Have you ever heard the expression “a watched kettle never boils”? This past week I waited for two and a half days for a really important email. It seemed like forever. How many times does that happen? Waiting around for a colleague to respond, following up with a supplier because we’re still waiting for an answer, hoping a client will answer us today. It’s a huge difference from your other daily experience. You want an answer — hop on to Google and you’ll probably find it on Wikipedia or a blog. You can ask your Friends on Facebook or your Connections on LinkedIn as well as your Followers on Twitter. Instant gratification!
Have we gotten so used to instant information gratification, that we can’t fulfil the expectations of our colleagues and clients? Is this the next (current) biggest challenge for businesses?
The problem is you
Well it’s you, it’s me, it’s your colleague, it’s your boss…not that long ago, we had to wait for the letter to arrive or even the fax to come through, but as sharing got increasingly easy, we’ve gotten the used to this “always on” access to information. The speed of business has just gotten too slow. We’re bottlenecks. The information we seek is often with one person. Even in a team effort: there’s one project manager, one developer, one team lead and of course, there’s many projects per manager or many pieces to develop. It’s one person with many answers as opposed to the web’s many people with all many answers. So we grow instantly frustrated as we wait…
Where do we go from here?
The answer isn’t clearcut and I’m not going to pretend I have it. Should we look out to the world around us? Maybe strengthen internal social networks (“Add Coworker” if you will). Introducing the concept of social networks at work would mean: instead of asking your project manager, you could post a status for all your company to see and anyone with a similar experience could answer. There are some corporate social networks around, but I’ve never seen them implemented.
Is project-based work the solution? I read somewhere that the future of business was project-based. Meaning that consultants get hired on a project-by-project basis. Because each consultant is their own boss, their time management would presumably lead to more efficiency. Or maybe an answer is simply ”technology” — Instead of saving documents to hard drives and hard-to-search shared drives, could offerings like Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Google Docs crawl each document and generate tags to improve search?
Or maybe the answer simply lies with me and you. Maybe we need to accept that not every piece of information is needed right now as Tim Ferriss would argue in The 4-Hour Workweek
What do you think?
(Photo credit: Caitlin Regan)
