A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

Email Communication Is Frustratingly Ineffective
The wild olive baboons of the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, like
most types of baboons, live in highly social troops that remain
remarkably stable even as they travel long distances each day in
search of forage. For the scientists who study these animals, a key
question is figuring out how they reach a consensus on which
direction to move. Answering this question is complicated because
these troops can grow as large as one hundred individuals, and
deducing how they make their movement decisions would require

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the simultaneous observation of most of them—a challenge described
by a well-known researcher in this field as one of “daunting
dimensions.”
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Not long ago, however, an international group of biologists,
anthropologists, and zoologists, led by Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin of
Princeton University, set out to overcome these obstacles.
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Their
secret weapon: high-resolution, custom-designed GPS collars that
record precise locations at a rate of one per second. The team was
able to get the collars on close to 85 percent of the animals in the
population, yielding a detailed look at the exact movements of the
troop throughout the day. Armed with advanced data-mining
algorithms and statistical analysis, the researchers were able to
extract the process by which these baboons seem to make their
decisions about which direction to move—a process, it turns out,
that’s fundamentally spatial.
When preparing to migrate, the baboons in the troop carefully
watch one another’s movements, looking in particular for initiators
who begin to head away from the group in some fixed direction. How
they respond to these initiators depends a lot on how they’re
arranged in space. If the angle between two initiators is more than
ninety degrees, meaning they are leaving the group in quite different
directions, then the remaining baboons will commit their loyalty to
one, reinforcing that proposal. On the other hand, if two initiators
head off in similar directions, the remaining baboons will tend to
compromise by committing to a direction that’s somewhere in
between. If too many initiators are active at the same time, the
remaining baboons are more likely to stay where they are, slowing
down the decision-making process until the options converge. Once a
given initiator attracts enough followers, the whole troop will follow.
To apply these ideas to the problems of email, let’s shift our
attention from wild olive baboons to their close primate cousins: us.
Instead of studying how baboons decide which direction to forage in
the forests of Kenya, consider instead a scenario in which a team of
knowledge workers is evaluating business plans. In shifting from the
forest to the office, we’ve also shifted the decision-making process
from one embodied in the physical world to one that’s likely purely
writing-based, as most such decisions unfold through electronic
messaging in the era of the hyperactive hive mind.

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Before we applaud our modern approach as superior, however, it
should give us some pause to remember that written language is at
most only five thousand years old,
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which is minuscule with respect
to evolutionary timescales. The ancient collaboration processes
etched into our neural circuits over millions of years of evolution,
and hinted at by the behaviors of our primate cousins, must still be
present, and presumably expecting something quite different from
our interactions than simply exchanging written words over
computer screens. This mismatch between how we’re wired to
communicate and how we’re coerced into communicating by modern
technology creates a deeply human sense of frustration.
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Around the same time that researchers were fitting GPS collars to
baboons, an MIT professor named Alex Pentland was fitting an even
more sophisticated package of sensors to a group of business
executives gathered around a conference table on MIT’s campus.
These sensors, called sociometers, are roughly the size of a deck of
cards and are worn around the neck. They include an accelerometer
to track the subject’s movement, a microphone to record their
speech, a wireless Bluetooth chip to determine who is nearby, and
finally, an infrared sensor to detect whether or not the subject is
looking another subject in the face while interacting.
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The executives would each present a business plan to the group.
Their goal was to then work together to agree on which plan was
best. A standard technique to study such collaboration is to
transcribe all the words that are spoken, but the reason why
Pentland went through the trouble of outfitting the subjects with
advanced sensors is that he had become convinced that this