Minimum Human Bandwidth

by Tom DeMarco, Fellow and Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

In the 8 September 2006 issue of MSNBC Newsweek, journalist Andrew Romano tells us something of his relationship (close but not huggy) with his sister:

Don't get me wrong. I love her and all -- but this might be the first she's heard of it. Which is why when I logged on to Facebook.com late last night -- like millions of bored teenagers and twentysomethings in bedrooms, dorm rooms and rented apartments everywhere -- the words came as something of a surprise: "Laura Romano is in a relationship. 11:32pm." I'm 24. An older, warmer brother might have preferred to learn of his sister's budding romance in person. But I wouldn't have had it any other way. [1]

He wouldn't have had it any other way. In particular, he wouldn't have preferred to learn it face-to-face. A face-to-face interaction of even a few seconds would certainly have imparted a lot more information than the six words of his sister's posting. It might have answered questions like Male or Female? Employed or Un? Single or Married? Presently or Recently Incarcerated? The reporter might have learned the name of his sister's new friend, maybe seen a picture or heard a word picture, possibly even learned something deep and intimate. Whew! Too much information!

An Isaac Asimov story from the 1950s tells of a future in which humans almost never meet. They live in their secluded convenience homes, surrounded by robotic servants that supply virtually all their needs. When they communicate at all, it is through a video telephone. The only real excuse for getting close to another person is sex. While they desire sex, the actual act has become traumatic. One character, after bolting out of the room where his intended paramour has invited him, calls her on the video phone and says he had a sudden sense that molecules of air that had been in her lungs a moment before were going to get into his lungs.

I worry that that future is beginning to happen in our workplaces. There are dozens of excuses why coworkers can't look each other right in the eye and communicate directly. They include flextime, distributed teams, full-hours coverage, work-at-home, office in the other building, no adequate small team workspace, and so forth. The reasons are different, but the effect is always the same: instead of wideband interaction, we communicate through a narrow pipe. The narrowest pipe of all is text messaging, now the fastest-growing means of corporate communication. We pass whatever needs to be said through the almost-comical medium of big thumbs typing on tiny keys, or spelling out words by repeatedly pressing on cell phone number keys. What could be next? Morse code?

We tend to think of narrow band communication as something that's thrust upon us by circumstance ("We use a lot of IM because the team is spread out all over the globe"), but an alternate explanation is considerably more sobering: is it possible that the narrow band filter is inserting itself into our work modes because of our increasing reluctance to deal with the uncontrolled, messy richness of face-to-face?

Opting for narrowed bandwidth interaction is a kind of flight from deep involvement, perhaps a reflection of poor socialization in one's upbringing. People who are unpracticed at deep interaction tend to avoid it lest it demonstrate their poor skills. This effect feeds on itself as more and more shallow interaction makes people less and less comfortable with anything else.

One of the most surprising changes in work habits over my lifetime has been the demise of lunch. When I arrived at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the fall of 1963, I fell into a culture that worked hard for two four-hour periods, morning and afternoon, with a rich, highly social lunch hour in between. Conversation over lunch could take you in virtually any direction. The personalities that presented themselves in the staff cafeteria were the heart and soul of work teams that governed the rest of the day. Those teams were full of camaraderie and respect and affection that might not have evolved if the interactions had been limited to strictly work matters. When I left the Labs and began to consult, I used to inquire of my client teams as to their lunch habits: who ate lunch with whom? The answers told me a lot about team jell. I don't bother to ask anymore, since almost everyone in the 2007 workplace eats alone at his/her desk. Gone are the rich and messy communications that told you so much about your coworkers. In their place, we often find a thumbed-in communication like "NJC" (nothin', just chillin'). If you look at such a message and conclude, "I wouldn't have it any other way," you're living in AzimovLand.

Eschewing rich human communication may not hurt the performance of someone who makes his living as a bookkeeper or day trader, but IT is different. The design and installation of complex systems requires a deep immersion into everything that is messy about how organizations function and how the people in them work together to make up an effective whole. It involves understanding people who are very different from ourselves and from each other, dealing with all of their needs, some of which are emotional and political. Hiding from this makes you ineffective. The narrow band we're coming to use so often is a road to dysfunction.

-- Tom DeMarco, Fellow and Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Reference

1. Romano, Andrew. "In Defense of Facebook." MSNBC Newsweek, updated 8 September 2006 (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14722671/site/newsweek).