The problem with using this communication strategy is that although it's statically efficient, it's dynamically inefficient. That is, even though it may be helpful for your reputation in the short term, it may ultimately be damaging in the long term. Seth Godin, the famous marketing guru, provides some excellent insight into this on his blog:
I bought some spinach at the farmer's market yesterday. The fact that the woman who grew it is the same person as the woman who sold it to me made the transaction fundamentally different than buying the same spinach in a bag at the A&P. It's not really surprising that factory farming keeps serving us poisons and side effects. It's fundamentally anonymous. [...]
This is the giant advantage of the small. Small organizations have the privilege of looking their customers in the eye. Small doesn't necessarily mean small in numbers. It's an attitude. Does your organization require a form to get something done, or does one human choose to interact with another? Does bad news come in the form of memos that obfuscate the truth, or is it delivered face to face?
Seth's point is that you should "Try to do as much as you can in person. Or by phone. Especially the hard stuff." Why? It makes you a better person. If you have to deliver bad news face to face, you work harder to make the situation right in the first place. So even if delivering bad news face to face involves taking a short term hit to your reputation, in the long run the extra integrity and effort you put forth should leave you in a much better place.
Musical Interlude:
Its the early 1990s,
space travel is frequent;
Everybody's wearing
silver hair with sequins
They're going to the moon
to party their butts off,
But I'm down here,
looking for the green stuff.
Quest for spinach!
I need my greens.
Quest for spinach!
I need my greens.
Quest for spinach!
I need my greeeeeeens...
Godin wrote this anecdote almost a year ago to the day, and I've been using his system ever since. I've even partially succeeded in getting a few other people hooked. In addition to the "media selection" of the spinach vendor, I'd like to offer up an example from my person life. A few weeks ago I drove down to Boston to deliver bad news to a friend. Seven hours of driving (each way) for three minutes of socially awkward conversation. But hey, I'm pretty socially awkward anyway, so whatever. As it turned out, talking "f2f" didn't do much to ameliorate the situation. But something else happened that weekend too. Before going back to Ithaca I dropped in on another friend who was living in the area. And as it turned out, we had a great time together. What had started out as a depressing weekend ended up being pretty awesome. So what does this have to do with the O'Sullivan model? Let me explain.
While O'Sullivan's model might describe the most common strategy for choosing a medium of communications, the most common strategy is by no means the best. The good news is that by learning about these tendencies we can teach ourselves to override them, trading a small decrease in short term static efficiency for a huge boost in dynamic efficiency over time. This is leadership. Communication is more than good spelling and grammar. It's about making other people feel comfortable. And the marketplace reflects this. Emotional intelligence is by far and away the number one mediating variable of future earnings potential. So what's the takeaway here? To quote Seth once again
Try to do as much as you can in person. Or by phone. Especially the hard stuff.
At the very least it'll force you to get dressed and leave the house. And you never know, something serendipitous just might happen along the way.
7 comments:
I really like your blog. You make total sense in everything you write. I think the theories do not always take into account the personal level and the effect that dropping some bad news on people through AIM or email could have on the relationship. For the whole efficiency part of the two theories (MRT vs. O’Sullivan’s), this scenario of you driving a total of fourteen hours to tell a friend something bad is a perfect example. You did not use the most efficient ways of communication and so you did not follow the MRT pattern and view points. BUT, you did what was necessary to keep your friend’s feelings from being even more hurt. And so this situation did not follow the theories, but it was necessary in order to keep the peace. Sometimes theories do not really cover all the possibilities and so you have to improvise in order to accommodate the feelings of everyone involved. You could have easily called or emailed your friend had you not truly cared about them and their feelings but instead you went the extra mile (or 500 in your case), and showed them respect and dedication.
I'm sure it's just a typo, but the Media Richness Theory deals with optimally matching the bandwidth of the technology to the social task. O'Sullivan's work (clarity vs. ambiguity) is what you described in the first paragraph.
The way I interpreted your post was that you were trying to take Godin's advice about doing "as much as you can in person", so you drove to Boston to have this conversation face to face. O'Sullivan would have predicted that you would have preferred a mediated form of communication, since the valance of the interaction was negative (his first hypothesis).
I don't think O'Sullivan's work is about how one should choose communication media. It seems to be more concerned with how people, given different forms of communication, will utilize them to manage impressions and self-presentation. I would hesitate to consider this to be taking the easy way out. Godin's point is concerned more with how people should act instead of how they will act. Does he have good advice? Yes. However, I don't think it is completely parallel.
@nina
Excellent catch, I'll fix that ASAP.
As for O'Sullivan's model, I realize that it is descriptive and not normative. The model describes what people instinctually do, not what one should do. What I was trying to get at is that our gut instinct of avoiding conflict is a negative personality trait, and we would do better to consciously ignore our instincts and choose face to face communication for difficult issues.
That might be slightly different than what the assignment was asking for, but if you're already choosing your media purposefully then the post hoc analysis doesn't really work.
I agree with the thoughts and comments in your blog. I don't know about the spinach and the music, but if socially awkward is your thing, more power to you.
I find that the while the theories may predict typical behavior they may not always pose the best or most healthy option. I have found two things that, I feel, are relevant:
1.) Expressing emotion, including but not limited to "negative" valence emotions, is very important. You feel a lot better if you just get stuff off of your chest.
2.) Doing this in person is much more appropriate and people appreciate it, especially for the "BIG" issues
Overall, I find that I agree with your life theory, but also that Your analysis was a little bit backwards, as some other commenters have noted.
I must agree that there are great benefits to having a ftf interaction rather than a mediated channel. As you have pointed out, choosing a mediated channel may not be the right choice but I certainly don’t believe that it is always the wrong choice. What I mean by this is that sometimes one needs the ambiguity that lean channels provide not only for “static efficiency” but also for “dynamic efficiency” as well. For example, I got into a petty argument with a close friend and I couldn’t apologize to her in person because she would always walk away. I then decided to write her an email and was able to explain to her exactly what I was thinking. She ended up reading the email and now she still remains one of my closest friends. I don’t believe that if I had apologized to her ftf, I would have perceived myself as a “better” person. If anything, my experience shows that perhaps I did make the “better” choice for our friendship by resorting to an email.
CMC provides people with an alternative channel of interaction that could be for the worse but also at times for the better. It’s very difficult to generally say that ftf is better than CMC and vice versa. That is exactly why O’Sullivan’s study is crucial. By noticing certain patterns one can see not only how people are using CMC but it also shows that there are great benefits that people realize when using it. I really do hope that people remember the importance of ftf but I also do believe that CMC provides us with advantages that we are only beginning to explore and appreciate.
I really like how you focused on a more general case of media selection, and even went so far as to include a link to another information source to back it up. Sometimes reading these posts can get a little dull because everyone (including myself) writes about a personal experience. After reading your post I realized that reading a third person analysis of another's story seems much more informative.
I agree with you that O'Sullivan's model isn't always the best to follow when choosing a medium, but I think the theory is more about what people tend towards in certain situations than what they actively think about choosing. In my personal experience people tend to shy away from socially awkward or uncomfortable conversations, preferring to put as much psychological distance between them and it as possible. This is not always (or usually) the best option, but I think its what people unconsciously gravitate towards.
You certainly make a good point in that the old adage of “No pain, no gain” (doing the hard stuff in person) can hold true. While I agree with your statement that the most common strategy is not necessarily the best, there may be quite a few situations where it actually is the best. It seems that you suggest that people are in essence taking the easy way out when communicating negative information or emotions by using mediated technology and that we should strive to make things more personal and interact with each other. However, I think it is important to consider the amount of deference mediated technology provides to people.
Consider trying to resolve a conflict between 2 people. By forcing face to face conversations the situation could be exacerbated simply because of emotions developed by seeing a person you are angry with. Instead, by sending an email, one defers the conflict to the other person, can present facts and apologies with less incitement, and allows the other person control of the situation. The mode suggested by O'Sullivan's theory (mediated communication) to deal with a highly negative valence issue in this case would be appropriate.
It seems the default position that anything solely text based is the easy and impersonal way out of dealing with touchy subjects (“Does bad news come in the form of memos that obfuscate the truth...”). Memos do not by themselves obfuscate the truth. Yes, they allow for one to more easily obfuscate the truth, but using memo's and other text based media honestly can often be appropriate for many situations.
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