Last month Ton Zijlstra spent an evening with us at the office, after a day at Big Data LDN. We’ve known each other since 2003, when we were both working on knowledge management. We are, in various ways, still having that conversation.
Ton runs The Green Land, a consultancy in the Netherlands with about thirteen people and no hierarchy. We talked about what it takes to keep everyone informed when there isn’t a manager passing information up and down. Much of it has to happen person to person, which can mean having the same conversation several times.
We’re trying to run Activate in a similar way. We’re smaller, but we already recognise the problem.
It’s tempting to solve this by writing more things down. A daily update, a weekly summary, another channel everyone should keep an eye on. AI makes this very easy. Every meeting can become a summary, and every collection of summaries can become another summary. Someone still has to read them all.
Someone still has to read them all.
For a few weeks before Ton’s visit, I’d been running a small automation for myself. Every two hours it read our Slack messages, the updates and tasks in our platform, and our meeting transcripts. Then it told me what was waiting on me.
I started answering colleagues’ questions before they’d asked them. Useful, although occasionally a little unnerving for the colleague.
After Ton’s visit, we began adapting it for everyone. Since Friday, each person at Activate gets a short digest a few times a day, when there’s something they need to know or do: a question waiting for an answer, something to review, a decision that affects their work.
The system keeps a profile of what each person is working on and updates it during the week. It uses that to decide what to send them. Urgent things arrive straight away; the rest can wait for the next digest.
On the first afternoon, five people received one. I didn’t. There was nothing new that needed my attention.
I was surprisingly pleased to receive nothing.
It also picked up a task assignment that had been recorded as sent but hadn’t reached the person it was meant for. The assignment appeared in their digest. A small example, but a useful reminder that recording a message as sent and getting it to someone are two separate things.
I was surprisingly pleased to receive nothing.
In his post about the visit, Ton wrote: “People aren’t there to support the process, the process is to support the professional.”
I think about that when I look at how much we ask people to read just to work out whether any of it concerns them. We’ve made it very easy to produce another report. I’m interested in whether we can take away some of the work of keeping up.
I don’t know yet whether this will mean fewer repeated conversations, or whether we’ll just move them somewhere else. It’s been a few days. The profiles can be wrong, some sources aren’t covered, and there’s plenty left to build.
For now, receiving nothing when there’s nothing for me feels like a useful start.