Can You Hear Me Read online

  But we also decide before we think, consciously, and that’s a bit more problematic. We rely on our emotional memories and unconscious memory patterns to make decisions. Avoid straw-berries; they make you sick! Find another way home; this feels dangerous! She’s just not that into you!

  Why is our tendency to decide on an unconscious level a problem, and what does it have to do with email? When you talk to someone face-to-face, you automatically absorb the emotional state of the person in front of you. Especially if you know someone well, you know whether the person is serious when he or she says, “Your hair is on fire,” or is just kidding.

  That knowledge enables you to decide how to hear and understand the communication you’re receiving. It’s based on the emotion-tagged memories you have of your previous interaction with that person and a whole host of other interactions and memories.

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  Most of us simply don’t appreciate that our decisions, our negotiations with other human beings, and our daily analysis of the familiar and the strange are expedited by two well-oiled unconscious processes: recognizing patterns and attaching meaning to them through emotion. Imagine the young child putting the proverbial finger on the hot stove. Instantly, the child’s unconscious mind is seething with shock, anger, pain, bafflement. The little one is never going to do that again. Pattern recognition and emotional-memory tagging will ensure that he or she never even comes close.

  That’s how our minds work. Take away the emotion, and we can’t get purchase on that mountain of messaging. You send and receive messages through email, and suddenly you and your recipients lack those immediate cues and your emotional-

  memory decision systems aren’t triggered. You either find the messages simply boring or interpret them incorrectly. Either way, you’re wrong.

  Add to that a huge increase in the number of messages coming at you, because email is so easy to send, and suddenly, your whole decision-making process is registering overload. You can’t keep up, and you can’t decide the relative importance of all the stuff coming at you. Triage is hard to do, and most of the information is deeply uninteresting, anyway. When you do react strongly to something, your reaction may be just as likely a misreading as a correct interpretation.

  And so, in sum, email (and texting, and Slack, and all the other forms of text-based communication) is frictionless and asynchronous. But it’s also boring, overwhelming, and difficult to deal with. That’s the real state of the digital era.

  In contrast, face-to-face communications, the kind we evolved to handle very, very well, are fast, data-rich, and mostly unconscious.

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  18 Can You Hear Me?

  The digital era is a communications disaster I’ve focused on email so far to make things clear. But the same problem bedevils all the digital era’s attempts to replace inefficient face-to-face talk with more efficient ways to transcend time and place—and make it easy. The engineers and scientists who launched the digital era weren’t particularly aware of, and thus weren’t thinking about, the virtues of face-to-face communications. As a result, they didn’t optimize the various kinds of digital communications for what humans need: data-rich, emotionally complex, fast exchanges of human intent and meaning, largely through the unconscious mind.

  Like most of us, maybe more so because they were engineers, they were only aware of their conscious minds. By definition, the unconscious remains just that, hidden away from the ego-

  saturated, confident, logical-seeming conscious mind. The latter thinks it’s in charge, like the Western child who thinks that milk comes in a carton, meat in a plastic-wrapped package, and entertainment everywhere on devices you can pinch and swipe to your heart’s content. Accordingly, the engineers gave us email, telephones and voice mail, video calls, and various other combinations of these digital sounds and images—most of which had the emotional components unintentionally engineered out of them.

  Let’s take the phone as a further, and important, example.

  When engineers were figuring out ways to condense the signal that is the human voice, they noticed that those voices were made up of three bands of sound. There’s the pitch people speak at, which at the low end (mostly men) goes as low as 85 hertz and at the high end (mostly women) goes as high as 255 hertz.

  That’s a narrow range, when you consider that if you have good ears, you can hear from 20 to 20,000 hertz. The engineers Introduction.indd 18

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  Introduction 19

  figured they could get the important part of human speech if they just took the 85- to 255-hertz range and cut out the overtones and undertones of human voices; these tones range considerably above and below the range of audible pitch.

  What are the undertones and overtones? You don’t hear them consciously, but, unconsciously, you’re incredibly good at picking them up. Every human voice has a slightly different mix of pitch, undertones, and overtones. Added together, these features give each voice a distinctive quality—what musicians call the timbre of an instrument, only for the voice. You are so good at hearing the timbre of human voices that you can identify every human voice you know—typically hundreds—in an instant, without being aware that you’re doing any work and without consciously hearing the undertones and overtones. You just blur them all together in John’s voice or Jane’s voice.

  Your unconscious mind has amazing power

  The ability to distinguish hundreds of people by voice is an astonishing feat when you think about it. It’s the unconscious at work again, running mental circles around the conscious mind, teeing up voices, patterns, and memories at unbelievable speeds, all before the conscious mind even knows something is about to happen. Milliseconds before, for the most part, but still well before your consciousness catches on, and in time for most predicaments.

  Because the engineers working on telephones cut out most of those undertones and overtones, voices don’t sound quite as distinctive on the phone but are still distinctive enough to be told apart, usually, by the unconscious. So far, so bad.

  But here’s where it gets really interesting. It turns out that the emotions in human voices are carried by the undertones, so that Introduction.indd 19

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  20 Can You Hear Me?

  when you cut out some of that spectrum of sound, you take the emotion out of voices. It’s why audioconferences are so boring.

  And when you realize that you base some decisions on your emotions, you begin to see that audioconferences, internet calls, most computerized phone systems, and most computer video systems based on the same bandwidth compression are all rendered both uninteresting and difficult to think about usefully.

  Sure, you register boredom, but is that the best basis from which to make your decisions?

  What’s more, we pick leaders according to the authority in their undertones. When US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain debated, McCain was generally considered to have won the first two debates. And when researchers analyzed the men’s vocal patterns, lo and behold, they found that Obama had matched his undertones to McCain’s—thus showing that Obama, at least, was deferring to McCain. The voters thought so too, and McCain was ahead in the polls.26

  In the third debate, roughly one week after the second, Obama suddenly took command. McCain matched his own undertone vocal patterns to Obama’s, and Obama was widely considered to have won this debate. He took the lead in the polls and won the presidency.

  We pick our leaders in a surprising way

  Leadership is determined by the vocal patterns of our undertones, most of which are usually removed from digital audio communications. In other words, you can’t lead a team effectively over the phone or any other similar digital means. And it’s harder to pay attention, make decisions, analyze meaning, recognize patterns, and have those deep aha moments—a
ll the mental work everyone counts on in the information age. And Introduction.indd 20

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  yet the chance are good, if you’re reading this book, that this is exactly what you’re trying to do.

  What about video; does adding a visual element help? And the answer is yes, of course, video helps somewhat. But it brings its own challenges. Why do most people find video such hard work? Why do people tend to shout during videoconferences even when others tell the shouters they can hear just fine?

  Your unconscious mind manages yet another incredible feat while you’re talking face-to-face with someone else. We tend to move closer to people, ideas, and things we like and away from those we don’t like. It’s a body-language signal that most people are not very good at disguising. We rear back our heads, for example, when we are hit with an offensive smell, person, or idea.

  Now, your unconscious not only notices visually that the people around you are moving back and forth as a gauge of their moods, but it also notices the small changes in the air caused by those motions. When you’re watching someone on a videoconference, your unconscious mind is looking for those breezy clues, but when it receives no such clues, it decides that the other person is further away than he or she actually is.

  We cannot easily measure the

  distance between us online

  Hence the shouting. And why people feel that video calls are hard work. Video calls are to face-to-face communications as tin-can telephones are to real phones. (And remember that phones are hard work, too.)

  Much of the digital world is effectively two-dimensional, when our minds crave three-dimensional. The audio stream is reduced. The emotions are blocked or deracinated. Video is in Introduction.indd 21

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  22 Can You Hear Me?

  fact two-dimensional and lacks essential sensory input. Email and text lack tonal and audible clues to intent. In system after system, the bandwidth is reduced in imperceptible ways that relate to emotion and the core human-thinking processes.

  And the flatness of digital is also partly why we find digital communications such hard work. They feel as if they should be easy. And being mostly frictionless, they are easier in some ways.

  But in unconscious ways that we can’t easily appreciate, they are sorely lacking, and we find it hard to compensate as a result.

  We humans crave connection with other humans In the end, we humans are a social, empathetic species, and we crave the basic connection that comes from urgent, authentic, face-to-face communications. We’re wired to live in that world.

  When humans communicate face-to-face, they exchange huge amounts of information about each other, only some of which they’re aware of. As soon as this human communication is reduced to the virtual world, it becomes impoverished. That’s the imbalance we need to redress.

  Next, we’ll turn to the first of the big five problems with virtual communication.

  How to read this book

  The first five chapters of this book take on the five big problems with virtual communications—the lack of feedback, empathy, control, emotion, and connection—how to think about them and what to do about them. The next four chapters take on specific issues and fixes for the various digital channels: email, email alternatives, text messages, conference calls, webinars, and Skype/hangout/chat sessions. There is a final chapter on sales, Introduction.indd 22

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  since of all the important areas of human commerce, the sales side particularly depends on human connection and is perhaps most upended by the changes brought about by the virtual world. Finally, I conclude with a look at the future.

  CHAPTER SUMMARY

  • We humans evolved as face-to-face communicators.

  • Most of our communication is unconscious and based on emotion.

  • Emotion helps us determine the importance of a communication.

  • Virtual communications remove most of the unconscious emotion from communication.

  • With its lack of emotional content, most virtual communication is overwhelming, boring, and forgettable.

  • Most forms of virtual communication don’t allow the unconscious mind to do its communication work.

  • We seldom make good decisions virtually.

  • Research shows that when we’re online, we don’t work together as well as we do when we’re face-to-face. We don’t trust each other as much and are angrier.

  • To succeed in the virtual world, we have to consciously reinsert the emotions that are missing.

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  PART oNE

  THE FIVE BASIC

  PROBLEMS

  WITH VIRTUAL

  CoMMUNICATIoNS

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  1.

  THE LACK oF FEEDBACK

  WHERE’S THE EMOTIoNAL CLARITY?

  You look at your opposite number on the negotiation team. He’s sitting across the big wooden conference room table from you, and you’re waiting for him to say something. Over the past four weeks, as the complicated negotiations have gone on, you’ve gotten to know him well. You know his tells, his nearly invisible body-language signs about what he’s really thinking underneath that impassive exterior.

  Finally, he says it: “I think we should go ahead.” But something is nagging at you. You know his body language well enough now to pick up on subtle discomfort. You know that he’s not entirely satisfied with the deal. So instead of saying, “Great, welcome aboard,” you pause.

  “Is there anything we haven’t talked about that is making you uncomfortable?” You know there is; you want to give him a chance to voice his reservations.

  And so he does. Later on, when you’ve ironed out the problems that were indeed still there, just beneath the surface, he confesses that he had been about to put the deal on hold and let it quietly die. He had grown to like you in the month you had been negotiating together, and he was uncomfortable with Chapter_01.indd 27

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  28 The Five Basic Problems with Virtual Communications sharing what seemed like minor problems. But added together, they had become one big deal killer. If you hadn’t given him the opening, he would have been ready to leave the table. Your reading of his body language saved the day.

  What is that sensory feedback, and why is it so important to us humans?

  There are two kinds of feedback: implicit and explicit. The implicit kind is illustrated by the example just above. It’s the sensory feedback that our unconscious minds give us 24-7, the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes of our world of experience. In addition to the five senses that we’re all keenly aware of, neuroscientists debate a number of others, such as thermocep-tion, proprioception, nociception, equilibrioception, mechanore-ception, chemoreceptors of various kinds, hunger and thirst, and others we’re just learning about.1

  Explicit feedback is the running commentary that drives individuals, teams, and organizations to get things done from day to day. In the real world, the two kinds of feedback mix in a way that usually feels effortless. Our words are conveyed to other people—and theirs to us—with a welter of largely unconscious sensory data that automatically goes with the words. We smile, frown, draw back, lean in, laugh, and cry. Our senses are at work all the time, creating both context and emotional meaning for our daily lives.

  Put us in the virtual world, and almost all these senses are deprived. Now, when the multichannel sensory system that is the brain is deprived of one or more of those senses, the neuroscientists tell us, it hates the vacuum. So, the brain fills the empty channels with assumptions, memories, and fake data. The result is, not surprisingly, all the misunderstandings we’re so familiar with in the v
irtual world. The email that conveys a sarcastic tone the sender didn’t intend. The phone conference that left every-Chapter_01.indd 28

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  The Lack of Feedback 29

  one believing that the project was dead in the water. The videoconference that made you feel less comfortable about joining the team. Trolling. And so on.

  Put us in the virtual world, in short, and we’re short-changed on the implicit feedback that is so important for getting us through our days. Remember, in evolutionary terms, we humans are fragile creatures and so have developed extraordinary prediction skills and pattern-recognition abilities. We put those two skills together to keep ourselves alive. Take away the data that allows us to predict and to recognize, and we feel lost, unsafe, and confused. That’s the virtual world in a nutshell.

  But the issues go further. Explicit feedback relies on implicit feedback much more than most people realize. So, when we’re asked what we thought of that presentation, that meeting, or that town hall session, we can offer a mix of explicit and implicit feedback. The mix allows us to soften the harsh messages and toughen the soft ones. We may only say, “It was fine,” but our body language—the implicit feedback—conveys that we really thought the session was a disaster. Or the reverse. We can deliver some tough words but soften their impact with a touch or a smile that says, “It really wasn’t that bad.” And there are, of course, a whole host of shades of meaning possible in between.

  The manager who is used to offering minimal explicit feedback because she conveys a strong connection to her team nonverbally may find herself struggling in the virtual world, where she suddenly has to articulate everything that she previously could leave unsaid. If she fails to do so, then she risks leaving her team confused about her intentions and their performance.

  Take out the implicit feedback on which the explicit messages depend, and you get confusion and alienation. Let’s further explore the difficulties inherent in feedback in the virtual world. We’ve identified the basic problem: explicit feedback Chapter_01.indd 29