Ticking away…
Being, Culture, Design, Facilitation, Featured, Invitation, Learning, Organization
A detail from the monastary at Mont St Michel in Normandy showing a person overwhelmed with ripening fruit. He’s probably rushing off to his next zoom meeting.
So much has changed since the pandemic began, and it is hard to notice what is happening now. I feel like my ability to perceive the major changes that have happened to us since March 2020 is diminished by the fact that there is very little art that has been made about our experience and very few public conversation about the bigger changes that have affected organizational and community life in places like North America and Europe. All I seem able to grasp are fragments of patterns. Because I work with all kinds of clients in all sorts of different sectors and locations and situations, I do find myself getting struck with similar patterns that seem to transcend these differences, and it makes me wonder a bit about what is creating these patterns.
One of those repeated patterns is “we don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” The effect of this is that convening people together is becoming increasingly difficult. I used to do lots of three-day planning sessions or organizational retreats where folks would come together and relax in each other’s company and open up a space for dreaming and visioning and building relationships. It was not uncommon for three or four-day courses to take place. Between 2011 and 2019, When we ran the nine-month Leadership 2020 program for the BC Federation of Community Social Services, we began and ended with five-day residential retreats on Bowen Island. We had two-hour webinars every fortnight. While some organizations found it hard to give up that amount of time (10 days away from the office on professional development training in a year!), we nevertheless put nearly 400 people through that program. Nowadays, when we do similar programs, the most we can get are three-day in-person retreats, and usually only one throughout the time together.
This is costing us big time. I am working with organizations where folks are meeting constantly but only spending time together a couple of times a year. The pandemic threw us into an emergency stop-gap approach to remote work that served the purpose of the times: to keep things going while we remained isolated. However, much of what happened throughout 2020 and 2021 was just stabilizing and concretizing these emergency measures. There wasn’t much thoughtfulness to how to make remote work and schooling work well. As a result, I think that many organizations made an over-compensation to being back together in person, and we are seeing some of that backlash now. Some people are six and seven years into their working careers who have only ever really known remote work. Their engagement patterns are radically different from those of us who came up in the days of long off-sites, of days spent in offices and work sites developing relationships and figuring things out together. And that isn’t even to mention schooling. Before the pandemic, there were some excellent programs in BC to support distance education for elementary and high school students, thoughtfully prepared and designed. When the pandemic began, teachers and professors were thrown into a completely new pedagogical context, and very, very few had any practiced ability to work in these contexts.
Of course, what makes this even worse is that we did a terrible job of managing the pandemic. Had we been able to return to office in the summer of 2020, with the virus squashed by a good public health response, it would have been an interesting time. We would have been equipped with experiences of different ways of being, what it felt like to work from home or support communities with a universal basic income. We would have run an experiment without entrenching structural constraints that made it hard to un-run the experiment. Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, temporary structural changes took hold. People moved away from their homes near their offices into cheaper and more distant communities. Public transportation funding shifted as ridership disappeared, and office leases were let go as companies and organizations realized that they could save on overhead and facilities costs. It is now far too late to be thoughtful about integrating the lessons of a global three or four month experiement into an existing society.
It feels to me that the urgency hasn’t gone away. Every day is a slew of online meetings, stacked back to back and on top of each other without any rest between sessions. Work hours are extended beyond a reasonable day, and those of us who are neuro-divergent are tipped into a world of near-constant distraction and dysregulation from the various and persistent demands on our time and attention. My first wide open day on my calendar for which I have no work committments at all is November 27, two months away. Since I turned 55 I have started taking Fridays off which means that I occasionally book full day sessions for that day. And I can move calls around and make time and space when I need to, but in general, I think my calendar probably reflects yours.
Our time and attention has been divided into hour long units, largely dictated by the default setting on our videoconferencing software. A half hour meeting feels like a blessing, as does a three hour session when we can take breaks and slow down.
My relationship to time is changing. Our relationship is changing.
I’m lamenting the loss of deep long engagement. Pre-pandemic we used to even have great online meetings that were rich and deep. People saw them as special and treated them like face to face meetings, giving the work it’s full attention. Cameras were always on.
Nowadays I bet there are heardly any meetings where everyone is focused on the task at hand. There are browser tabs open, phones to play with, tasks to accomplish while the meeting is going on. In some cases when we are doing workshops in organizations, and people have simply accepted the calendar invitation without giving any thought to how participatory it is, folks will just ghost the whole meeting. We have presented to zoom rooms full of black boxes with names in them, every camera off, every mic muted. One meeting I was involved – with elected officials no less, on the subject of engagement – I simply cut it short. No one was paying attention, no one was participating. There was nothing to do. Clearly the work wasn’t important enough, and so I just said something like “Instead of pulling teeth, I’m just going to suggest we finish this session.” A couple of people took a moment to say goodbye, and most just blinked off. I billed them my full rate.
I reallize that my life history as a facilitator has left me ill equipped for these kinds of meetings where attention is splintered into shards and no one seems to have the time to prepare or follow up becasue the next task is coming right up. Instead what I end up doing is focusing deeply on the invitation to the gathering so that everyone who comes has placed the time we have together at the top of their list. Sometimes this means shortening the meeting from two days to one day, or a half day to an hour and a half. I always warn clients that we can’t do the same quality work in half the time, so we make do. If we need a large amount of time together, we will plan something for a few months out so folks can clear their schedules. It’s now all about invitation and preparation, even more so than it ever was.
So…how are you with time and attention? What adjustments are you making to deliver quality in the meetings in which you are participating?
PS. If you want to read a good literature review on this stuff, check out “Remote work burnout, professional job stress, and employee emotional exhaustion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” i need not remind you that we are still in the pandemic; we are just pretending we aren’t.
This resonates a lot. Interestingly, in the organizations I’ve worked with since the pandemic, the default meeting duration is 30 mins (make that 25 since people are always late, thanks to back to back meetings) rather than 1 hour, and it doesn’t feel like a blessing to me!
It takes a while to let the content of the previous meeting fade away (thank you, Zeigarnik effect), which means we’re really just getting started when it’s time to move to the next meeting. In this context, there is very little space for divergence and emergence – it’s all about getting to action.
People think they’re saving time, but the quality of what comes out of their reflections is greatly diminished. We’re trying to duct tape our way out and then we wonder why things keep breaking.
Great observations Simon!
My sense is that the discontinuity of the pandemic has revealed, more than it has caused, the cracks in our social systems. Even before the pandemic I had a strong sense that most people’s capacity to manage their time and attention effectively, to avoid distractions, to allow time for and practice the art of thoughtful imagining, to converse effectively and ‘intentionally’, and to think critically and creatively, were already woefully inadequate, and getting worse, for a whole series of complex reasons.
This is what happens in civilizations when everything is falling apart — the basic skills and capacities needed to deal with the complex matters at hand deteriorate to the point where most of our behaviours at every level of society become simply reactive, rather than considered (social media being where that mindless, frenzied reactivity is most obviously on display), and hence everything we do becomes increasingly dysfunctional.
I don’t think the end of the pandemic, if it ever comes, is going to change that.
I agree with you David. I think we have been changed and I’m not sure we have the self awareness collectively and individually to really know how.
I agree chris, and I find myself withdrawing from the hectic schedule of ever shortened meets, the world needs conversation, and relationships are thinning under the pressure. Burnouts – an unintentional consequence – might lead to a re-evaluation of the value of conversation and friends. I will be an attractor for conversation I think.
Thank you for these reflections. How we relate with time has been a longtime interest of mine, something i may delve into more someday. I resonate with your sense of acceleration and busyness out in the wider world, and i think it was well underway before pandemic. Unfortunately the “great pause” was short-lived (an opportunity squandered) and did not result in a shift to those patterns, so the trajectory continues.
My own personal choice to address the remote work aspects of what you describe here is simply to refuse. When groups approach me seeking remote support, i refer them to other practitioners i trust who are willing to do this sort of thing. I’ll do short, informal consultations via Zoom; for any real facilitation or training, it’s in-person or nothing. I realized during pandemic that remote meetings required at least as much prep work while providing a tiny fraction (10-50%?) of the satisfaction. I do this type of work because it nourishes my soul, and it’s my gift to the world–in order to sustain it i have to feel fed by it. There must be joy!
In addition, i place strong value on local connections, so i rarely engage in any kind of online activity outside of work either. Not to mention i turn off the computer every weekend, and i don’t use my cellphone (i finally got one for the first time in 2020) for internet. Boundaries! As a result, i sometimes go months without turning on Zoom; and i haven’t missed it. I am content with these filters on my life at this time.
Groups commonly have unrealistic expectations. They want to accomplish 3 major agenda items in a session that’s only long enough for 1 or 2. It’s part of my job to educate them on what’s realistic and can be accomplished well within a time frame, and that’s usually part of an early conversation with any new client. I aim to manage expectations so that i can deliver on whatever i promise. That way i maintain the high quality of work that i need to be in integrity with myself and serve others.
Beautiful. Thank you Kavana.