Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Delegate to Decrease Occupational Spam

In response to my article in Forbes on Email Hell, my friend Richard Titus made a spot on comment:

This is great. I also employ several email tools (ClearContext, x1) to try and reduce the "occupational spam" that's a critical part of the BBC culture. A big part of the problem, however, is a failure to delegate decisions & authority. Over Cc'ing i find is really about people seeking permission rather than forgiveness - as an executive you have to give people a goal, and permission to succeed or fail in its pursuit.

This isn't just germane to the BBC culture, the BCC culture exists in most organizations.  Email and meeting habits are set from the top down.

The difference between communication and collaboration is having a bounded goal.  Executives have a responsibility not only for goal setting (which with motivation is leadership) and accountability (management).  But we have responsibility to structure conversations towards goals.  Richard points out CCing is symptom of a lack of empowering responsibility, but there is also an opportunity. 

Reporting can flow in more ways than up.  Reporting doesn't need to be a side-activity, but a byproduct of getting work done.  It needs a modicum of structure and additional transparency that is now easy with social software.

Do not interpret this as  decouple decision rights and information flow.  The spice must flow, however, the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.  My apologies to Frank Herbert & Karl Marx for that last comment.

Meeting Hell

Meetings are a big productivity killer that you can control by working together better.  Studies have shown the cost of meetings, you probably spend a week per month in meetings, and you can calculate your own cost of meetings. The issue isn't just where you spend your team's time, but how you spend it. Vinnie Mirchandani, following my post in Forbes on Email Hell, points out the productivity problem isn't just email.

The other big productivity killer in corporations is meetings. I am constantly surprised to see too many of my client employees just go from meeting to meeting - then, of course come back to their desks to handle the deluge of email!

Like email, improving meeting productivity requires more than personal tactics.  Through leadership, the behavior of the group must change.  This distinction is critical in our current climate.  Companies need to make do with less -- and doing so cannot be done through personal productivity gains -- but with efficient and effective coordination and collaboration of teams, the organization as a whole, and how partners and customers intersect.

Changing meetings is difficult because nowhere does company culture manifest itself, if not define itself, than through meetings.  The meeting culture of some companies puts a premium on presentation, or cooperation to consensus, or conflict as creativity.  Research has even shown that most meetings are status contests.  Beyond this theater as a disclaimer, here is some practical advice to make meetings more effective and efficient:

Do I need to be there?

Without a criteria for who should attend meetings, the attendee list tends to grow.  Not only does having more people in the meeting effect the productivity of the meeting, but it keeps people from working on other things.  Put responsibility for this criteria upon the person calling the meeting, as they have the greatest odds of abusing it.

Share notes

At the beginning of every meeting, ensure that someone is taking notes and how they will be shared.  Better yet, have an established practice for how this is done in every meeting.  Sharing notes can help decrease the attendee list for efficiency sake.  How notes are taken can make the group more effective:

• Consider having the note taker project while taking notes.  This clarifies and gains support for what was said and what is agreed to. 
• Take notes in a wiki to make it easy to link to supporting materials, pass editing control to others, share while taking and makes the notes searchable and discoverable alongside other knowledge.
• Don't aim for meeting minutes, encourage summarization, but try to capture as much as possible.  The great thing about meeting notes is that they carry with them the context of an event.  Small things said may mean a lot in the future. For example, someone might contribute an alternative point of view that wasn't part of what might be the summary, but when someone finds it outside the meeting they can contact the person to further explore it.
• Focus on next steps.  Conclude meetings with agreement on what was learned and the action items.

One tendency I have seen is to constrict note sharing for sake of politics.  Sometimes this necessary, but the instinct for control tends to hamper productivity.  For example, if division heads need to meet on an HR issue and craft a message for broader consumption, sometimes the meeting owner controls the notes.  Always share notes with meeting attendees and have a protocol for how they will be shared further.

What's the goal?

A meeting without a clear goal shouldn't exist.  Goals help focus conversation, but also ensure time is being spent towards the right outcome.

The most unproductive outcome of a meeting is having another meeting.  Usually because of unclear goal setting.  Unfortunately, meetings are autopoietic, meaning they self-propagate.  The only time a meeting should lead to another meeting is if that is the up front goal (let's plan the annual sales kickoff, or let's divide the strategic planning we need to accomplish into these three meetings).

What's the agenda?

The structure of an agenda should support accomplish the goal of the meeting.  One challenge is trying to limit agenda items while everyone has their own agendas and need to be heared.  One of the quickest produtivity gains available is to perform agenda setting in a wiki beforehand.  Be sure you bring people's attention to the agenda as it changes.  Link to supporting materials so everyone arrives at the meeting not only understanding the goal, but understands the subject matter behind each agenda item.

Will this ever end?

Always have a firm start time and end time for meetings.  Notice that when meetings have a firm end time, and you get close to it, suddenly the meeting becomes more productive?  Consider how time as a constraint can provide focus for conversation.  Consider trying that hour long meeting in 30 minutes.

Identify Subgroups

Before a meeting, consider if a subgroup of attendees can better discuss and decide or recommend a course of action.  During a meeting recognize when the conversation really is for a subset of attendees, and if time allows, table the conversation until the subgroup can work it out.

Standup Meetings

One of the best practices businessfolk can adapt from agile software development methodologies is the standup meeting.  Have the team meet daily for 5-15 minutes to synch on status.  Sometimes this is done litterally standing up, which gives even the most diligent of soldiers a stake in ending the meeting before they pass out.  Each team member takes a turn updating everyone, perhaps taking clarifying questions, but not using the forum for protracted discussion.

Prep Time

The beauty of the standup meeting is that everyone comes prepared to update others.  However, this preparation doesn't come for free.  You need to allow the team members time to prepare for the meeting. 

One evolution I've witnessed at Socialtext is how they increasingly shared their status updates in the wiki before the standup meeting, and then it became convention for everyone to read the updates before the meeting.  In any meeting format, status updates are better replaced with coordinating conversations, unblocking issues and gaining a shared understanding of priorities.

BAHM: Big Hairy Audacious Meetings

So far, I've provided general considerations for making meetings more productive for groups. But what are some bold things you can try with your team? For the more adventurous teams, here are some Big Hair Audacious Meeting methods to consider:

• Barcamp Your Retreat -- At Socialtext, half of our employees are remote, so our face to face meetings really matter when we have them.  Initially we did like all companies do, lots of time preparing the perfect agenda, with lots to cover.  Once we tried a Barcamp-style open space methodology for the first afternoon.  People liked it so much, we threw away the structured agenda for the week and let it self-organize.  At the end of the week, everyone revelled in the experience, but we also reviewed the original agenda and found we covered every single item.
• Turn it Off or Turn it On -- Companies have gone to the extreme in adapting to having connectivity available during meetings.  Some have banned laptops and blackberries during meetings, which I think completely misses the point.  Doing email in meetings is bad, but the cause is usually a culture of unproductive email and meetings.  Having laptops augment meetings, with wikis, backchannels and the ability to search, is good with the right focus.  But you need to make people conscious of the issue.  Try three things:
  • During specific portions of a meeting, or certain kinds of meetings, the organizer needs to demand all laptops shut for 100% focus on the people in the room.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ask people to bring their laptops and look to augment the meeting with social software and search. Afterwards, ask people how this made your team more productive, or not.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ban everything but pen, paper and people.  Afterwards, ask people how it helped or hurt productivity -- but more importantly talk about if time and effectiveness is being lost because people are not valuing attention.
• Standups -- I used standup meetings as an illustration of how time is best use for status reporting, but do try this format with your team.
• Make Every Meeting a Party -- I always quote Pete Kaminski's insight that "time spent face to face is too valuable for work" to make the point that teams need to socialize.  If you don't afford the time to help your team be unproductive, they will make meetings unproductive.
• Turn Recurring Meetings into Processes -- survey the meeting topics of your organization and you may find recurring meetings that are the result of broken business processes.  Fix the process or lackthereof.
• Get Back to One-on-Ones -- short one-to-one meetings can be incredibly productive.  They even help decrease email volume.  Consider the patterns with your team, and if you can carve out the time for one-on-one meetings by having less group meetings.
• No Meeting Monday -- this is the obvious audacious one.  Consider banning meetings on Monday, not just because it is a good day for people to collect themselves and orient how meetings should be conducted for the rest of the week.  But it will raise the conciousness of meeting cost.  As with email, knowing it is an issue we are all responsible for is half the battle.

In summary, I don't take the extreme position that meetings are wholly unproductive, and the issue isn't the cost of meetings, but how to increase their return by working together better.  In future posts I hope to address how to make meetings more effective and efficient with partners and customers.

Related readings:

• Best Buy's Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)
• Tim Ferriss' Do-Not-Do-List
• 37signals' Meetings are Toxic
• Short case study on meeting augmentation
• Outsourcing memory
• 43 folders on Topless meetings
• Productivity of Far Flung Teams
• The hidden cost of meetings

Email Hell

The following is an article I contributed to Forbes.

E-mail overload is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. And the average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person per day are expected to reach over 228 by 2010.

The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to solve it.

A major contributor to e-mail overload is broken business processes. When an environment changes, business processes fail to adapt, and this causes exceptions. For example, when a customer requests information that isn't provided by a standard support process, it can kick off a chain of e-mails hunting for information--and what is found isn't easily captured into the redesign of the process.

We haven't had good tools and practices for resolving these exceptions and learning from them. In  The Only Sustainable Edge, John Seely Brown and John Hagel identify that most employee time is not spent executing process, but handling exceptions to process.

Commercial e-mail spam filters and virus protection do a reasonable job today. What remains is behavioral--not how e-mail works, but how we work with it and how we shouldn't. According to Gartner Group, 30% of e-mail is "occupational spam," characterized by excessive CC, BCC and Reply-All use. Not by coincidence, Socialtext customers commonly decrease e-mail volume by 30% and moving e-mails to collaborative workspaces that are designed for one-to-many or many-to-many communication.

From a user's point of view, e-mail is what you could call a push medium. Beyond your control, anyone can push an e-mail into your inbox at near zero cost. By contrast, new Web 2.0 media emphasize pull technology: You choose who or what you want to subscribe to, pull information to you when you want it and unsubscribe when you want. Ideally, we would use push mediums for directed private or time-sensitive communication and pull for less formal, more public and less urgent communication. Now there is a choice--so long as you can gain agreement on which to use for what and how to use it.

Eugene Kim says there is "no such thing as collaboration without a shared goal." For every group that you regularly communicate with, one of your goals should be to increase communications efficiency and effectiveness. Without these shared goals and practices, behavior will not change. And with new technologies, you have the opportunity to transform communication habits into collaborative best practices.

Here are the top five tactics for making e-mail an efficient and effective collaboration tool:

Establish Internal E-Mail Practices

Within your organization or community, review your current e-mail habits. Consider establishing agreements on the formality, tone, brevity, distribution, responsiveness and timing. Then try bold experiments such as "E-mail-Free Fridays"--not necessarily because they will work, but for learning what could work and raising awareness of the cost of e-mail. Other peers might help bring awareness to work/life balance issues when always on mobile e-mail.

Move Group E-mail to Collaborative Workspaces

With enterprise social software solutions available on the market today, identify group uses of e-mail and move them to private workspaces. This creates a spam- and noise-free environment for the team. Different workspaces with different features can accomplish different goals. For example, create one where your team can hold less formal, blog-style conversations and general context sharing. Google     (nasdaq:       GOOG -        news     -            people     ) employees blog weekly in lieu of more formal reporting to make employees' work searchable. Or create more structured project workspaces with a process for archiving them at the end of the project.

Establish Public Protocols When Possible

For communicating with the outside world, establish protocols such as preferred methods of contact. As you communicate, be clear about how private or redistributable an e-mail is. For example, I include this line in my signature:

This e-mail is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private

Reply to E-mail by Blog

Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls once described blogging as "replying to my e-mails in public." Of course, you can't do that with every e-mail you get. But for the ones you can, you decrease the odds of answering the same question again and make your ideas discoverable. And while not everyone will blog, there are other public ways to share when appropriate.

Leverage Special-Purpose Social Software

Luis Suarez of IBM     (nyse:       IBM -        news     -            people     ) is  successfully replacing e-mail with social software. It's not just about reducing e-mail, but using Web sites to help you communicate efficiently and effectively. For example, LinkedIn is a better tool for referring new contacts. Dopplr is great for sharing travel plans. Flickr for sharing photos. Delicious for links.

As with private workspaces, these Web sites might create separate inboxes for you to manage. Ironically, for those who don't use advanced tools such as dashboards and newsreaders, the e-mail inbox becomes a place that notifies you about communications in other places. And that lets e-mail stick to what it does best.

Ross Mayfield is chairman, president and co-founder of Socialtext, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based social software company.

Broken Business Processes Contribute to Email Overload

Ramon Padilla from Tech Republic picked up on a quote of mine from a Christopher Lynch interview:

“(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.”

In Ramon's article he explores how did we get here and why has it happened.  Here are the headlines of the five points he explores.

1. Making it up as we go along.
2. Not enforcing business processes.
3. Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs.
4. Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms.
5. Lack of communication alternative besides e-mail.

If you would like to learn more about this issue, please help me by voting on Fast Company's The Killer Pitch for this story:

Most people don't dispute that they suffer from email overload. A recent report from Basex in the NYTimes revealed that people spend 28% of their day interrupted by things like unnecessary email. However, what we do about our overload is a source of much debate.

Socialtext has connected the dots between a few reports to discover that a great deal of our email comes from handling exceptions. Because business processes don't have a system to translate them into practice, we spend more than a quarter of our day emailing about the exceptions to the business process rules.

Worse than the volume of email is the amount of mental energy required by each email recipient, ergo worker, to parse each exception and determine what to do with it. E-mail was once intended to increase productivity and has now become so voluminous it is counter productive. Basex determined that business loose $650 billion in productivity due to the unnecessary email interruptions. And, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per person per day expected to reach over 228 by 2010.

Socialtext has been building out business practice support using their customizable Enterprise 2.0 platform to return email back to its rightful place in the communication stratigraphy,  which is not as the catch-all for exception handling. Their business social software makes the process more productive, reducing email by 30%. With the growth in the remote workforce, global coverage, proliferation of mobile devices, and social technologies; collaboration is the solution to improve the effectiveness of communication and address these forces.

Personally, I think we should win because our pitch uses the word stratigraphy.

Breaking the Glass Silo

Establishing ties and communication across silos is a goal of many of my customers.  Unfortunately, most companies have information flowing up and command flowing down with only executives coordinating across departments.  Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization, a new HBS working paper by Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart, and  Michael L. Tushman combs through millions of emails, calendar entries and teleconferences in a large enterprise to reveal some patterns of working across organizational, spatial and geographic boundaries:

• Communication is heavily constrained by formal organizational structure: the vast majority of communication occurs within business unit and functional boundaries, not across them. This points to the importance of drawing the right organizational boundaries.
• Women, mid- to high-level executives, and members of the executive management, sales, and marketing functions are most likely to participate in cross-group communications.
• These individuals provide a bridge for distant groups in a company's social structure.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Open sessions a frequent question was if there were any gender differences to be considered for implementation and adoption.  This research indicates that women are more apt to bridge. 

Some of our better champions are women that work across these boundaries.  And even better, its our job to help them succeed and get promoted.

Whipping up a batch of effective communications

Randall Stross in the NYTimes writes about how prominent bloggers get overwhelmed by email and how its nothing new.  Of course, journalists empathize with this condition, so its perhaps over emphasized at large.  But implicit in a lot of conversations I've had lately, we've turned up the noise in our communications and there is a lot of room for innovation in extracting signal and enhancing effectiveness. 

Randall notes how  human proxies in the form of assistants may not be effective.  Yes, you can offshore outsource such services at nominal cost these days, but if anything such an assistant should be closer to you than anyone to be effective.  And the article does not explore using the social network as a filter, going beyond the single assistant.  The article does highlight the practices of H.L. Menchken, known for his effective and illustrious correspondence, who died 50 years ago.

Whether the post brought 10 or 80 letters, Mencken read and answered them all the same day. He said, “My mail is so large that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”

YET at the same time that Mencken teaches us the importance of avoiding overnight e-mail indebtedness, he also reminds us of the need to shield ourselves from incessant distractions during the day when individual messages arrive. The postal service used to pick up and deliver mail twice a day, which was frequent enough to permit Mencken to arrange to meet a friend on the same day that he extended the invitation. Yet it was not so frequent as to interrupt his work.

Batch processing was easier when everyone was on the same clocks for sending and receiving.  Today most people have a bell curve for their communications, with peak hours generally being when they are awake.  And everyone has a different bell curve not to mention different time zones.

This batch processing approach is inherently more efficient, but to make it effective you have to establish protocols with whom you communicate.  Productivity guru Tim Ferriss notes:

...In a digital world, creating time therefore hinges on minimizing e-mail. The fastest method I’ve found for controlling the e-mail impulse is to set up an autoresponder that indicates you will be checking e-mail twice per day or less. This is an example of “batching” tasks (performing like tasks at set times, between which you let them accumulate), and your success with batching will depend on two factors:

1.  Your ability to train others to respect these intervals
and, much more difficult,
2.  Your ability to discipline yourself to follow your own rules

I think you can work out these protocols with people you regularly communicate.  But such people also adapt to you, perhaps your lack of responsiveness and how you react in escalating.  But establishing these protocols, across modalities, are the most difficult with the same strangers who could provide the most valuable new information to you.  Look Tantek's approach of putting and adapting his protocols on a wiki page.  Look at Robert Scoble's difficulty in how he follows everyone who follows him, but then can't get people to respect a protocol of not sending him direct messages in twitter, especially the text messages are expensive when on the road in Israel.  Valuing and responding new correspondents, what Menchen called courtesy and we might call quaint, rises in complexity as modalities fragment communication.

Ms. Rodgers said that Mencken was acutely disturbed by interruptions that broke his concentration. The sound of a ringing telephone was associated in his mind, he once wrote, with “wishing heartily that Alexander Graham Bell had been run over by an ice wagon at the age of 4.”

Some people might wish the same for Jack, Ev and Biz, although an ice wagon is tough to come by these days.

As we are splintering out of email and into other modalities, they tend to share some common traits:

• Pull models of attention management instead of push
• Less formal
• More public and discoverable
• With RSS and APIs, messages can be used in other modalities
• Filtered by people

These modalities, such a blogs and Twitter, and not to mention more specialized forms such as social bookmarking, feed sharing, Flickr or obnoxious Facebook apps -- all trend towards batch processing.  They can almost all flow into an RSS newsreader for a power user.  And conversations flow across them and often threads and comments are hard to follow.  But that's okay because of informality and discovering what you missed while in the flow is far easier. 

One key to effectiveness is looking for opportunities for more public conversation to prompt easy group forming and gaining agreement from the group on a more effective set of protocols.

Batch processing private correspondence needs more than tools, but practices.  We've known for a while now that creating private spaces for collaboration can aid productivity by taking some email out of the inbox.  And more recently with wikis and the right practices, groups can agree on protocols to be more effective and adapt them rapidly.  To Tim Ferriss' point, this needs discipline, but for the whole group.

Something I'm seeing with what we recently launched at Socialtext is an important distinction:

1. You can follow people and their more public communications.  They will be less formal, often curating information for you while in the flow of their own activity.  By pulling their flow at a time convenient for you and publishing not just for them, you gain greater social discovery.
2. As you form more private groups in workspaces, and if you take the time to gain agreement on communication protocols, you can batch process effectively.
3. If either (1) which requires no protocol, or (2) which does, fails to be effective for sender or receiver -- by all means escalate, even at risk of being run over by an ice wagon.

Vacation Email

I'm on vacation in Hawaii, and while not totally unplugged, I have an increasing fear of my inbox upon my formal return.  Dick Kaser shares a similar email story:

...I made the mistake a couple of weeks ago of retaliating against my computer. I switched it off for 3 entire days, wrote longhand in a journal again, and told my boss that I felt like a new man. Of course, that was until the day of reckoning came as several hundreds of emails rolled off the server into my laptop client...

Now, since I suddenly had 300 pending messages in my inbox, I could not get past the new messages pouring in marked "Urgent" to clear the backlog. It took a turbulent plane ride with my laptop jostling on a tray table and a long night in a hotel room to clean out the stack of incoming emails. And though I can say I am back on top of it again, I am not proud that the new man I had become was bombarded again...

I set up a Vacation Page in my company wiki, sort of a public inbox.  The theory is if it is really that important it can be transparent.  Or if it was important on the first day of my vacation, it may not be on the last one so they can edit it out. 

The outside world is getting a vacation auto-responder email, a crude instrument for those who don't know my presence is on Jaiku and Twitter, or otherwise aggregated as a Lifestream where someone might see a vacation picture.

That was, until, I learned how sand may have enabled consumer electronics, but it hates moving parts like telephoto lenses.

Anyway, taking a real vacation either requires falling off the grid, rudely to others, or lots of cooperation with begotten collaborators until presence is richer and messaging more passive.

Gmail Storage and Unfair Bundling

Post revised: my Gmail is working again, thanks to the helpful work of others, so I edited the below to stick to constructive feedback.

When someone exceeds their storage quota in Gmail they should be able to pay to upgrade their storage.  Not require Google Apps for Your Domain (making you have a domain, buy one through them or convert your whole company). This bundling strategy is not what I expected when I signed up for Google as an individual.  I feel a degree of lock-in and forced virality that is sure to disappoint other users in the future.

One aside, when I called the Apps support line I got an educated young woman who tried to help using her knowledge of the system, not following scripts.  Not sure how it will scale, but I did not expect such quality support from the get-go.

Gmail Storage Limit

“If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.”

Over the past couple of weeks, I've reached my Gmail storage limit, currently 2768 MB.  This is something I didn't think could happen and it is really hampering my productivity.  I've been an advocate of Gmail and my blog review is listed in their testimonials, where I said:

• "I want all my personal data accessible anywhere anytime.
• Privacy concerns are overblown... I'm more concerned with     services that model me and my relationships without my permission or control.
• It's the best webmail app there is. Simple, usable and powerful."

While I have offloaded much of the work I used to do in email to wikis and blogs, my public position makes me a target for spam and genuine correspondance with new collaborators. 

While there are some good tactics for reducing Gmail volume, the solutions I want are not available to me:

• I want to whip out my credit card and buy more storage.
• I want to not only search to find deletable emails, but sort.  I can make a massive list of emails with attachments, but I can't sort to eliminate the top 20 files that are undoubtedly hogs. 
• I want to keep my user pattern of being a piler, not a filer, and relying on search for recall
• I don't want to have to offload my archive onto my client and end up having two seperate places to search

Unfortunately, for now, I'm back to the user experience I've had with webmail.  Constantly tending to an inbox at the limit instead of actually getting work done.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: A Google employee reached out and I can say with confidence that a solution is on the way.

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