There’s this old Finnish sketch of Uuno Turhapuro in which he’s gone to check on his friend at the friend’s cottage. Uuno stands about 50 meters from the cottage of his friend Sörsselsön. It’s mid-night, but, for some reason, instead of knocking on the door, he decides to shout from afar.
- Uuno: “Were you still sleeping?”
- Sörsselsön: “What!?”
- Uuno: “I asked, were you still sleeping?”
- Sörsselsön: “Where!?”
- Uuno: “Slee-ping!”
- Sörsselsön: “I haven’t been to anywhere - I was sleeping!”
- Uuno: “Where?”
- Sörsselsön: “Slee-ping!”
- Uuno: “That’s what I just asked!”
- Sörsselsön: “Asked what!?”
- Uuno: “That, were you still sleeping!”
I have worked in many group settings – bands, student groups, volunteer house committees, teams of developers, a small start-up, cross-functional work groups, managerial work groups and, now again, in some more groups of students. I have worked in a couple of groups in which I have not known the people beforehand and we have never met in person – and I just recently finished a project with such a group. I have never felt as awkward in reading the room, obscured of intentions and confused about the trust spectrum that fits this group despite having a basic idea of how such issues could be mitigated.
One guy in our group reached out via our chosen channel – a whatsapp chat-group – by asking “managing groups and people is hard, isn’t it”. I think – I think(!) – he wanted to acknowledge that I had taken an unwarranted leader role without explicit nomination while also empathising with that by implying he knows what that feels like. Or… he was being a bit spicy buiding camradery with verbal horseplay as to say, “you think you’re the leader, hunh? Well it’s ok. Listen…” Maybe he was having an outright laugh, but delivering it subtly enough to deny any malice just in case I was going to take it in a very bad way and then could have gaslighted his way out of it. After some further conversation it seemed to be genuine empathy rather than anything manipulative. But how was I supposed to know as the chat poorly created any human connection – neither had the sprinkled emojis – the finger-salt of conversations for those keeping up with the times.
I thought that the person was quite into the project and was thinking beyond the course requirements into managing the group dynamics and improving the work flow. But later, when I posted a request-for-comments (RFC) as an initiative and a placeholder to shape and steer our design – Nothing… Crickets. Even that guy ghosted the channel giving the RFC a latent thumbs-up emoji about a week or two later. We did talk over these things at the beginning of the project, but it seemed all of a sudden that the motivations had turned upside-down. Now I was questioning what do they expect, do they have expectations, what do I expect from them? I don’t know, I don’t have context, I don’t see them.
But what if we had used cameras, seen each other’s faces and reactions – or lo-and-behold met in person! “You can do that!? Who can live at that speed?” Obviously we didn’t. Obviously that felt like waste of time and resources. Obviously “we knew better”. So we used chat and never saw each other. Not always, but sometimes, it felt like that sketch of Uuno Turhapuro.
What I know is that building trust and rapport can be challenging. Social interactions are nuanced, contextual, and situational. That one guy didn’t do anything wrong, but the group’s methods of communication left an aura of vagueness and somewhat corroded trust. Thus, the progress slugged on slower than expected.
I visited Ericsson and in their presentation they drilled on that meeting with people helps. They related it to one of those things that are based on experience instead of accurate quantifiability.
One of the benefits of meeting people is that you can connect with them – which in order builds trust. Fournier puts it concisely, although in the context of 1on1s with managers: “The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.” [1]
I was skeptic about routine 1on1s when I first encountered them. I still am, a bit, but I used to, too. I have since found out, they do help build rapport as they allow time and space to share thoughts that would otherwise not surface.
Beyond connecting, meeting f2f allows various options for efficient means of communication.
(…) people are not good at saying precisely what they mean in a way that others can exactly understand. We have yet to achieve Borg hive mind or Vulcan mind meld, so we’re constantly pushing complex ideas through the eye of the needle of language. And language is not something that most engineers have mastered in nuance and interpretation. [1]
Camille Fournier also explains in her book that in person you can pick up cues from body language and other reactions to help build up a better interpretation.
Thomas Allen came up with the Allen curve when researching research and development work flows. It depicts how engineers talk less to each other in correlation to the distance between them. It makes sense considering that proximity lowers the “cost” of interaction.
A teacher of mine, ex-Nokia and some other enterprises, mentioned a rule of thumb I have kept in mind since: usually working in person for a project speeds up things especially during the start and end of the project. I would add to that the several tipping points or milestones might also warrant some close contact work.
And prototypes! I wrote on prototypes before. Adam Savage wrote an excellent book Every tool’s a hammer, in which he tells a few compelling cases on putting physical things – cardboard mock-ups among other conversation pieces – in between people to bridge the gap of communication [2].
Trust breaks barriers; We map the environment to figure out what is expected of us, we read the room, we observe ways that carry over the message the best. Despite some base-level trust in our shared principles and practices – and common good and human kindness – we are still indoctrinated to building defenses and being reserved to a varying degree. Those hesitations accumulate into delays and blockers. Trust is a catalyst to help with the flow.
I agree with Jen, who Adam Savage quotes in his book [2]:
There’s a level of transcendence that you can get to when you’re working by youself on a project and everything’s sort of vibrating and you’re just in the zone. But, it’s a whole other level when you’re doing that with other people.
- C. Fournier, The manager’s path: a guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change. Beijing: O'Reilly, 2017.
- Savage, Adam, Every Tool’s a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It. Atria Books, 2020.