What We Lost

Who is this?

Princess Leia, right? End of Rogue One. Wrong, this is not Princess Leia. This is.

A photograph of Carrie Fisher in her role of Princess Leia. Chances are, your brain can tell the difference between the two photos. The first is a computer generated image (“CGI”) and the second is a straight-up photograph.

How does our brain know its CGI? It doesn’t. Your brain knows that something is strangely off about this image. The eyes are a little too big. They lack life. The smile isn’t a Carrie Fisher smile. My brain is fully aware this image is intended to look like Carrie Fisher. Still, my brain also instinctively raises a red flag alerting me, “Something is wrong” because my brain is shockingly good at receiving and parsing visual information when it comes to the human face. It is essential that I can gather and process signal from the humans around me. Quickly and efficiently.

The dissonance you sense staring at this image is a part of a rich, more significant problem we humans are collectively experiencing during this unending Pandemic.

This is Not a Meeting

Let’s start with disclaimers:

• I’m pro humans working together. Always have been.
• Distributed work has been and will continue to be required in these times of the Pandemic.
• There is no doubt in my mind that distributed work works. I believed this before the Pandemic, and I believe it more now.

With that said, I can confirm that this is not a meeting.

I suspect this is a staged Zoom call for marketing purposes. How do I know this? Everyone is smiling.

Here’s another one. Again, randomly pulled off the Internet, but more slightly realistic.

That’s more familiar. Humans staring in random directions. Many clearly not listening. Camera off for one participant. Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call?

Zero.

Yeah, I won’t let this point go. There are no humans on this call. Yes, there are 14 participants with their video on, one with their video off, and someone dialing in. Yes, you can gather some interesting signal from a single frame of this meeting, but this is a crappy 2D representation of the team; both essential signal and purpose are missing from this situation.

Five or Seven Senses

You have five base senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Bonus fact: you actually have seven. The mysterious additional two are:

• Vestibular: the movement and balanced sense, which gives us information about where our head and body are in space. Helps us stay upright when we sit, stand, and walk.
• Proprioception: the body awareness sense, which tells us where our body parts are relative to each other. It also gives us information about how much force to use, allowing us to crack an egg while not crushing the egg in our hands.

Every single of these senses, yeah, even vestibular and proprioception, are limited in a video conference call. You do not see the entire person; you see them from the chest up. Your hearing is limited and frustratingly altered by the milliseconds of lag and subsequent awkward interruptions to the conversation when someone attempts to insert a vital fact only stomped by the current speaker who hasn’t heard the interruption yet. You probably don’t think smell, like taste, is essential, but that is because you’ve been sitting all by your lonesome in your home office for the two+ years (like me) and have forgotten that smell, while not critical, contributes to the information tapestry of an in-person. And touch, the feel of the table in front of you. The slight echo you feel in the wood when someone sets their coffee cup on the table.

It’s an endless list of little things that you think you’ve forgotten, but you haven’t. You are quite literally built to sense an infinite amount of subtle bits of signal from your fellow humans. We were not built to live alone in caves; we were built to live together in them.

And this is not Princess Leia:

Endless Bits of Friction

Relative to the Pandemic, the single biggest work question I’ve been asking myself for two years is: what did we lose? What is the measurable and objective loss for teams not working in close proximity? I’ve been looking for cracks. I’ve been looking for leading indicators of future doom. The Great Resignation seems like a proper crack, right? But are people quitting their jobs because they can’t work together or because their current job sucks and all this terror in the air has given them a new appreciation of what really matters?

What I see are endless bits of friction:

No, I can’t hear you. You’re muted.

No, I can’t see what you’re sharing.

No, I have no idea that you’re in a bad mood. You’re just the same old postage stamp two-dimensional muted headshot that you were in the last three meetings.

No, I have no idea that everyone hates the idea you just proposed because my ability to read the room has been mostly erased. I can’t tell the difference between “We hate this idea” silence and “We’re mostly just quiet because it’s a chore to speak during a video conference” silence.

Yes, I’m inserting your name into the conversation because I see you aren’t paying attention, and I know the conversation is heading in your direction.

Yes, I appreciate that folks are using visual cues like nods and thumbs up to indicate their agreement, but does everyone remember that we were capable of such understanding with none of the awkwardness?

Yes, I spend an excessive amount of time looking at myself. It’s ridiculous.

A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience. A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career.

And This is Not Princess Leia

If I were to ask right after you viewed Rogue One whether that was Princess Leia or not, you’d say, “CGI, right?” I respond, “Yes, but what was wrong with the image? How could you tell it wasn’t Princess Leia?”

To which you’d shrug, “I don’t know. Her eyes were a little creepy?”

Suppose you’re not a professional computer graphics artist. In that case, you don’t know what’s precisely wrong with this image, but understanding the specifics is not a requirement for your brain to alert you that something funky is going on. Your brain has been trained and rewarded for successfully deriving information from the simplest facial expressions. You have learned much from listening, from understanding each word they speak, and for listening to the pause between the words because there is information there, as well. And you were in that meeting. We all were, and we’ll never forget it because, at one point, she stood, slammed her fist on the desk, and yelled, “I can’t believe we’ve let this happen!” I couldn’t believe it, either.

Do you want to know why you’re fatigued at the end of a long day of video conferences? It’s because your brain has been straining to collect essential information that is no longer there.

I look forward to seeing you again. Together we are more.