Flip Chart Fairy Tales

Although it’s not very trendy among academics and HR professionals, the command and control approach to management still has its advocates, as Glyn Lumley noted in his post yesterday.

Command and control feels safe. You tell people what to do and watch them while they do it. Feeling in control reduces the manager’s anxiety. Empowering people and letting them organise themselves seems a lot riskier. Whether it is appropriate for modern, complex organisations is debatable.

Management theorists have questioned the effectiveness of command and control over the last few decades but it seems that some managers had their doubts long before that. Here is a quote from a management textbook that pre-dates F.W. Taylor: 

Nowadays I make it a practice to call them into consultation on any new work and to discover by this means what sort of ability is possessed by each of them. Furthermore, I observe that they are more willing to set about a piece of work on which they think that their opinions have been asked and their advice followed.  

It’s from Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella who wrote his treatise on estate management in the first century AD.

Last week, the News of the World suspended one of its reporters after complaints were made about illegal phone hacking. Senior managers at the newspaper claim that this is a one-off incident which they are treating as a potential breach of discipline. That’s the same line the paper took last time this happened. Two employees were sacked and the NoW’s managers claimed that they knew nothing about the use of phone hacking. The sacked journalists were portrayed as rogue employees who overstepped the mark and contravened the paper’s usual ethical standards.

Once again we are being asked to believe in the idea of the rogue operator; the employee who, in furthering the employer’s interests, uses illegal or immoral methods which are not sanctioned by the company.

The banking industry is full of rogue trader stories. Barings’ mangers claimed that Nick Leeson was an out-of-control maverick when he lost the bank £860m. Société Générale said something similar when Jérôme Kerviel blew a €4.9 billion hole in its balance sheet. These men, so we were told, were one-off eccentrics who just didn’t know where to draw the line.

The important difference between so-called rogue traders and workplace fraudsters is that the former use unethical methods to further their employers’ goals. Rogue traders don’t steal from their employers; they simply use immoral or illegal tactics to achieve the objectives they have been set. When this goes wrong and, more importantly, when the wrongdoing becomes public, the employers quickly deny all knowledge, claim that the employees are renegades and insist that such practices are highly unusual in their organisations.

However, these claims are at odds with everything we know about the way organisations work. Most organisations contain employee behaviour within a set of cultural norms. These norms are reinforced, sometimes explicitly but more often implicitly, by the organisations’ leaders. Employees very rarely operate outside these norms. They might push the boundaries a bit but, apart from the criminal or psychopathic few, it is unusual for workers in any organisation to violate these unwritten rules. If they do they are usually punished in some way.

Managers, too, are strongly aware of a company’s ‘way of doing things’ and tend to spot counter-cultural behaviour very quickly. Despite all the talk of employee empowerment and self-managed teams over the past two decades, most organisations are still run using modern variations on the command and control model advocated by F.W. Taylor over a century ago. There are very few organisations where a manager will give his workers an objective but have no interest in how they go about achieving it. Almost all bosses know how their people do their jobs even if they don’t monitor all the specific details. This is especially the case in more demanding environments where managers are under pressure from senior executives. Fearing that they won’t meet their own deadlines, they tend to monitor the progress of their teams very closely and keep a keen eye on the costs.

In truth, then, there is no such thing as a rogue operator. If an employee uses unethical tactics to further an employer’s objectives, the behaviour is almost certainly sanctioned, either explicitly or tacitly, by the management and encouraged by the organisation’s culture. Workers don’t suddenly decide to break the law or take crazy risks with other people’s money. They do it because everyone else is doing it and they are rewarded for it. When they get away with it, they are praised for their performance. It’s only when it goes wrong that they are cast out and treated as pariahs by the very people who encouraged the behaviour in the first place.

The News of the World’s management would have us believe that, in a highly results-focused and hierarchical environment, managers would run stories and sign off expenses without asking how reporters got their information or what the expenses were for. If that is really what happened, the News of the World would be like no other organisation I have ever seen.

As with the banks’ responses to their rogue traders, the News of the World is attempting to individualise what is, in all likelihood, a systemic problem. Employees rarely deviate very far from the behavioural norms that prevail in their organisations. If one person in an organisation is behaving unethically, the chances are that a lot of other people are doing something similar.

Adam Wagner, a barrister and former colleague of Mr Justice Foskett, applauds the judge’s decision to publish his rulings in the Sharon Shoesmith case online.

The case was always likely to be full of controversy and complexity as well as salacious detail. This is not in itself remarkable: public law is often the cutting edge of social and political issues. What is unusual is the manner in which Mr Justice Foskett approached his task by looking outwards to the general public, as well as inwards to the legal system.

At every stage of this case, barristers’ submissions, judge’s remarks and a full summary of the 176-page judgment have been made available through the judiciary’s new website.

As Mr Wagner says, this is an encouraging development and it would be good to see more legal judgments posted online. However, I think he is being a bit optimistic here:

A more open judicial system would help the press, prevent hasty reporting errors spreading via the internet, and improve access to justice for the general public…

The judgment from the original hearing on 23 April, in which the judge expressed his unease about Sharon Shoesmith’s dismissal, was published online too. It didn’t stop the Sun from printing this twisted spin on his ruling or a whole host of mini-me bloggers from simply regurgitating what they had read in the tabloids.

Many people had already made up their minds about Sharon Shoesmith and they filtered out anything that contradicted their opinions – even the comments of an eminent judge.

Overall, though, I agree with Adam Wagner. Publishing online judgments is a positive step. It allows members of the public to read the reasons behind legal decisions and make up their own minds. Most importantly, it enables people to see through the distortion and truth-bending that passes for reporting in some of our newspapers.

Completely trashing his previous claim to be un-intellectual, the HRD has a post up at XpertHR in which he quotes Jean Paul Sartre. The subject of the HRD’s post is, ”If I could change on thing about HR…” part of an ongoing series at XpertHR to which I will contribute if I ever get my brain in gear.

The HRD argues that the image of the HR profession is in the hands of HR people themselves. How HR people decide to behave determines how others will see them. As Sartre says:

We ourselves decide our being.

[T]he coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment.

There is some truth in this. As a colleague of mine said to me years ago:

We invite people to see us in a certain way. We do it before we have even spoken.

This is why first impressions are so important. We love to put other people in boxes; it helps us to make sense of the world. And we do it remarkably quickly. For example, if you join a new team and take on the completer-finisher role at the first meeting, people then label you as the completer-finisher. Before long, you’ll find yourself doing the minutes every week and writing up the flipcharts. Or, if you adopt a stance where you rely on your technical expertise, you will be boxed off as a technocrat and, while you might frequently be asked for your professional opinion, you’ll probably be excluded from the more strategic discussions.

It can be hard to change this because both our behaviour and other people’s judgements of us are often sub-conscious. If you go into a meeting and adopt a subservient role it is probably not a conscious decision; it is driven by your self-image. Somewhere deep down you believe yourself to be subservient and so you act accordingly. Likewise, your colleagues might not even be aware that they have pigeonholed you as subservient; they have simply reacted to the signals you have sent out. By your actions and your behaviour you have invited them to see you in a certain way. You shouldn’t be surprised if they take up that invitation.

Once this pattern has been established it is extremely difficult to change. This is why people who go through deep personal development programmes then decide to change their way of being can often run into problems with their colleagues. If Mrs Mouse who always makes the tea and writes the flipcharts suddenly decides she wants to chair the meeting and lead the next project, her colleagues could be forgiven for feeling a bit uneasy.

The HRD offers another Sartre quote:

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

Apparently that sentence was seen as an advocacy of violence against repression – because the people who have an interest in keeping you in your place will resist your attempts break out of it. Once people have made something of you and put you in a box, they cling to that image and it takes a lot to change it. A radical and deep-seated refusal to conform to what others have made of you might not require violent resistance, at least, not in the corporate world, but it may well lead to conflict. I have seen people forced to leave organisations because their colleagues and managers had typecast them. Having been pushed into the same roles over and over again, they found that their only option was to go and play on another stage. For any number of reasons, it can be in other people’s interests to keep you in the box to which they have allocated you and they will fight hard to make sure you stay there. If it is useful to someone else to have you performing a certain role, they will use everything from emotional blackmail to naked intimidation to keep you in your place.

So, while I agree with the HRD that “there is nothing stopping you from being what you want to be” and that “it’s never too late to change the way in which you act”, we should acknowledge that changing the way we are and the way we behave may disturb and even threaten those around us. It is likely that they will react accordingly and may even oppose the changes we wish to make. When faced with such resistance it’s not surprising that many people just take the easy way out. They forget all the resolutions they made on those personal development programmes and revert back to their pre-assigned roles.

Of course, it’s much better if you invite people to see you in the way you want to be seen from day one. That’s why new leaders have to stamp their personalities on their organisations quickly. It is especially important for new HR directors, with all the baggage attached to their profession, to start behaving as they want to be seen on the first day in the job. If you want to be thought of as powerful, business focused and strategic, you have to be powerful, business-focused and strategic from the moment you walk through the door. If you’re not, they’ll have you making the tea and handing out the tissues again before you’ve even attended your first board meeting.

I said this wasn’t over yet. All those who thought Sharon Shoesmith had lost her case against her dismissal from Haringey weren’t paying attention to what the judge actually said. 

Earlier today, the judge refused to award the costs claimed by Ofsted, Haringey and the Department of Education against Ms Shoesmith on the grounds that: 

I did not see this as a plain case where the Claimant could be said to have “lost” in the usually accepted sense of that term. 

He went on to criticise Ed Balls and Haringey for the way the dismissal of Ms Shoesmith had been handled saying: 

Whilst I endeavoured to express my views on this issue with some circumspection given the possibility of further proceedings taking place before the Employment Tribunal (see paragraphs 517-532 of the judgment), it was, I am sure, plain to everyone that I was not satisfied that the procedures adopted by Haringey at this time gave the appearance of fairness and that, had I felt it my role to do so, I would have granted relief in relation to Haringey’s decision. If one has to talk in terms of “wins” or “losses”, the Claimant “won” on this issue and Haringey “lost”. 

That’s judge-speak for saying that, had he been sitting on an employment tribunal, judging only the employment issues, he would have found in Ms Shoesmith’s favour. 

He granted Ms Shoesmith leave to appeal against his decision on the judicial review saying: 

It is by no means fanciful that the Court of Appeal may differ from my view. 

Ms Shoesmith also has a claim lodged with an Employment Tribunal the date for which has yet to be fixed. 

As I said right at the start, I can’t see how her sacking can have been within the law. From reading the judge’s comments today, this is not looking good for Ed Balls or Haringey. 

The full ruling is here.

Anthony Hilton, a man who has seen a few economic downturns close up, dismisses all the silly season panic about a double dip recession:

It is surely time for a reality check. There is good reason for August being called the silly season but these days it is the financial markets more than the media which lose their sense of proportion and their ability to make rational judgements. It is the month where the bosses go off to the beach leaving the number twos in charge normally with the morale-sapping final instruction not to screw things up. This makes the deputies even more nervous than they would otherwise be and increases by a significant factor the likelihood that they will indeed screw things up. Apply this to every dealing room across the City and you have the reason more financial crises occur in August than any other month – though thankfully not this time – as well as the reason for markets overreacting to every shred of supposedly new information.

The worry at present is the possibility of a double-dip recession. There is no more reason now to suppose there will be one than there was six months ago – less in fact given the progress already made this year. Such an event is possible but that does not make it likely because the lesson of past recessions and recoveries is that double dips are in fact quite rare. But this historical truth has not stopped the markets behaving as if it was a near certainty.

The other point is that given what it has had to suffer already it would not matter that much if the economy did have another flat quarter provided that was all that happened and it bounced back again swiftly thereafter. The growth rate over the next three or four years is what will determine standards of living in this country, not the growth rate over the next three or four months and given that recoveries almost never proceed at an even pace so would be quite normal for there to be bright patches and dull patches.

Slow, bumpy and grinding growth, then, a bit like my old car metaphor.

He’s not convinced about the government’s cuts either:

When it comes to spending cuts the markets are assuming the Government’s actions will match its words. But if they do it will be a first. It is one thing for the Chancellor to demand 25% cuts, it is quite another for the Whitehall machine actually to deliver them. The sensible approach is not to believe it until you see it and to take the parliamentary rhetoric with a pinch of salt.

There will of course be a squeeze of some sort but history shows that the only way to cut government spending successfully is for the state to withdraw totally from various activities. But this Government shows every indication of shying away from the confrontations which would follow such a course and instead it seems to be trying to maintain most of what the state does but to spend less on it. What earlier governments have found when they tried this is that it only ever works for a short time.

Contrast that with Jon Davis in Sunday’s Observer. He thinks civil servants are well up for delivering savings:

Many in the Civil Service are of the opinion that cuts of up to a third are practicable, and could even lead to better government.

I’m a wee bit sceptical about that. I have seen too many bullish senior executives declare that, ‘There is loads of fat in this organisation’ – to which the obvious riposte is, ‘Why haven’t you done anything about it then?’ Blustering hyperbole is easy in a boardroom slanging match or when making off-the-cuff comments to journalists. Identifying and getting rid of that fat is a lot more difficult.

From the lofty perspective of the Treasury it is easy to talk of thirty-three percent spending cuts. In the hinterland of government agencies, NHS trusts and local authorities, those savings will be a lot harder to find and, even if they could be identified, the skills to make cuts without everything else falling apart are absent from many of these organisations.

At the moment there is a calm-before-the-storm feeling. Everyone in the public sector seems to be waiting for the spending review on 20 October to see what’s in store for them. I wouldn’t expect too much though. The spending review will give more detail about how much each department has to cut but the specifics will still be left to local managers. That’s where the problems will start. It’s easy to put numbers on spreadsheets but a lot more difficult to deliver the savings that make those numbers real.

The Economist has a review of Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble’s book The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge. The book has just come out and looks like it is well worth reading.

Organisations often put huge resources into producing ideas and planning change programmes. The toughest part, though, is to get the ideas off the Powerpoint slides and into action. This paragraph in the review struck a chord with me:

[Govindarajan and Trimble] say that you need to start by recognising that innovation is unnatural. Established businesses are built for efficiency, which depends on predictability and repeatability—on breaking tasks down into their component parts and holding employees accountable for hitting their targets. But innovation is by definition unpredictable and uncertain. Bosses may sing a pretty song about innovation being the future. But in practice the heads of operational units will favour the known over the unknown.

Which is why change of any kind is so difficult to implement. I know I say this every time I write anything about organisational culture but, as Edgar Schein explained, culture is based on assumptions and beliefs. You can’t change behaviour unless you change the assumptions and beliefs that underpin that behaviour. However, these assumptions have been built up over time and are usually based on what has worked in the past. As Govindarajan and Trimble say, even when they claim to be in favour of innovation and change people tend to stick to what they know. This is especially true when they are under pressure.

I have seen many a change programme look as though it is delivering lasting results when times are good only for the organisation to retrench back to the tried and tested as soon as the business environment becomes difficult. Organisational cultures have something of the characteristic of spring steel. You can bend them quite a long way but they have a habit of springing back to where they were.

Change management theorists argue about the best strategies for implementing change. In an ideal world you would get all the senior and influential people in the company behind the change. In practice, that is usually difficult to do. Those championing change in organisations often use the “small fires” approach, where you change parts of the organisation to set an example to the rest and show what can be achieved. These micro-cultures or skunkworks teams are often given a degree of autonomy and encouraged to be deliberately counter-cultural. But, as Govindarajan and Trimble point out, this can cause problems too. Being whacky and mocking the boring suits who pay your salaries is unlikely to win friends and influence people. Often, these innovation hothouses are starved of resources because they’ve pissed too many people off.

Like an organism, a company can reject a transplanted organ, even after the transplant has appeared to succeed. (The metaphors are coming thick and fast here, I know!) I’ve seen this happen all too often. In one example, the change programme was fully backed by the CEO and his deputy. They appointed change champions; they empowered groups of employees to innovate and gave them the support and political backing to implement their ideas. All the textbook change-management stuff about communication, getting buy in and taking people with you was in place. Even the language began to change and it looked as though the organisation had made a long-term shift. However, the company was deeply hierarchical and with an economic downturn came a backlash. Some managers felt the CEO had gone too far with this empowerment stuff and they had allies on the board. Eventually the organisation spat the CEO and his deputy out. What had looked for all the world like a successful change programme had been something of an illusion. At the first sign of trouble the organisation reverted to type.

Making any innovation in organisations, even basic transactional changes, can be difficult. Counter-cultural change is even harder. The corporate body has a habit of rejecting the counter-cultural transplants. Cultural assumptions in organisations run deep; even when you think you’ve changed them, they re-emerge, sometimes even stronger than before.

Coming up with innovative ideas is only half the battle. The Powerpoint slides and project plans may have been word-smithed to death and contain some really whizzy graphics but the messy business of making the change stick will be a lot harder. It’s a difficult balance to get right. Too cautious and nothing will change; too challenging and, unless you have a rock-solid mandate behind you, nothing will change either.

Ron Ashkenas wrote a piece on conflict avoidance for the Harvard Business Review earlier this week. Conflict avoidance, together with its pernicious twin, embarrassment avoidance, is behind a lot of the dysfunctional behaviour in organisations. Most people will go to extreme lengths to avoid conflict and embarrassment; managers are no different.

Ron Ashkenas gives some great examples; I particularly liked this one:

One such conflict-avoiding company even asks project teams to run stakeholder “acceptance analyses” throughout the course of a project, in the hope that eventually everyone will get on board and the senior manager won’t have to directly tell anyone to cooperate.

How many times have I heard that; if we just explain it to people they’ll all get it in the end won’t they?

Usually, conflict avoidance strategies create complexity in organisations. Every time we shy away from confronting an issue head-on, we create that extra layer of ambiguity. A decision is fudged in a meeting so that everyone can go away with their chosen interpretation of what has been agreed. That means they can effectively do what they like and still claim to be doing what they agreed to do. Eventually, the ambiguity has to be reined in, so new controls and procedures are put in place and so it goes on.

I worked with one chairman who had some difficult issues to deal with and some violent disagreements between members of his board. His solution to the problem was to close down contentious debate by demanding more data and deferring the discussion until the next meeting. Eventually I realised that his plan was simply to talk out any conflict until his tenure as chairman had expired. It was a great strategy for managing the chairman’s and board members’ discomfort but damn all use to the company.

Another fascinating feature of conflict avoidance is that we avoid talking about it. To discuss conflict avoidance or embarrassment avoidance would, in itself, be uncomfortable. Therefore, we don’t just create strategies to avoid conflict, we create strategies to avoid talking about avoiding conflict.

This is most obvious in the stories we tell ourselves when we know we have bottled out of an uncomfortable conversation. “It wasn’t the right time to discuss it.” “It would have been inappropriate in an open meeting.” “I don’t think he’s ready to hear that message yet.” “I’m just giving him a chance to improve on his own.” And my personal favourite, “I’m keeping my powder dry until I’ve got some more data.” We create elaborate stories to tell ourselves that avoiding a conflict situation was the right thing to do. Sometimes the stories are so good that we begin to believe them ourselves.

And, of course, we don’t challenge other people’s stories because, if we did, they might challenge ours. That way we create a whole culture which avoids conflict, rationalises it, then colludes in a cover-up to deny the very existence of conflict avoidance. This is the pattern of behaviour that Chris Argyris called defensive reasoning:

Whenever human beings are faced with any issue that contains significant embarrassment or threat, they act in ways that bypass, as best they can, the embarrassment or threat.

Organizational defensive routines are actions or policies that prevent individuals or segments of the organization from experiencing embarrassment or threat.

Many organisational policies and practices are designed to protect people’s comfort and especially senior people’s comfort. Project management methodologies, bureaucratised performance management processes, change management, grading and reward structures, even MS PowerPoint - they all have their uses but they can very easily be manipulated to help managers to stay within their comfort zones, avoid conflict and rationalise away acts of craven cowardice.

Ron Ashkenas asks, “Is your culture too nice?” by which he means “Do people shy away from conflict in your organisation?” I have never worked anywhere where people don’t avoid conflict and that includes investment banks. All organisations, to an extent, suffer from conflict avoidance.  

Tackling conflict avoidance is difficult but, if you are clever enough, being confrontational in a non-confrontational organisation can bring good results. You have to do it sparingly and pick your moments; if you don’t everyone else will label you a bully and gang up on you. But used wisely, confrontation can shake people out of their inertia and get things moving. Surfacing hidden conflict and then meeting it head on can also relieve tension that has been building up. Often, far from being seen as a bully, the manager who knows how to use conflict constructively is hailed as a ‘breath of fresh air’.

So what are the techniques for engaging in constructive conflict? Ron has a few at the end of his post. I have a few more but this post is already too long so I’ll save them for another day.

Financial Secretary to the Treasury Mark Hoban crashed and burned on Radio 4 this morning. When asked whether he had conducted a formal study of the impact of the government’s spending proposals on disadvantaged groups, he didn’t have a clue what the interviewer, Justin Webb, was talking about. That this is a legal requirement was clearly news to him and he repeatedly avoided answering the question.

As this was going on, UNISON, the public sector union, announced that it would mount a legal challenge against Andrew Lansley’s NHS white paper on the grounds that the NHS constitution is legally binding and prevents the government from implementing any change without major consultation.

Some commentators have already spotted the potential legal booby-traps in the measures brought in by the Labour government in its dying days. Legislation giving people legal entitlements to public services and stronger equality laws were always going to make it more difficult to cut public spending. Theresa May anticipated this back in June and warned George Osborne about it before the budget.

Commenting on Mark Hoban’s debacle, the Spectator’s Frazer Nelson accused the government of completely missing these ‘New Labour landmines’:

Labour transferred power from parliament (where it was about to lose power) to the courts (where the lefty judiciary reign supreme). Their calculation was that if they did this quietly enough, and in technicalities, the Cameroons would not wise up to it because of their aversion to detail.

Actually, they didn’t do it that quietly. Polly Toynbee, one of the Labour Party’s most prominent supporters in the media, explained exactly what they were up to back in June 2009. She even described the legislative programme as ‘a spending landmine’.

These spending landmines are starting to go off. There will almost certainly be more legal challenges to the government’s spending programmes. As with the civil service redundancy scheme, the government may find that it has to repeal legislation before it can implement its programme. That will slow things down and take up time that the Coalition had hoped to use for other bills.

It remains to be seen whether the judiciary is as lefty as Frazer Nelson thinks, and whether it will uphold any or all of these challenges. All the same, the Coalition should have a contingency plan in case it needs to spend the next year unpicking Labour’s legislative landmines.

Update: The Equality Act is not in force yet so Justin Webb was jumping the gun here. (See Darren Newman in the comments thread below.) Unfortunatley, Mark Hoban didn’t seem to be aware of that either.

Something unusual happened yesterday; this blog had a lot more comments than it normally gets. That’s surprising for this time of year, given that many people are on holiday.

Over the last year or so, I have noticed two seemingly contradictory trends. The blog’s hit rate has almost doubled while, at the same time, the number of comments has fallen. The rise in hit rates is probably due, in part, to the increased interest in this blog’s subject matter. My career is unusual in that I have worked in investment banking and in the public sector, both of which have come under the media spotlight recently, so some of my ramblings and reflections have attracted people’s attention. Being linked to by major newspapers like the Guardian has helped to boost the blog traffic.

Another major source of hits is Twitter. Since I started posting on Twitter a few months ago, I have noticed another sharp increase in traffic. As I was thinking about this recently, the penny dropped. Twitter is also the reason why I’m getting fewer blog comments. Everyone is discussing stuff on Twitter instead.

Earlier this week, digital marketing expert Mitch Joel blogged about The End Of Conversation In Social Media. The title gives you a pretty clear idea of Mitch’s stance on the subject but here are his observations:

Blogs that have comments, with little back and forth. Some Bloggers respond to the comments and some don’t.

Those that do have comments, usually have no further comment from the person who left a comment in the first place. That’s not a conversation. That’s feedback.

Individuals not leaving a comment to engage in a conversation, but simply to promote their own links or to chest-thump.

Twitter doesn’t really bring out a conversation. It’s a great place to broadcast and get some quick tidbits, but let’s face it, unless you’re creating spiritual and motivation tweets, it’s hard to have substance in 140 characters (or less – if you’re looking for a retweet).

Even in cool arenas like the #blogchat that takes place on Twitter every Sunday night, it feels more like everyone screaming a thought at once than a conversation that can be followed and engaged with.

Facebook has some great banter with the wall posts and status updates, but it’s more chatty than conversational and it’s not an open/public environment.

I have observed something similar. Twitter doesn’t lend itself to debate. It’s difficult to follow a conversation and the 140 character limit restricts what you can say. It’s rather like watching children pass notes to each other in the classroom. It’s difficult to join in and almost impossible to discuss anything in depth. It’s even worse when you look at the Twitter pages of some of the political bloggers. Their comments threads were always more rowdy and abusive than those on business-related blogs. Their Twitter pages are full of seemingly random insults; that what political arguments look like when they are conducted by passing post-it notes.

At the end of his post, Mitch poses the question:

Are we seeing a new shift in Social Media? Are the conversations dead? Were they ever – really – alive? What do you think?

From what I’ve seen, there was more conversation and debate in the early days of blogs and discussion forums than there is now. Twitter and other social media are fun because there is always something new happening and you can connect with lots of people but you don’t really get conversation. The shift in focus towards Twitter seems to have reduced the level of conversation elsewhere on the web too.

Back in the eighties and early nineties I used to follow a band called New Model Army. (Anyone who is familiar with the band will know that they had followers not fans.) Twenty years ago, their chief bard, Justin Sullivan, wrote these words:

This golden age of communication
Means everyone talks at the same time

Strangely prophetic. Perhaps he foresaw Twitter and social media, because that’s exactly what’s happening now.