Our Work From Anywhere Future
Or why Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams need to disrupt themselves
Supposedly, one of the main reasons Steve Jobs got along well with Bob Iger was because Iger was willing to interrupt his own industry. This was the crucial difference as well between Steve Balmer and Steve Jobs - while Balmer doubled down on desktop computing, Jobs cannibalized Macintosh sales by pushing new devices such as the iPod Touch, the iPad, and finally the iPhone. This allowed Apple to create, and ride, the wave of mobile devices, while Microsoft floundered for a decade.
At the beginning of the year, Zoom became the savior that scaled fast enough to allow knowledge workers to continue working (and earning steady incomes) during global lockdowns. Companies - some sooner, others a little later - adopted a work from home strategy and Zoom formed the corner stone of that strategy. But, after a year of Zoom, we are all feeling the (Zoom) burn, and we know that this not ideal.
When we all worked at an office, Zoom and Slack provided effective means of communication. If I needed a group of people to know about something I didn’t need to stand on the office desk and shout - I can just message a Slack channel. If I need to meet with a team member who works out of a different office or need an occasional day to work from home, Zoom bridged the gap. But after a year of 8hr zoom meetings, more and more people are pushing the boundaries of what is reasonable with Zoom and Slack.
Management Change
In part the future needs new ways of managing work. Software development with tools such as Github and PR reviews is already very asynchronous and naturally fits a WFA culture. However, most other tasks are simply forcing the use of Zoom to accomplish the existing task without understanding that the tasks themselves need to re-designed. I am not a management expert, but a key change is to embrace asynchronous communication (something Marshall McLuhan alluded to would happen as electronic communication increased). When messaging is the way I reach you, I always reach you instantly. Whether it is to ask if you saw the full moon last night or I want to know whether you will be joining the client call right now. The near immediacy of the delivery necessitates a delay in the response.
Businesses need to understand this shift and move towards workflows that benefit from asynchronous communication and minimize synchronous communication. More simply put, as many management effectiveness gurus have said, if you can put in an email, don’t call a meeting.
Deep Work
In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes an architecture style that naturally insulates quiet deep work spaces from noisy collaboration spaces. The outer edges of the office are noisy, imagine a cafeteria, which is a casual, non-dedicated space where people gather to have conversations. The expectation is that there is always a bit of a buzz and people expect to randomly engage and run into people. Going deeper into the office you find quieter more dedicated working environments, and finally, in the deepest recesses, you find entirely quiet insulated spaces that allow for deep focused work. The layering ensures less accidental overlap (i.e. a noisy birthday celebration being heard or being distracted when trying to quickly grab some water). This idea of deep work, enabled by carefully architected work spaces, is gone when existing work is made to work over virtual conference tools. Over Zoom and Slack you do not have clear insulation - yes you can mute notifications, or mute a particular channel, but you’d have to unmute it as well.
Virtual worlds such as Gather Town and Virbela (which Gitlab uses) provide an initial alternative. By virtually creating office spaces, layouts, and sounds around physical proximity in a virtual space, they try to provide an illusion of office spaces. While these are good, these are not enough.
Affective and Augmented Intelligence
In The Innovators, Walter Isaacson makes a point of illustrating that Artificial Intelligence, where machines eliminate human knowledge workers, has always been claimed to be just a few decades away but never actually materialized. On the other hand, Augmented Intelligence, where machines collaboratively help humans has been the essentially all of the digital innovation we have seen over the last half century. Desktop publishing, spreadsheets, Google Docs - none have eliminated humans, they have empowered humans.
Affective Intelligence, on the other hand, is still in early stages and talks about deeper synthesis, including feedback from the machine back to the human nervous system. Simple haptics on your touch screen or your PlayStation controller, are just the most simple examples of the possibilities. Exoskeletons and brain interfaces are more ambitious endeavors along the same lines.
Combining the possibilities of these technologies, Zoom and Slack, which are trying to solve the virtual collaboration problem, should look at opportunities to make virtual collaboration entirely different, and better, than collaboration via physical proximity whenever possible.
Imagine, instead of a mouse, you slip on a glove and a neckband speaker. You draw on a 3-d virtual space board that allows for naturally capturing details in 3 instead of 2 dimensions (i.e. one more dimension than a whiteboard). The neckband speaker provides environmental sound (like Dolby Atmos) to give you a virtual sense of how far away the sound is coming from and potentially a little pulse when someone needs to tab you on the shoulders. Zoom will be always on via the neckband speaker and, when you want to switch to video, a voice command will open a video chat with whoever you are already having an audio conversation with. Bose already has speaker glasses and if we merge these with Google Glass (instead of the bulky VR headsets), people, information, etc. could simply be projected into you field of view. This also means that we will develop entirely new forms of UI and UX than enable better collaborations via more synthetic merging of man and machine.
Of all the players, it seems Microsoft is best positioned to take advantage of it. Owning XBox implies they already have understanding of virtual worlds and how online collaboration works in real-time. Microsoft also has a history of innovative devices such as Kinetiq and the HoloLens. Microsoft also has Teams and office collaboration software. Finally, and most importantly, Microsoft has existing sales teams with deep relationships with Enterprise IT - similar to IBM, nobody is going to get fired for going with Microsoft. Now, we just have to see if Satya Nadella is willing to push innovation (the last few years seem to suggest that he definitely will) or double down on existing business like Steve Balmer did in what constituted Microsoft’s lost decade.