, this guy”, I thought and decided I’d steer clear of him at coffee time...

He’s right though, it is a bit rude. Anyway, it got me thinking about the nature of how we do stuff now. Asynchronous functions (read: Email) have transformed the way we can do business because they make us scalable. Pretty much everything I do is on an asynchronous basis (there is the argument that everything is asynchronous so what I really mean is ‘obviously more down the asynchronous end of the spectrum’).

Most of my synchronous activities take place when spending time with friends and family: talking, eating, drinking and laughing.

So it is interesting that I spend my week interrupting this useful scalability that has been achieved via email, web services and various workflows with synchronous meetings which increasingly serve little purpose than checkpoints. “Let’s take this offline” is one of my least favourite phrases (not least because I hate the office-speak). I always think “No, let’s keep it online. It was offline until you called the meeting, now the point is raised and you want to take it offline again.” (I get tetchy too…). I think the issue here is that the meeting is needed to sync, but is ineffective at doing business. Maybe all meetings should be curtailed to simple agenda 15 minute stand-ups (a la Scrum).

What do we need then? I think we need new ways of thinking about some activities: can you run an effective meeting in an async way? Email doesn’t work for this, and if you follow the 3-colour rule (“if there’s 3 colours in an email it’s time for a meeting”) then it would also be counter-intuitive. So some kind of structured communication with rules on response times/capabilities might be the answer, but would undoubtedly be a nightmare to model to the satisfaction of everyone.

Looping back to my learning opportunity, I wondered if I might be able to commit more effectively if the content was delivered 1 hour per day over a week. That’s much more attractive to me though it’s likely to be a challenge for the provider.