Month: September 2013

Tomorrow I head back to Washington DC after a month's worth of work travel: 5 countries (China, Austria, Romania, UK, The Netherlands), 10 presentations and workshops, various hotels, airports, railway stations, metro systems, buses, taxis and languages. At this point I'm tempted to write about packing techniques, hints for mastering airport security lines, methods of minimizing currency confusion, how not to lose important items, and what seems to work to keep the 'day job' going during a period of patchy internet access, changing time zones, and missing smart-phone alerts to call-in to a meeting back at base. But instead I'm sticking with the organization design theme.

One of my colleagues on Friday asked what were the preoccupations and questions I was hearing from people in these various presentations and workshops – anything in common across them? It was a great question that caused me to mentally skim over various perspectives of organization I'd been discussing over the month: four workshops on methods of organization design, four seminars on aspects of the future of work and how this might affect organization design, one session on organizational health, and another on changing the culture of an organization. All told somewhat over 350 people representing private and public sector, multiple nationalities and job roles attended the events. Each event needed a different set of information, PowerPoint, handouts, etc.

So coming up with 'the headline', as the jargon goes, wasn't that easy. I remember once being asked to present my entire PhD dissertation, 4 years of work, on one page – a similar challenge. But there were three consistently asked questions across the month:

1. How do we design organizations for insecurity?
2. What skills, leadership and management capabilities do organizations need for meeting the future?
3. How can we design with the changing demographics we are facing?

Below is a brief discussion on each of these.

How do we design organizations for insecurity?
The word 'insecurity' came up a lot in various guises, 'precarity', 'ambiguity', 'agility', 'resilience' and 'not knowing' among them. One person in a non-profit that got government funding said that they knew they would get funding cuts but didn't know when or how much. Another talked about how last month's anxieties about oil prices were affecting their business. Others talked about difficulties in assessing where their next competitors' would come from, when, and what they – the upstart competitors – would do to disrupt the market. The whole part social organization and social media plays in keeping businesses on edge was a topic of discussion in some meetings.

As these discussions proceed it's evident that thinking traditionally about organization redesign (or restructure or reorganization) as a 'project' that has a beginning and an endpoint is increasingly pointless. A better way is to make continuous adjustments in much the same way that an aircraft pilot (in the old days before auto-pilot) was minutely adjusting course 99% of the time. He/she was keeping an eye on all sorts of instruments, information, and insights to fly safely and land at destination. Sailing in heavy weather is another analogy for the skills needed. Read this piece and you get the idea that there's no room for sitting back. Constant vigilance is called for. Just read the current BlackBerry, Nokia, or Microsoft stories and you'll see the need for dynamic organization design. It is one that Foursquare practices (and is still working on)

'Dennis Crowley, CEO, Foursquare believes that his product needs to be radically different every few months because he faces so much competition. Believing this he wants to oversee 'a company under constant reinvention'. (Foursquare is a free app that helps people and their friends make the most of where they are). As he said, 'Reorganizing a company is generally considered a bad thing. We're trying to see it differently. It has to be built into the culture, this idea that we haven't got it right yet – product or organization design.' '

What skills, leadership and management capabilities do organizations need for meeting the future?
This is a difficult question to get to grips with. STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, and math) are increasingly difficult to find globally and increasingly required. There are a whole range of new skills, I think, related to social organization/social media and technology use. It's no good saying 'I'm a technophobe' – as a person in one of the presentations said – and expect to have any voice in an organization's design (or even future), organizations are increasingly driven by technology and require digital confidence. We're already seeing more people interacting with robots and this will become increasingly common calling for machine/human interaction skills that may have to be developed.(e.g. how do managers manage a mixed team of humans and humanoid robots?)

Other skills gaps are reported in Manpower Group's 2013 "Talent Shortage Survey". It states that

'Worldwide, 35% of over 38,000 employers surveyed report they are experiencing difficulty filling jobs due to lack of available talent. This represents a slight rise in comparison to the 2012 survey and is the highest proportion of employers expressing concern about talent shortages since 2007.'

The report does offer examples of methods for mitigating some of the talent shortages. For example, 'More than two in five (44%) EMEA employers who face a talent shortage at present say that their strategic response involves modified people practices, while 22% adopt strategies which focus on work models and 19% include talent sourcing solutions. ' These types of responses involve redesigning aspects of the organization.

The report goes on to note 'However, the region has the highest proportion of employers who are facing skills gaps but don't have a strategy to deal with them (29%).'

Leadership and management skills for meeting the future are based in wholly different notions of what leadership and managing mean. Gary Hamel, a management speaker, is one advocating 'leaders everywhere' which automatically counters traditional infrastructures around hierarchy, seniority, and 'climbing career ladders'. He talks about leaders being seers, architects, connectors, mentors, contrarians, bushwackers, guardians, and citizens. Not a traditional list of leadership roles. See these roles explained here.

In some cultures unraveling the differences between leaders and managers may well become a semantic nonsense as we dispense with managers, and leaders are 'everywhere'. But in other cultures hierarchies are alive and well and any ideas of changing these causes difficulties. The immediate challenge for multi-nationals is how to design organizations that successfully integrate traditional and new concepts of leadership/management

How can we design with the changing demographics we are facing?
Changing demographics are another big challenge. Many people I met talked about the aging population and the difficulties of changing infrastructures and, in some countries, laws that will enable older workers to remain in the workforce. A UK publication Working Better: the over 50s the new work generation has useful information on some of the barriers and opportunities. It includes discussions on working hours, staying healthy, making workplace accommodations and the legal frameworks around pensions.

At the other end of the age range youth unemployment is a global issue. The International Labor Office report on this is a dispiriting read:

"The global youth unemployment rate, estimated at 12.6 per cent in 2013, is close to its crisis peak. As many as 73 million young people are estimated to be unemployed in 2013. At the same time, informal employment among young people remains pervasive and transitions to decent work are slow and difficult. The economic and social costs of unemployment, long-term unemployment, discouragement and widespread low-quality jobs for young people continue to rise and undermine economies' growth potential.

Skills mismatch on youth labour markets has become a persistent and growing trend. Overeducation and over-skilling coexist with undereducation and under-skilling, and increasingly with skills obsolescence brought about by long-term unemployment."

The under-education and underskilling particuarly in levels of literacy, numeracy and 'emotional' skills has given rise to a lot of hand-wringing followed by ideas on how to design organizations and organizational schemes to remedy this.

End point
I found it interesting that there was this commonality of questions across the geographies and industries. Are you asking these same three questions and if so, how are you addressing them? Let me know.

In 1992 The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism was published. In it author Robert Reich says that 'Essentially, three broad categories of work are emerging, corresponding to the three different competitive positions in which Americans find themselves. The same three categories are taking shape in other nations. Call them production services, in person services, and symbolic-analytic services'. (p 205)

In person services have been top of my mind this week: I'm increasingly noticing that what were in-person services are not now. What did Reich mean by in-person services? Twenty years ago he says that 'In-person servers are in direct contact with the ultimate beneficiaries of their work. … included in this category are retail sales workers, waiters and waitresses, hotel workers, janitors, cashiers, hospital attendants and orderlies, nursing-home aides, child-care workers, house cleaners, home health-care aides, taxi drivers, secretaries, hairdressers, auto mechanics, sellers of residential real estate, flight attendants, physical therapists, and – amongst the fastest growing of all – security guards'.

Look at the list above. How many are still 'in-person services' in your experience? Last week I did the following:

• Checked in and checked out of two hotels
• Checked into flights
• Bought railway tickets
• Entered a country
• Got money from more than one bank
• Bought goods from supermarkets

Not that many years ago these were 'in-person' transactions. In those activities listed above there was no person in 'direct contact with [me] the ultimate beneficiary'. I was interacting with technology in each one.

One hotel experience was fascinating: CitizenM in Amsterdam bills itself as 'a hotel driven by one desire: to create affordable luxury for the people. By "the people," we mean a smart new breed of international traveler, the type who crosses continents the way others cross streets.' This hotel is almost totally technology enabled. The entire guest room is controlled by a single touch screen that 'lets you control the hotel room, including television, window blinds, temperature, coloured lighting, wake-up alarm themes and more for an ambient room experience.' The check-in/check out are touch screen activities as is the fresh food vending. There are some real human 'ambassadors' about and just for fun I took the test to see if I would be a suitable 'ambassador' for Citizen M. I got a score of 89% and an invitation to apply for a job!

I'm not sure who exactly comprise 'the people' targeted by CitizenM but clearly they are not in the 'in-person' types of jobs because these are rapidly being digitized: handing formerly in-person work to technology of various types is an accelerating trend. I've just read about The Briggo Coffee Haus 'Don't call it a vending machine. Designed by Yves Behar, the Briggo Coffe Haus is intended to be a destination'. So that's ok then. Knowing Yves Behar had a hand in it I can rest easy in the knowledge that my 'automated caffeine fix might become as precisely crafted as the cups from your favorite barista. The new Briggo Coffee Haus is an industrial robot that will memorize orders, autonomously prepare a cafe au lait, and never misspell your name.' Even better than a human then? So look-out for a huge drop in the numbers of baristas employed by Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Peets, Caribou, etc. as a machine improves the coffee experience.

In a different area of in-person work I'm aiming to find an in-home carer for my mother (97 this November). No worries – I just look for those in the vanguard of social robotics because 'Assisted living is going to be a big industry, and whoever cracks the technology first will be able to export it to everyone else," says Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), going on to say "If we don't invest in social robotics there's a risk we will be left behind." And 25% of people surveyed think that by 2030 robots will be taking care of the elderly. Take a look at the MOBISERV (An Integrated Intelligent Home Environment for the Provision of Health, Nutrition and Mobility Services to Older Adults) site for more on this work.

So what's left that might be in person – not large swathes of medical care. In an article Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms Vinod Khosla writes: "Eventually, we won't need the average doctor and will have much better and cheaper care for 90-99% of our medical needs. We will still need to leverage the top 10 or 20% of doctors (at least for the next two decades) to help that bionic software get better at diagnosis. So a world mostly without doctors (at least average ones) is not only not reasonable, but also more likely than not. There will be exceptions, and plenty of stories around these exceptions, but what I am talking about will most likely be the rule and doctors may be the exception rather than the other way around.'

You get the picture? It's one that is increasingly imminent – and in some instances here already. You can speculate just from general knowledge and early clues that driverless cars might replace taxis and thus taxi drivers or that museum tour guides could be robots or that teachers could be replaced with robots.

Leaving aside the colossal social, moral, and ethical challenges that replacing human in-person work with technology enabled substitutions will create, what does it mean for organizational designers? This was a question that we were debating in one of the workshops I facilitated during the week.

Clearly it could mean fewer human workers or at least differently skilled ones – robots and other technologies need engineers and skilled operators. And for those humans left in the workforce it means learning to work alongside robots something BMW has started to do. This company is 'revolutionizing the role of robots in automotive manufacturing by having a handful of robots work side-by-side with human workers at its plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina.' It announces that: 'As a new generation of safer, more user-friendly robots emerges, BMW's man-machine collaboration could be the first of many examples of robots taking on new human tasks, and working more closely alongside humans.'

In our old paradigm we might think that learning to work alongside a robot may take training. (In our experiment with the Anybots we noticed the reluctance of people to engage with it). And that robots in the workforce may require different management skills, for example learning to manage a team comprising real humans and robot humanoids. And that in-person job replacement will engender new organization designs and cultural patterns and norms. And that relationships between management and trades unions/works councils are likely to be stretched. And so on.

But in a new paradigm where technology and human are symbiotic and in-person work no longer has a human to human connotation we may have a completely different approach – perhaps one where current concepts of organization design are no longer applicable. I was on a phone call today where we were wondering how to be alert to this possibility and ride with it. If you have any ideas let me know.

In any event think about the possibility that the job you are currently in could well be done and perhaps better done by a humanoid robot or other technology. What are you doing to prepare for this? Let me know on this too.

On Monday last week I was facilitating a session on neuroscience in business at the Cambridge Network. While I was preparing for it I scanned through my blog pieces to find out how many times I have referenced neuroscience since I started writing the blog in 2009. It turns out to be in ten blogs. I then re-read the section in my forthcoming book Organization Design: Engaging with Change that has a piece about neuroscience in one of the chapters. What I was reminding myself of was the number of points where neuro-something touches organization design. It's quite a few.

Undoubtedly what scientists are discovering about brain function will continue to change the way we approach and work with organization design and development. But we need to be cautious about what we appear to know. Although seems as if we know a lot about 'hard wiring', brain sections 'lighting up' and so on which we take as 'evidence' for certain things we are currently in the very early, elementary, and unsophisticated stages of being able to speak with certainty on neuro stuff applied to organization design and development. Nevertheless it is an exciting and appealing arena and one where already lots of happiness coaches and neuro-marketers are doing very well.

The Society for Neuroscience describes neuroscience as 'the study of the brain and the nervous system. Neuroscientists aim to decipher:

• How the brain's 100 billion nerve cells are born, grow, and connect
• How these cells organize themselves into effective, functional circuits
• How it shapes our thoughts, beliefs, hopes, dreams, imaginations and behaviours'

And an interesting article notes that 'Neuroscience-based principles have been incorporated into areas such as business management, economics and marketing, leading to the development of artificial neural networks, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing and, most recently, organizational cognitive neuroscience'. (my bold). (Gillingwater & Gillingwater 2011).

Organizational cognitive neuroscience is defined as 'the cognitive neuroscientific study of organizational behavior. OCN lets us start to understand the relationship between our organizational behavior and our brains and allows us to dissect specific social processes at the neurobiological level and apply a wider range of analysis to specific organizational research questions.' (Senior, Lee, & Butler, 2011)

Ok – but let's pause and look at some of the issues. For example, there are 'technological limitations of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which appears to be the method of choice for cognitive neuroscience research at present. A fundamental limitation in neuroimaging is an inability to infer complex social behavior from observations of specific activated brain regions. … Organizational researchers who wish to investigate the potential of neuroscience to inform their work need to engage with these inference problems in order to avoid the nonsensical claims that seem to appear with such frequency in the popular press'. (Lee, Senior, & Butler, 2012)

I love the phrase 'nonsensical claims'. I agree it's great to read that 'Human brains are hard-wired for empathy, friendship' but let's look at this type of soundbite with a bit of skepticism. Ask questions about it like: How was the research conducted? What were the demographics and culture of the sample? How big was the sample? Is it reasonable to generalize from this research into the wider population?
In her fun TedX Talk 'Beware Neuro-Bunk', Molly Crockett, a neuroscientist, offers more comments on skepticism

• "If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it … ask to see the evidence. Ask for the part of the story that's not being told."
• "[Neuroscientists] haven't found a 'buy' button inside the brain, we can't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans, and we can't turn sinners into saints with hormones."
• "When you see activation in [a brain region], you can't just pick and choose your favorite explanation."

While Malia Mason, another neuroscientist, comments (in the HBR Ideacast, Big Brain Theory) ''This idea that you can distinguish a good leader from a bad one by throwing them into a scanner and looking at what their brain is doing just doesn't seem to hold a lot of weight."

But here's the question – how do we know what stuff based in neuroscience principles might be worth trying and experimenting with in our organizations? I offered three suggestions to the group on Monday: mindfulness, positive psychology and multitasking. All three have a reasonable amount of research history.

Mindfulness
Oxford University, UK, has a Centre for Mindfulness and suggests that 'People who have learned mindfulness:

• Experience long-lasting physical and psychological stress reduction.
• Discover positive changes in well-being.
• Are less likely to get stuck in depression and exhaustion, and are better able to control addictive behaviour.'

Certainly our group enjoyed the 3 minute breathing space meditation available on the Centre's website and there are a number of organizations who offer mindfulness programs including parts of the UK's National Health Service and Google.

Positive Psychology
The University of Pennsylvania has the Center for Positive Psychology . There positive psychology is defined as 'the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. '

Given all the happiness hype on this, it's good to see that the American Psychological Association makes the point that 'positive psychology proponents agree that the field's success has come with some pitfalls, including the dissemination by the mass media -— though, they argue, not by the researchers themselves -— of overly simplistic messages'.

A National Institutes of Health study has found that 'Positive emotions -— if cultivated intentionally in contextually-appropriate ways -— can buffer against and undo the deleterious effects of stressful encounters and reduce the impact of future distress. Indeed, new scientific research on neuroplasticity suggests that positive emotional states may trigger lasting, durable changes in the structure and function of the brain which instantiate and promote further adaptive thoughts and behaviors.'

But run your skepticism questions and again be aware of the tentative expression of the findings. Many organizations, including IBM and Fedex have taken up principles of positive psychology – frequently under the 'happiness' banner which I think represents one of the 'overly simplistic messages'. I may be wrong here. But there's another article supporting this view here.

Multitasking
I don't know of a university research department with a singular brief to examine multitasking but there are multiple studies on the topic which, as typical across research studies, have somewhat conflicting findings but seem to agree on a few points:

• The prefrontal cortex has been frequently implicated as a brain region that mediates multitasking and the switching processes.
• Multitasking is commonly shown to impair cognitive performance, as each switch results in a reduction in performance compared to doing one task at a time.
• However, there is growing evidence that the ability to multitask can be trained with repetitive and adaptive practice.
• Multitasking abilities have been observed to decline as we age.

What's interesting about all four points above is that they are again framed rather tentatively. They are not screaming sound bites that only young people are good at multitasking, or people should never multitask. Everyone is familiar with multitasking and there are many instructions around this. I've been invited to a meeting in October and have been told: 'Leave your devices (laptop, phone, tablets, etc.) at home or check them at the door. We want you to be focused and devote yourself to this day with your fullest selves, without any distraction.'

Summary
You'll gather I'm not about to rebrand myself as a neuro organization designer, I remain skeptical about many of the soundbites and claims. As I say in the closing section of the chapter in the forthcoming book 'Neuroscience research is a burgeoning field that has started to have, and will continue to have significant impact on the way work is done and organizations are designed. Some of the current claims made about neuro-science are suspect and it is wise for organization designers to keep informed on the topic and to view findings from a critical mindset making careful judgments on whether or not to apply them in their organizations.'

What's your view? Let me know.

References
Lee, N., Senior, C., & Butler, M. (2012, July). The Domain of Organizational Cognitive Neuroscience : Theoretical and Empirical Challenges. Journal of Management, 38(4), 921-931.
Senior, C., Lee, N., & Butler, M. (2011, May/June). PERSPECTIVE-—Organizational Cognitive Neuroscience. Organization Science, 22(3), 804-815.
Gillingwater, D., & Gillingwater, T. H. (2011). A neuroanatomical approach to exploring organizational performance. Operations Management: A Modern Approach, 120.

Note from me to financial controllers/corporate decision makers/IT guys (July 13 2013)

All – I would like to try out, for one month, being an Anybot. Basically this is a remote controlled webcam/video conferencing robot that would be based in head office and linked to my laptop in DC or wherever else I am. Using it I can join meetings in a more dynamic way – like see who is talking, ramble around the office, chat to people in the hallway, and generally feel more connected to the office than I do currently.

I think we will see robots like this being increasingly used in offices and clearly they have significant workplace implications not just in terms of logistics – where are they charged and stored, how are they maintained, etc. but also cultural and social implications – how easy is it to relate to a work colleague who is a video screen on a segueway? How effective are they in helping people feel and stay connected? How much can they save in travel costs?

Verizon is using similar robots in classrooms for students who can't physically get to schools.

Note to all Head Office staff (August 6) following proposal acceptance
This is what you'll see from sometime during week of August 12. A colleague in some other location will be joining meetings, rolling down the corridor to greet you, and generally being (differently) on-site rather remote. Test drive an Anybot yourself here. If you have any questions let me know.

Extract from technical set up note from Anybots team
Both the QB and desktop client need to make bidirectional UDP connections from QB port range 8880-8900 to external port 3478. If the video doesn't populate during the test drive session, then we know that your firewall is blocking the ports needed to control the robot. The options at this point are to open the ports or to use a 4G WiFi device. Note that 4G can also be 'spikey' and not deliver a consistent bandwidth. If this happens, the anybot can behave a little erratically and the driver will have difficulty. (My wry thought – this could be a description of some humans I know).

Note from IT guy (August 9)
The Anybot is here. I took for a test drive on Friday and it got lots of attention. See attached photos. There is a bit of a challenge with the wireless receiver it uses in that I had difficulty seeing the audio/video stream. I was able to navigate around using my 35+ years of video-game-playing dexterity but this will be a challenge for the uninitiated.

Summary of flurry of emails between August 9 and August 13 when we thought lots of people might want to test it leading to the point made by the Anybots minder that: 'I think we need to create a protocol for the use of the Anybot, as my babysitting responsibilities will need some limits.'

A 5-step guide to booking and using the Anybot circulated to people who signed up to use Anybot. Step 5 being:
'20 minutes before the meeting alert your escort. He/she can collect 'you' from the desk beside Tom's on the second floor. The escort is needed because wifi round the office elevator banks is intermittent. Therefore:

• Someone from that meeting you are remotely attending will have to guide Anybot through that zone and if necessary wheel the Anybots (if wifi connectivity is lost in transit)
• The escort will also need to guide 'you' Anybot back to the home base (by Tom's desk)'

NOTE: For the one month trial period Tom became the permanent escort/caretaker for Anybots. Giving rise to 'I'm willing to be helpful if Anybot has a robo-emergency during the day, but want to avoid being paged every time Anybot's wifi connectivity goes out when someone is driving it around, for example (and this seems to happen with some frequency.) '

Notes from remote users i.e. offsite driving the anybot at head office
Vera: I tried it and it was a great experience. It is like you are sitting in the room. A lot better than the regular video rooms. It was great fun.
Hugh: The blanking on the wifi was difficult but when it worked, it worked really well. I very much appreciated the fact that I could move around during the meeting, as there were items I needed to visually inspect on the walls and on display.
Sara: So I took anybot for a spin to see Ryan. It was fun to drive him. I couldn't hear folks very well unless they spoke up closer to the anybot. It got easier to drive after practice. I can see that it'd be easier over time.
Chris: I have logged on to the anybots system and it looks like I am ready to go for the 1pm call. One challenge though: based on what I am seeing in the camera, I looks like the bot is on the first floor at the base of the steps. I've never actually used the elevators in your building, only the stairs, so I'm not sure how I would get the bot up to my meeting. Also, my meeting is in conference room 3 and I couldn't find that from here if my life depended on it 🙂 Any advice? (NOTE: Tom escorted Chris to the conference room).
Skip: I must be doing something wrong, my screen gets stuck here… it's been like ten minutes, might it be that the bots are occupied? NOTE: This comment highlighted the fact that the Anybot has to be manually switched on at home base by Tom. If people assumed it was already on and they could take control it didn't happen. In this case Skip gave up and instead 'I ended up using the one at the Anybot facility instead. Navigation was intuitive yet I felt invasive even in the absence of people to observe, very interesting nonetheless.'
Nancy: The maneuverability takes some practice but once rolling down the corridor meeting Linda and a few others for a casual chat was great fun. And in the meeting I went to the immediate presence is much more engaging than being on the other end of a speaker phone – it's a lot easier to participate and see what's going on in the room. On the downside the audio/sound balancing wasn't good and also people could hear noise from my end even when I had the mute button on.

Comments from on-site people
An escorting comment from Tom. I was able to escort Sara over to Ryan, and we were stopped along the way a number of times by persons wanting to chat! A fascinating series of interactions. At any rate, Sara is now conversing with Ryan, and he will bring Anybot back to my workstation when done.
Rick: The anybot is loud when being used in the open office for conversation. I am attempting to work next to Kim while she is anybotting with George and it is extremely difficult due to the volume. It literally turned heads in a radius of 20+ feet. We are all grinning (barely) and bearing it.
Grace: The presence of the Anybot in the meeting does provide something slightly superior than a computer or a video conference screen-—in that it cannot be so easily ignored (due to its autonomous mobility).
Jack: Roaming is definitely something that should be encouraged, as it highlights the serendipitous and impromptu features of the Anybot.

End of month learning:
So there we have it. A month of smallish experimentation with lots learned about the pluses and minuses of using a robotic telepresence. Some of the things we found:

• Our wifi capability doesn't make Anybots use an easy experience though this is possibly due to it not having a strong enough antenna to keep it connected during normal operation.
• Only a small number of people actually signed up and used it – though lots expressed interest in doing so. Reasons for this include the 'price of entry' being too high. It involves registering with Anybots, getting initial log-in, needing an escort, and learning how to drive it.
• The psychosocial factors – people aren't that comfortable interacting with a mechanical device that looks, as one person said, 'like a scarecrow, not like a softer featured, cuddly robot'.
• The audio quality on both ends was problematic at times.
• The big plus for those who did use it for attending meetings was being in the room as a physical presence, and the spontaneous interactions they had on their way to the meeting room. They felt included in a way that doesn't happen on phone or even video. It's clear that by whatever means we need to learn how to include remote people more effectively into meetings and day to day casual interactions.
• On site there was a big 'wow' factor and an interest in looking at the anybot in action but that didn't translate into encouraging off site colleague to give it a go. We sent out a lot of entreaties to try it. We're not sure why this is. Anecdotally it seemed that people found the human/machine communication a little daunting. It was fine for the remote people and less comfortable for the people face to face with the robot.
• One staff member said, 'Anybot implies a scarcity of a resource (particularly, communication resources) because of its ability to bring the resource to an area in a mobile way'. He asked: 'Do we have a dearth of communication resources (a problem) that the Anybot seeks to solve?' And then answered himself. 'Not really-—we have a plethora of communication equipment that while imperfect, doesn't garner too many complaints. The Anybot therefore may be a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist at for us.'

All in all useful learning that can help us think through what technical, social, and communication capability we need to develop to work more effectively with off site colleagues with or without robotic help. And home time for Anybot.

What do you think are the benefits and barriers of devices like this that allow remote colleagues to travel the office rather than being tethered to a phone or video line? Let me know.

Is 347 emails a lot to answer in one week? I don't know but that's what I did. I get about 200 per day – a lot of which I just either read because they're subscriptions to info or ones that don't really need any reply beyond things like 'thanks' or 'good to hear'. The 347 required me to think carefully, for example, reviewing someone's document, working out how I can do a joint presentation with someone and have it come across as seamless teamwork (I'm working on three of those at the moment each with a different person), responding to a request for information which means hunting through stuff.

I got curious about emails this week because various things caused me to think that we've got stuck in the notion that emails are not part of 'the work'. It reminds me of the staff room in the college I used to teach in where we would say 'teaching would be great if it weren't for the students.' Wouldn't it be less stressful all round if we accepted that the way a lot of the work gets done is via emails and other types of social media channel and then designed our lives and our work accepting the reality of emails, IM, tweets, etc. etc? They are not going to go away at least in the immediate although they may change form.

I liked the nugget in the Lucy Kellaway series on The History of Office Life that mentioned the horror people felt at the introduction of the telephone which they thought would constantly interrupt things. 'New technology including the telephone, telegraph, typewriters, adding machines, and even filing cabinets revolutionized office work in the late 19th century. In particular the telephone was looked on suspiciously in the UK. Britain's chief post office engineer, Sir William Preece, told a House of Commons committee : "I have one in my office, but more for show. If I want to send a message, I employ a boy to take it."'

Isn't all this stuff I've been reading a lot recently about 'taming the email beast' simply not knowing how to seamlessly integrate it into a working day and/or a current version of the various personal time management techniques common a couple of decades ago? Some of us may remember Filofax , Time Manager International, Daytimer, and their ilk. We carted around small binders with our tasks in AB and C lists – and were careful to handle every piece of paper only once. Some of us, including me, still use theirs. And indeed, I was scoffed at the other day for my Neanderthal behavior in using mine.

What might be different now from the paper days is that we're handling a greater volume of interactions that are coming through ever more channels. But that is the reality. It is 'the work'. And there are different ways of organizing and managing this work. I'm not sure it is enough to leave it to individuals to grapple with the stress of it on their own. One of my colleagues responded to an invitation I'd made to try out the Anybot with the email response, 'I'm sorry I had all good intentions to have a go, but I'm just swamped. I've just topped 1000 unopened e-mails.' Maybe I read stress and emotion into the text but I've had a prior face to face conversation with him on the topic so I think I'm on safe ground.

Another colleague just deletes, without opening, emails from people 'I'm not interested in'. Ruthless or sensible, I wonder? I guess it sends a virtual message to people who don't get a response from her and she doesn't have to type anything. The volume of digital communication is really hard for people to cope with.

There are numerous software packages coming to market that promise to help you beat email overload. Information Week recently reviewed ten of them. I think they're very attractive in principle – but I'm a fan of self-help things like that. But they are not enough. If you are an organizational member trying to beat email overload on your own you can only be partially successful – you don't have the support mechanisms and infrastructure there – even if you're allowed to download the software.

A better approach it seems to me is to recognize that organization designs (and many of the people in them) are locked into outdated ways of thinking about how work gets done. They have layered digital communication into and onto old models and are now trying to solve an 'overload problem' rather than seeing these expanding communication channels as offering possibilities to totally re-think how work flows.

Organizations that mandate a 'no e-mail Friday', for example – are probably doing it with the best of intentions but they may, in fact, be adding more stress to their employees because the emails are piling up and need to be dealt with on Monday.

What a different organization design might look like – one where its employee accepted huge volumes of digital communication as a normal and had good techniques for managing this effectively, efficiently, and without feeling unduly stressed – I'm not sure yet. Maybe it's something that the MIX Digital Freedom Challenge contenders will pick up on? (Maybe I'll be a contender). I rather the like the 'email only on Fridays' approach suggested by Graham Allcott. It's closer to organizing around acceptance of the reality. And I have another thought that was triggered by a conversation we had during the week (via email) on distraction and open plan offices.

Someone in the conversation mentioned a recent piece in The Economist, on the value of "inaction" and "laziness" which hints at the idea of managing work differently. In the organizational world there is a lot of talk about collaboration and designing collaborative workplaces – to get to a 'culture of collaboration' (whatever that is), but much less discussion on reflection, pauses and time for thought to get to a 'culture of reflection', (I've never had a client say they wanted this type of culture). If we could design workplaces with really engaging internal reflective space for employees and work flows that integrated the volume of communication into the normal – but different from current -flow we might all feel better for it.

Overall I'm skeptical about the notion of emails being a beast that must be tamed. I think developing organizational designs and working norms around its effective use is what's called for. What's your view? Should we accept the reality of huge volumes of communication and design organizations and develop employees to manage them? If so your ideas on how to do this would be welcome.

NOTE: In pursuing the line of thought on reflection and reflective space I came across some nice work on designing external reflective spaces, labyrinths, healing gardens, water features mainly into hospital environments but they should also be part of standard office design. I also found a certain amount of evidence suggesting that 'mindfulness' practices – the personal mental equivalent of a physical reflective space is a performance enhancer. Take a look at Oxford University's Mindfulness Centre for more on this.

See also my February 13 2012 blog piece on emails and writing with which offers more thoughts on the topic.