Email is Dead?

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Matt Moore is on a bit of an insightfulness binge this week (must be that Interesting thing he was involved with). He’s been posting on the mortality of email, which pleases me.

Dave Snowden has been talking about “email detox” for years. We do lots of email traffic network analysis inside organisations that show exactly how dysfunctional email overload makes an organisation – especially when there are coordination problems between departmental silos… the traffic upwards starts to intensify as small decisions get escalated just to get an action taking place across the silos… which means, effectively the higher you are in the organisation, the more emails you get, and the less attention you can give to really important stuff – like thinking for example.

Email isn’t the only problem here, but its facility and omnivalence is. We use it for everything, from ultra-informal to ultra-formal: to broadcast announcements, arrange meetings, change meetings, share jokes, ask questions, negotiate plead and persuade, issue rationales and justifications, share documents, gossip, ping our social relationships, test the water, build common understanding, signify agreement and disagreement, sell ourselves, buy things, keep records, store key documents, ad infinitum. It’s a humungous bucket of stuff that is invasive as a tumour and as addictive as a brain.

Never mind that we have steadily developed tools and technologies to differentiate our different information activities – the conversational and discussion support of IM and chat; the personal interaction of phones; the collaborative co-construction of wikis; the broadcast current awareness of blogging; the social pinging of text messaging; the document sharing of web platforms, bookmarking and tagging. Never mind all that cleverness we’ve invented, we still, like brutes, try to use a hammer to do all our carpentry for us – the drawing, sawing, fretwork and all.

So I’ve been convinced for a while that email is an evil monster and needs to be cut down to size, stripping out the bulk of all those bundled information activities and supporting them with tools that (a) support them better and (b) differentiate our information environment sensibly so that we can navigate it and exploit it more effectively. But I’ve been worrying that such terrible, primitive habits are hard to break, and have been racking my brains to develop weaning strategies.

So I heave a great sigh of relief when Matt suggests that email, like an over-infectious virus, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Its greed for attention is swiftly burning itself out by killing its hosts faster than it can propagate. Its success in its ability to support so much variety of activity means it has become a universal tool of the connected. And that attracts spam, scam and scum. And the arms race between spam and anti-spam is exhausting. The costs of use will soon outweigh the ease + momentum of habit. Other tools are starting to look and feel more attractive. Facebook afficionados tell me they hardly ever use email now, they do all their communications and sharing using the toolsets on that platform. And Chad Lorenz recently pointed to evidence that teenagers are steadily abandoning email as a platform for communications – raising a bit of a storm in the process.

I can see that CIOs, records managers and information managers (and the system vendors who feed off them) might worry about that. They’ve only just gotten their heads and their systems around incorporating email into their record-keeping and information compliance processes. Now a greater plurification of information channels, both more ephemeral and more diverse, might seem to give them greater challenges. It’s in their interest to keep us trying to do everything on as few platforms and channels as possible, because that’s simpler in terms of meeting legal discovery and recordkeeping requirements.

In my view, we should abandon the quest to capture and manage all the text we exchange. We should let ephemeral communications be ephemeral, and legitimise only those documents that we want to capture as stable records. We need to recover our sense of what to record and preserve and what to let go. And that will release us to play sensibly with the tools that make sense. And we can finally grow up – and stop Making It Up As You Go Along (MIU AYGA in the drawing above). Roll on, sweet paradise. Now back to my email backlog.

4 Comments so far

Gordon

Part of a presentation I gave recently focussed on this, taking the view that email remains valid as a communication tool but that it is abused badly, particularly when it comes to sending attachments (docs) round.

We use a Wiki at my work to stop this and generally email is lightly used for ‘conversational’ information. We have internal mailing lists for bugs and whatnot but they are very very focussed and work well (and track the info!).

You are right though, a lot of the information that is captured is useless.

Posted on November 30, 2007 at 04:32 PM | Comment permalink

Graham Durant-Law

Interesting post Patrick. 
I posted about Pavlovian work practices - http://www.durantlaw.info/Pavlov - using email as the example.  I agree entirely that we should let ephemeral communications be ephemeral, and legitimise only those documents that we want to capture as stable records. I also think we need to slow down and make considered responses with as much background and context as possible instead of responding to email like Pavlov’s dog.
Regards, Graham

Posted on December 01, 2007 at 11:51 AM | Comment permalink

Patrick,
Personally I don’t quite buy the “try to use a hammer to do all our carpentry” parallel. I see e-mail as a channel rather than a tool. Just about all the things listed (...arrange meetings, change meetings, share jokes, ask questions, negotiate plead and persuade, issue rationales and justifications, share documents, gossip, ping our social relationships, test the water, build common understanding, signify agreement and disagreement, sell ourselves, buy things...) I can do very effectively face-to-face with people.

I understand the problem of volume of e-mail but am not sure the answer is to replace e-mail with many different alternatives. I can more easily focus on one channel than many, but then I am not a teenager wink

Dave

Posted on December 03, 2007 at 12:03 AM | Comment permalink

Claude Baudoin

Having just spent a week in meetings with Dave Staughton (we work together), mostly doing e-mail sitting around the table while occasionally interrupting ourselves to think about the topic of the meeting, I will have to disagree with him and line up behind Dave, Matt, and the hammer metaphor.

I’ve actually proposed several times, so far to no avail, that we do an empirical study of e-mail traffic in our company in order to clearly understand how many messages would be avoided if we used the right tool for the right job.

The problem with Dave’s “neutral channel” view, IMO, is that email does carry some modalities and unintended consequences, including spam, “forced asynchronicity”, lack of a general “recall” feature, etc., that are quite inefficient for some of the uses it’s put to (especially convening and changing meetings, among others).

At the same time, a lot of what’s happening is not a tool issue, it’s a culture issue.  Other tools will therefore develop their own pathologies for cultural reasons.  For example, in IM, people often don’t know when or how to end a conversation, and so it goes on and becomes disruptive (you thought you were done and had switched to another window, and then the other person pops back up just to say “OK, lata").  We’ll probably soon see similar irritants in social networking.

For the record, I’m older than Dave wink

Claude Baudoin

Posted on December 03, 2007 at 09:12 AM | Comment permalink

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