SPEED

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

Only 25 years ago when I took my first job with an international organisation we read the post at leisure in the first couple of hours and then dictated replies until lunchtime. In the afternoon we thought about problems, drew up inventories and held short meetings. By 16:00 the Circulator would begin to come round, containing a copy of every letter received and written that day. Occasionally there was something of a stir when a telegram arrived from India and the first time this happened it prompted an extremely rigorous exercise in telegram writing to keep the words to an absolute minimum.

In my first nine months we made two international telephone calls. I then went to the Caribbean, armed with the Olympia manual typewriter that had seen me through high school and university, lugging it on and off Leeward Islands Air Transit so often that the inevitable happened; the baggage handlers dropped it and it was never the same again. When I returned to England in 1981 headquarters had a telex machine and things were never the same again as it was swiftly succeeded by the fax, the word processor and courier services and finally e-mail and the Web.

Nowadays I am thought somewhat quaint because I treat communication in as medium-free a way as possible. Just because it's a fax, I used to argue, doesn't mean that I will reply any quicker than if it were a letter.

I check my e-mail regularly but sparingly, preferring my PA to give me a verbal digest, and although I ring my office, again regularly but sparely, on my mobile phone, I don't know my number so that I can honestly refuse to give it to anyone.

Apart from the fact that I'm not important enough to hector and be hectored on a totally random basis wherever I am and whatever situation I'm in, my main task is to think and disturbance is bad for clear thinking. And, in any case, what's the point of trying to run your own diary if you have a PA?

Does this speed and intensity of communication make for better decisions?

Before answering that, let me try to assemble some evidence. First, and obviously, a lot of e-mail is like soap opera; if you take a rain check for a few hours you come back to find you can pick up the plot as if you had never been away. Occasionally you want to track a big decision but in that case I'm tempted to resort to the telephone to unblock procedural silt, to assuage doubt, to make milder terms or simply to discuss a situation in the less harsh, more retractable verbal medium;

e-mail, once written, cannot be unsaid in the same way that a careless phrase can be modulated.

Secondly, when an e-mail is long and complex enough to command my detailed attention I frequently find that vital material is garbled. The apparent casualness of the medium induces carelessness which, in turn, requires a whole extra relay of communication.

The convention in letter writing was care to such a degree that the prose was often stilted but the effect was usually clear.

We have fallen into the trap of thinking that the medium allows more liberty with the message. This is even more true in the way that we are indifferent to the market for what we send. In letter writing you knew who would read it and that the initial reader would take care to whom the letter was shown or copied.

Nowadays we send an identical missive by e-mail to people we know intimately but copy it to others we have never met; and all of them in turn feel free to copy it to other people, possibly friends, possibly competitors.

Whether this is better in the long run than the plod of routine correspondence is difficult to analyse. Certainly the way we communicate now is likely to lead to more but less purposeful contact; more people are brought into the scope of an activity but they are not so likely as they were before to know exactly what's happening. Thus misunderstanding and occasional dudgeon. Nowadays we can offend people by accident; twenty years ago we were very careful how we did that.

It is also true that this kind of fractured communication tends to be less strategic, more tactical; it is the administrative equivalent of spot trading on the stock exchange.

At this point you would have to concede that the people whose business is in the Internet and telecommunications have been bad at strategic planning. They are all very good at engineering buy-in and leveraging and branding but the economic models have mostly been grandiloquent.

It might have been tempting to conjure new models for a new medium but in the end it has been real, hard cash that has been burned.

On the other side of the coin, I am dedicated to the progress of the text message (SMS) as it has been bottom up, cheap, flexible and has developed its own argot which, and this is a bonus, serious people don't like. This is surely a good medium for ephemera and haiku.

We need to make a distinction which is becoming blurred between the speed at which we are expected to make decisions and the quantity of information we receive or which we can access.

This is said to cause "information overload" but that's just a euphemism for bad management, the old aphorism of the bad worker blaming his tools springs to mind.

Handled well, the new access to information is nothing but beneficial (ten years ago you wouldn't have been reading me!) but on balance I can't see that the speed of response is improving the quality of decision making.

One not new but now ubiquitous phenomenon is the enthusiasm. Nowadays somebody can have a very sketchy idea and in half an hour there is a thousand words of e-mail -- the prose equivalent of a Spanish omelette -- on a hundred screens. Greed, excitement, loyalty, friendship, enthusiasm, novelty, may catch us so that we read the message; but in 24 hours we are clear that the idea won't work.

I don't think I would even like to suffer this regularly in my employer's time but as I'm self-employed it is extremely irritating. Increasingly I have to resist invitations to brainstorms, to incipient consortia, to discussion groups and problem solving chat rooms. It is business that does the business, the rest is strictly recreational.

This judgment is, admittedly, a little harsh.

We are not drawing hard lines any more between work and home (whether we should is another matter) and in a fast moving, insubstantial environment it is tempting to bang every button you see in case you hit the jackpot; but while the rules of economics are not immutable neither are they malleable. Surpluses create capital and capital requires a return on the investment. It isn't often that I preach conventional economics but on this occasion those who claim to be good at that kind of thing should have thought more carefully, gone back to fundamentals, and stayed away from their laptops for a couple of days to work it out on the back of an envelope.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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