One of those happy coincidences this week, where two pieces of information come together at the same time. Like a lot of companies in our field of work, we are doing quite a bit of work around resilience, mindfulness and emotional intelligence. If you work in any organisation today, it is more than likely that you are being asked to do more with less, pick up the slack or even 'man up'! People are feeling under a great deal of pressure at the moment, hence the interest in the previously mentioned topics. (Although it still remains to be seen whether this interest is driven by a concern for the welfare employees or a way of squeezing a bit more juice from the lemon! We were given a phrase yesterday by Robert Joyce, (see previous blog post) - he talked about 'McMindfulness', the pursuit of peace and harmony, but do it QUICKLY!)
The two sources of information were a podcast, BBC World Service, The Forum: A world of ideas (13/1/15) and an article in The Observer (18/1/15).
The podcast was actually about interruptions. Although sometimes, we welcome an interruption (and can signal to the other person that it is their turn to speak, by, for example, repeating ourselves) and sometimes an interruption can act as a distraction from a less enjoyable task, you won't be surprised to hear that most of the time, we find interruptions rude and consequently make some judgements about the person doing the interrupting. However, it turns out that there are cultural, psychological and gender differences in the way we talk, pause and listen. We also have different tolerances for being interrupted. (Are you happy working in an open-plan office?)
One of the interesting contributions to the debate was from Claudia Roda, Professor of Computer Science and Global Communication at the American University in Paris. Her argument is that modern technology, email, social media etc violates the normal rules of conversation and that as a society, we are being too interrupted by technology. (You may have experienced this if you have ever left your Twitter/email/Facebook link open as you work. For how long can you ignore an incoming message?). Roda argues for the development of 'polite machines'. These are machines that have to 'learn' the rules of interaction (based on the individual user) and adapt to their preferences.
The Observer article, 'Why the modern world is bad for your brain' was by the eminent neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin (18/1/15 and online,
was full of interesting facts about using technology.
What both the podcast and the article had in common is evidence that multitasking is not that effective. We may think that we are being efficient, but actually our effectiveness is being diminished. IQ is reduced and our ability to concentrate is affected by a greater amount than if we had been smoking marijuana! There are effects on health too and we suffer from 'cognitive overload' due to the increased number of decisions that we have to take.
Is the development of more/better technology the answer or do we need to re-think how we want our employees to work?
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