Interactions are valuable
In the drive for efficiency, organisations often want to build one or more databases that people can query instead of asking their colleagues.
At the ‘low fi’ end this might mean having a Notion or an Airtable or a wiki, containing a kind of organisational FAQ.
How do I book a holiday?
What do I do if a client asks for a refund?
Do we have a standard consultancy agreement?
How do I get authorisation to spend money?
These sorts of questions are indeed frequently asked, and it can massively reduce friction for people (both in terms of their ability to their job, and in terms of their employee experience) when this information is available in an easily accessible way.
So let me be clear that I think it’s a good thing to have systems that let people find information for themselves when they need it.
But I think there is a pitfall here.
Even when information is available, it can still be valuable to answer someone’s question personally. Or... up to a point. Repeated “let me google that for you” conversations can be frustrating. I don’t think people should have to have infinite patience. But what I’m trying to provide here is a counterweight to the prevailing idea which is: any time that people have to spend talking to each other is time wasted, that they could have been “working”.
There is something very important missing from this perspective which is that each interaction is valuable because it strengthens the relationship.
Relationships grow through contact over time. Each interaction we have potentially strengthens our relationship, and lays down bandwidth that we can draw on later to work together more effectively.
And sometimes interactions are better than systems. It’s more valuable to find out somebody’s work by observing it and talking to them, than it is to it find out about it by looking in your project management system. There is meaningful context which you simply cannot get from a report. What do these numbers (and the trends in them) mean? Firsthand observation massively improves your ability to form hypotheses about the meaning of data. Such conversations are also examples of interactions that lead to stronger relationships, and deeper empathy for your colleagues and their roles.
This is why I think that people should have free choice about how they maintain their to do list. It’s a deliberate decision to actually prevent us pulling centralised reporting on people’s workloads, and to force us to talk to each other instead. It’s a way of avoiding a world in which people say “don’t talk to me about my project, just look in Asana”. A lot of important detail is missing in Asana, but more than that we’d miss out on an interaction, and interactions are valuable.
