When Normal Changes

The Human Bit, by Frank Peters.

Last week, I had a conversation with someone in his mid-fifties who has spent about twenty-five years working in technical development.

We were talking about changes in his company. Managers have left. New managers have arrived. Interim managers have appeared. Departments have been reorganised. There are new names, new responsibilities and new structures.

Mostly, he knows this because emails keep arriving.

One departure was announced as effective immediately. Half an hour later came another email introducing new management. A new department head appeared. My conversation partner has seen him once. They spoke for about ten minutes during a break.

There had been no meeting with the team. No proper introduction. No moment when somebody stood in front of the people they were going to lead and said: Hello. This is who I am. Tell me who you are.

Just an email.

I found that extraordinary.

Perhaps I have watched too many American films, but surely the new boss is supposed to arrive carrying coffee for everybody.

Apparently not.

And then, sometime after our conversation, another thought occurred to me.

Perhaps I found it extraordinary because I am old enough to find it extraordinary.

What counts as normal?

My conversation partner is in his mid-fifties. Many of his colleagues are considerably younger. They entered working life in a different world.

Remote work is normal. Online meetings are normal. Teams spread across different locations are normal. A colleague can be somebody you work with every week without ever having shared a room with them. If that is the professional world you entered, perhaps a manager arriving by email does not seem particularly strange.

You cannot watch something disappear if it had already disappeared before you arrived.

That does not mean younger people do not value human contact, any more than everybody over fifty wants to spend five days a week in an office discussing last night’s television beside the coffee machine. But our sense of what an organisation should feel like probably owes something to the organisations in which we first learned to work.

My conversation partner said something that stayed with me.

“Face-to-face communication is no more in focus.”

When he said it, I heard criticism. Afterwards, I wondered whether he was also simply describing the world as it now is.

There was another new manager who had at least walked around one floor and introduced himself individually. My conversation partner still thought more should have happened. Somebody from senior management should have brought people together and introduced the new arrivals properly.

Nothing grand. No PowerPoint. No balloons. No motivational video.

Just people meeting people.

I understand that instinct. A manager can have a title, a square on an organisation chart and the authority to make decisions, but meeting somebody gives that authority a face. You hear how the person speaks. They hear how you speak. Something begins.

Yet even there I have to be careful. It is very easy for me to say that this is obviously better.

Obvious to whom?

Someone who has spent twenty-five years in organisations may have learned that relationships are built in rooms, corridors, workshops and conversations. Someone whose professional life began with remote teams may have learned to build relationships differently.

The interesting bit is what happens when both understandings of work occupy the same company.

Where does commitment come from?

Another senior figure had apparently been talking about a lack of commitment. Not enough commitment to planning. Not enough commitment to decisions. Not enough commitment between the different functions involved in a project.

That bothered my conversation partner.

It bothered me too, because commitment is one of those words organisations like to demand without spending quite so much time wondering where it comes from.

Can you reduce human contact and still expect the same forms of attachment that developed when people knew one another differently?

Perhaps you can. People form very real relationships online. Distributed teams can work brilliantly. Sitting in the same building has never guaranteed trust, competence or even basic cooperation.

But commitment has to attach itself to something.

A person. A team. A purpose. A piece of work. Some sense that what I am doing connects with what you are doing.

You can put commitment into a presentation.

That does not produce it.

And then our conversation offered a wonderfully ordinary example of what happens when those connections become weak.

An external requirements engineer had been given hundreds of technical requirements to organise. She was new to the work. Her task was to divide them into two broad boxes: software or hardware.

One requirement concerned what should happen if an electronic unit came into contact with water.

Hardware.

So it went to the hardware developers.

Except the people receiving it developed circuit boards and the electronic components mounted on them. Protection against water belonged to the enclosure around the electronics.

Wrong desk.

My conversation partner explained this. The engineer’s answer, as he described it, was essentially that she had been given two possibilities.

Hardware or software.

It clearly wasn’t software.

Therefore it was hardware.

I liked the example more the longer I thought about it, because she was not necessarily being foolish. From where she was standing, the decision made perfect sense. She had a task, two categories and hundreds of requirements. She followed the logic available to her.

The people receiving the requirement had another perspective. They knew what hardware meant at the point where somebody actually had to build something.

Both sides were behaving rationally.

The nonsense existed somewhere between them.

The end of the food chain.

My conversation partner described his team as being at “the end of the food chain”.

Plans and decisions begin somewhere above them. Work travels through different levels until eventually it reaches the people who have to make something real.

There is nobody below them to pass it to.

They have to make it work.

That gives them a particular view of the organisation. A presentation can say that a project is “software focused”. Fine. But eventually software needs something physical to run on. Someone has to decide what that physical thing is. Someone has to build it.

So my conversation partner has chosen to concentrate on what he calls the “grassroots level”, or the “real doing level”. He has ordered evaluation boards. Development has begun on real electronics. He talks to colleagues who are trying things out. On an existing system, he keeps in contact with the people installing it and with those who call when something does not work.

“I try to keep the business running on the real operational level,” he told me.

That sentence stayed with me.

Not because the operational level is somehow nobler than management. It isn’t. Organisations need planning, coordination, budgets, priorities and people prepared to make decisions beyond today’s immediate problem.

But every level can see something the others cannot.

The person making the plan may be able to see the whole project.

The person holding the circuit board can see whether one part of that plan actually works.

Trouble begins when either believes that their view is the whole view.

Towards the end of our conversation, another expression appeared.

“Rolling planning.”

The phrase was new to both of us, although the idea is simple enough. Instead of making a plan and treating it as fixed, you keep adjusting it as circumstances change and new information arrives.

Perfectly sensible.

Probably essential in uncertain technical development.

But perspective changes this too. From one level of the organisation, changing the plan may look like responsiveness. From another, it may look like nobody knows what is going on.

A manager sees flexibility.

An engineer sees uncertainty.

A remote worker sees freedom.

Someone else sees isolation.

One person sees an efficient email.

Another wonders why nobody walked into the room.

The ordinary things.

I keep coming back to that new manager.

The email arrived. The organisation chart changed. Work continued.

For many people, perhaps nothing remarkable happened.

That may be the most interesting part.

We become accustomed to things remarkably quickly. Video meetings were once unusual. Working closely with people we had never met was unusual. Signing documents without paper was unusual. Having a working day interrupted by half a dozen digital channels was unusual.

Then they became ordinary.

And once something becomes ordinary, we tend to stop asking what it is doing to us.

That does not mean the old way was better. I have no desire to reconstruct some imaginary golden age in which every manager knew everybody’s name, every office was full of camaraderie and every face-to-face meeting was useful. Plenty of them were dreadful.

But there may be value in noticing what has changed before we become so accustomed to it that we can no longer see it.

My conversation partner remembers another way of working. Some of his younger colleagues do not.

Neither side automatically has the answer.

One remembers what disappeared.

The other has no particular reason to want it back.

And somewhere between those two perspectives sits a question I keep returning to:

If something has become normal, does that mean it makes sense?

I don’t know.

But if I arrived tomorrow to lead a group of people I had never met, I think I would still do one rather old-fashioned thing.

I would walk into the room.

Say hello.

And listen.