The average professional receives 183 emails per day, excluding spam.  That’s nearly 1000 per week or more than 20 an hour.  Every hour.  Every day. 

Nothing has had quite the impact on executives, professionals and staff in the way that email has.  It has opened lines of communications that didn’t exist before.  It has enabled a searchable knowledge base of documented decisions.  I have one colleague who’s kept every email sent or received since the early days of cc:Mail in 1997 -- he claims it’s his own personal knowledge management system where subject lines and body text create contextual tags for myriad attachments that he continues to reference.  It has enabled rapid, sound-bite responses to rapid, sound-bite requests (“Jerry, can you approve this?”; “Approved”; “Tx.”)

Yet, the very nature of email has progressed it to a point where it has become a net-detractor of personal productivity.  Every meeting, every call, every soccer game and wedding is rife with attendees scrolling through inboxes to see if the latest 20 emails -- delivered in the last hour -- contain some pearl or catastrophe requiring immediate attention.

It has become a challenge of prioritization.  The growth rates in complexities and the availability of information of our business and professional systems (I’m not talking about SAP, Oracle or MS Office -- I’m talking about the whole system) has officially outstripped any individual’s ability to process.  Hence, the constant scanning, the constant triage and the constant concern that something is out there that needs our attention.

And we’re just as likely to miss critical information as we are likely to get wrapped around the axle trying find it.  One CIO told me, “I don’t know if I have the full set of information that I need, the right set, the wrong or misleading set or even how incomplete that set might be.  In short, I really don’t know what I don’t know.  Heck, I don’t even know what I do know.” 

He’s not alone.  A 2006 study of 1,500 UK professionals concluded that email was responsible for “damaged and diminished productivity”.  That study came on the heels of a 2005 study of 1,100 Britons that found that workers distracted by email and text messages, “suffer a greater loss of IQ than a person smoking marijuana.”  <Please insert your favorite counter-culture quip here as it will likely be better than any I can come up with>

And while this endless flow of information threatens to overwhelm us, the answer is not to reduce the flow of information, but to change the operating models that we all use to manage it. 

Case in point, executives at a midwestern manufacturer to the automotive industry are undertaking an impressive change in the culture of organizational engagement, driven by their management of email.  They set four fundamental objectives:

1. 1. Move the “right” information up the management chain.
   

2. 2. Cultivate the “broader audience” vision and idea flow.
   

3. 3. Engage a “selected” network of experts for decisions.
   

4. 4. Reduce total noise in the system.
   

Armed with these goals, they have begun to rethink how information moves.  The pilot project, a rollout of new b2b enhancements, has put several constraints on participants:

1. 1.All email will be addressed only to who those are required to act upon it (and only for the scope of the pilot).
   

2. 2.Ccs and Bccs are strictly prohibited.
   

3. 3.No “reply alls” unless all really need to take action on the reply.
   

4. 4.Every email should be written for public consumption.
   

The team is using an off the shelf product (there are a number on the market -- MindTouch Deki, Collab.net and others) which is allowing them to publish all the project email to blogs or wikis and create RSS-Feeds to alert and notify subscribers when there is a conversation happening that may be of interest to them.

So far, the results have been promising.  The notion of self-subscribing to certain topical areas has been well-received.  Interested parties get an alert and a link and take a look to see what the impact of the conversation might be.  Participants report much better interactions, as a broader audience has potential access to various discussions but a much smaller subset of motivated actors actually gets engaged.

By most accounts, this pilot has made real progress in changing the dynamic of how collaboration amongst professionals takes place in a most-traditional of automative manufacturing firms.  The technology implementation was easy and straightforward.  The cultural change, process change and rules of engagement have proven the real challenge in achieving the kinds of outcomes they’ve begun to experience.

Now if only they could do something about all the other distractions in my life...

Rich Pople

Managing Director