"You don’t hammer nails with a screwdriver…When you have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail…"

- Anthony Bucci 

I am stuck! I am sitting here attempting to do some work and my email is taking an incredibly slow time AND I am also waiting for emails that are still, seemingly due to same slowness challenge, not arriving. And as a result I find myself [feeling] incapacitated.

I, who pride myself of being able to do many and diverse things concurrently in any given day (I believe some call it ‘multi-tasking’ but personally I don’t really know another way to get tasks done, so for me it is ‘tasking’), am stuck because one thing isn’t working and I can’t seem to move on.

As with everything we have a choice and I have decided to make the choice of taking this time as an opportunity to:

1. write down some things that I have been munching on about technology. And

2. thank the sloooooooow email server (albeit ever so breifly)

I’ll start with 2. first.

This little moment in my life has given me the chance to experience and gain insight into what it feels like not being able to move on/forward  on something because a detail isn’t clear/isn’t working the way they decided it needed to.

I have seen it with clients and friends. Of course I also experience it – like now. And sometimes I cause it.

Rather than walking away and giving something time to resolve itself/exploring it more deeply at another more appropriate time, we opt for focusing all our energy on the thing that is making us confused/stuck and the strange (‘counter intuitive’) effect is that we stay stuck rather than getting unstuck, when everything else is whizzing forward.

The important note however is that even if the stuck is real – my email server is really having problems – I don’t need to focus on  what is making me stuck. I need to let those around my know I am stuck* and then put my energies else where. It is out of my hands right now.

(That was very difficult for me to write! It is so much easier to recommend to someone to leave it than to do it oneself!)

*In this case using this amazing technology called a phone and also emailing from my hotmail account for urgent documents to be sent there and letting the people who own the server do their job. Technology can break down.

This actually leads quite nicely into my thoughts on technology:

1. When should we use what technology? Is technology good bad or ugly? Is it really saving us time?

These and some other questions have been running around in my head and in my life recently, in part because a lot of my work is cross-generational, in part because I love technology though am really only able to understand the front end/navigational human and how to use elements, and for all the rest I pride myself on knowing who to ask…or know to ask the person who knows the person with the answer…and in part because as technology invades and pervades all areas of my life I find that sometimes I need to force switch off and have developed some seriously surprising reverse innovator towards luddite ways. For instance, I pride myself on not having a microwave, I rarely watch TV yet I can’t seem to leave my computer and specifically my inbox alone and as a result am steering VERY clear of a blackberry type device, even though I know that it could ‘save my time’ and streamline my diary. I now carry around a seriously large diary and, shock horror, use a pen to write in it. And just yesterday the wonderful Andrea drew me a large calendar on butcher paper to stick on my wall.

All of the above however reflects something much larger: The profusion of new and wonderful tools into our lives, and the speed with which new tools and platforms are coming, allows little time for reflection and as a result we end up with a confused mess of overuse of some things and a complete shut-out of others.

As a change agent I can self-diagnose: parts of me are stuck in fear/resistance mode, and rather than take the time to learn and streamline and scope I am choosing instead for the short-term easier solution – do nothing. I am living in many worlds on this, some as an innovator and an insane curiousity in new technologies, and some as a luddite who pushes technology away. 

Having ranted with you for long enough I feel it appropriate to focus my thoughts via an example - when to use email?

The medium is the message - Marshall McLuhan*

Email, like many tools, represents a medium with which to transmit a message. It is also a very new medium, and because of this, its impacts and how it should/is best used, are still emerging. And because of its previlance, it is as if it has always been here. And of course there are children living in this world who use it for whom it has always been here. There is another element, that of the recievers and senders. In business at least there is an expectation for immediate responses and email represents the seemingly perfect solution.

."..it’s important to take a responsible stance vis a vis our technology. It’s good for some things, not good for others, and we need to know both to make an informed choice about when to use technology and when to try something else…."

I pride myselfon being a communicator and also on "AND" as opposed to "or". That is, usually it isn’t a question of one thing over another but rather both or many things being correct. So email isn’t evil, and email may not always be the appropriate medium for the information/kowledge you want to pass. It is important to take context/environment into account. It is important to take the receiver(s) into account. 

"Recognize the strengths and weaknesses of a tool and use it appropriately. You don’t hammer nails with a screwdriver, either, but of course screwdrivers are handy nonetheless."

"When you have a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."

Extending the analogy - if we see email as the hammer, then any form of information I have, I start thinking should be sent/nailed via email. I know I am a victim and culprit of this crime! Too often I find that my tendency towards fast and immediate, two things that conceptually the email medium offers, makes me select/elect to email information without a moments thought about whether it is the right way for me to have communicated.

I see people narrow their thinking around the capabilities of the tool, instead of forcing the tool to expand into their thinking or using other tools instead. The ubiquity of technology, the dramatic and “cool” things you can do with it, make that kind of slip very easy.

It is like we forgot that there is a person involved on the other end. Just because the email medium itself is fast doesn’t mean that person receiving it is going to act that fast.

Some questions that help me slow down: Is an email the right thing to be sending? Could I have better called/walked over and had a conversation/instant messaged/blogged/not emailed…? and so forth.

"Email is a primitive mode of communication",  my good friend Marge is fond of saying. 

Another challenge for me as a communicator is that even with all the tools technology can build for us, we still house one of the best tools in the world – our brain/internal system. And ongoing dialogue with many other brains/human systems provides a very powerful network/medium. I know people often react to this with - oh no, more talk – but the reality is that humans have always learned and developed via conversations and stories. We’ve evolved with this. And we often operate from false assumptions. Just because the email as a medium is fast, doesn’t mean the process of receiving the information we seek is. Who hasn’t spent hours of their time waiting around for sign off on something, or for a document to come through?

The time it takes to send and recieve emails seems to be inversely proportional to the time it takes to wait for the information you really needed to receive. We get stuck in the ‘waiting room’**.

And this brings us back (yes, my rants do often come back full circle) to being stuck. Too frequently we get stuck because we focus our energies in the wrong place. We focus on energies on building beautiful technology platforms that can convey information cleanly smoothly and fast…with very little thought for the information that should goes through them. What do we want to say, who are the users, what is their level of skill with the medium and so forth. Going back to email -  if I send poor information through a well working email system, the end user still receives poor information. That they recieved it in a smooth fast and reliable manner seems very much besides the point.

To it put bluntly: sh*% in sh*& out 

I want to end with something more profound and less perverse. 

As often is the case I find myself left with two options: say nothing or quote someone else. I hope you like my choice:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Richard Feynman, physicist extraordinaire Source: Rogers’ Commision Report into the Challenger Crash. Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle.

End notes

* This  Marshall McLuhan quote is a sneaky and confusing quote - everytime I think I get it something new emerges, but it wanted to be there so I left it. For a good essay on understanding it read this

** The waiting room I reference here is in Dr Seuss’s ‘Oh the Places You’ll Go’ - it would serve us well to follow his caution "No, this is not for you!"

^ The indented quotes are are taken from Anthony’s writing in a comment to a recent post. Thank you Anthony, I hope you don’t mind my playing with your words.

If you made it this far and are scratching your head: Often my intention with these rants is to engage in inquiry/dialogue, to share explore imagine and discover. The answers are sometimes less clear but for I firmly believe that if more of us asked questions, and responded to them, then the clear answers are able to emerge. At some stage I hazard a guess things embedded here will become an article entitled something as exciting as ‘appropriate uses of technology’. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 11:47 pm and is filed under change, musings, quotes, science, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.