Tapestries-25 | Experience eats connectivity for breakfast
Re-visiting Drucker in the context of working from home.
I wrote this following a chat with my good friends, Jonathan and Sebastian at JOON. Check them out.
Some years ago, Peter Drucker, famed management thinker, said that "culture eats strategy for breakfast". It makes intuitive sense. Strategy, the stuff you find in slogans and presentations, is easier to project and a source of being "busy", but is arguably less impactful than culture, which is more subtle and pervasive. In this period of working from home, I'd like to coin a similar phrase of my own: experience eats connectivity for breakfast, and I think there's an analogy worth exploring here.
The pandemic has massively accelerated the adoption of remote work. With large portions of the white-collar workforce now plying their trade from home, there's been an explosion in the use of tools like Zoom, Slack, Teams and many others. These companies and products should be commended for the way they enabled a relatively seamless transition in the context of titanic operating changes. What they did is create a bridge from the experience of working in an office to the experience of working at home. They ensured that connectivity remained despite physical fracturing.
But 7 months into the experience of working from home, I'd suggest cracks are starting to develop. We are rich in connectivity and poor in shared experience. Working with or for someone is a very human experience. Often we are compelled to do actual work out of a sense of loyalty to, or camaraderie with, our peers and colleagues. The experiences of success, failure, embarrassment, excitement, dejection, frustration and elation are ones traditionally shared with our colleagues in a much more human and textured environment. These emotions exist while working from home, but are experienced in silos and abstracted through screens.
There is no commonality of experience, and we all know it. Even the previously shared experience of "getting to work" has changed, to subtle effect. A frigid winter's day means that when sitting next to your colleague, you know that you've both braved the cold to get there, and will brave it again when you leave. Arriving at the office on a Friday, irrespective of where your commute started from and where the afternoon will take you, you're both filled with the same contemporaneous relief that the weekend is here. None of this is groundbreaking, but it's worth re-stating that sharing something other than work creates the conditions for colleagues to work together and go above and beyond for each other. Acknowledging the importance of shared experiences opens up the possibilities for engagement moving forward.
I've previously discussed how video games present a very effective way for distributed teams to connect. Working together, in the shared experience of a "game", provides a parallel channel of interaction to supplement the "work" to be done together. I've also suggested that managers should buy their employees plants to keep in or around their home office; raising it creates a tactile, shared experience, something for team members to share outside of their regular tasks. And NO! Zoom drinks or trivia don't count! While the content of the interaction may be more "experiential", the texture of the channel - the same one used for every meeting - undermines its potential for shared experience.
Connectivity in this paradigm is critical for business continuity, but it is not the most important piece of the puzzle. When I reflect on strategy vs culture, I often rely on the car analogy, where strategy is the driver and culture is the engine. The analogy is equally applicable here, where the connectivity is the driver and experience is the engine. Strategy and connectivity both share an important trait: they're visible. It is relatively easy to work on strategy or show you're online and connected. What's difficult, truly intangible, and infinitely more valuable, is developing culture and enabling shared experience.
You can have as many meetings and check-ins and Zoom-socials as the calendar permits. But in the working-from-home paradigm, unless you use shared experience to cultivate the camaraderie that is at the heart of every successful team, you'll very quickly run out of gas.
Photo by Vladislav Bulatov