We have never had more technology, systems, processes, information or means to communicate at our disposal, yet for all the capability we continue to build, businesses seem to be running into very modern-day, very ‘human’ problems. These days, we can automate tasks that used to take us hours, distribute content to thousands of customers at once, work from home or with someone on the other side of the world, analyse enormous amounts of data and now ask our AI (virtual assistants) to write, research, summarise, schedule and answer for us. It’s exciting, a little mind-blowing and in many respects, represents an extraordinary time to be in business. And with all these promised gains in time, efficiency and capability, you could be forgiven for thinking that growth would become easier with greater capacity.
However, if you spend enough time talking to business owners about what is actually getting in the way of performance and, more specifically, growth, they start to paint a very interesting picture. For all the technological capability we’ve built around our people, many businesses are struggling to get their teams to genuinely ‘switch on’ and engage, while others are finding it increasingly difficult to get customers or suppliers to respond, follow up or make decisions. It gives me the impression that the everyday challenge of getting another human being to engage, understand, decide or act is becoming much harder.
I’ve heard different versions of this repeatedly through Connect + Collide, my slightly crazy experiment to reconnect with people from across my professional network, and it’s actually provided me with a lot of insights that I wasn’t expecting. The conversations have progressively drawn me towards the very human side of modern business and the constraints that technology, for all its brilliance, can’t necessarily solve for us.
The way we communicate provides us with a fascinating insight because modern technology has made us exceptionally good at sending things and getting things off our plate. Our phones alone have become extraordinary communication tools and, alongside email, social media, AI and marketing platforms, we can reach thousands of people before we’ve had our morning coffee. In many ways it’s fantastic, but getting something off our plate often means putting it onto somebody else’s, and when everyone has the same ability to do so, the cumulative effect on the person receiving seems to simply compound the problem.
One of my Connect + Collide coffee guests made a fascinating observation that has really stuck with me. He suggested that…
“we’re reaching a point where even communication from somebody we trust, such as a call or text from a friend or family member, can cognitively feel like SPAM if it arrives at a time when we simply don’t have the capacity to receive it.”
There’s something uncomfortable but instantly recognisable about this observation because all of us at one time or another have looked at our phone, seen the name of somebody we genuinely like and thought, I just can’t deal with that right now. We have to believe that the same thing is happening in the workplace as we move between our inbox, phone, meetings and whatever work we’re actually trying to complete. Individually, these interruptions might be tiny, but each requires us to make a judgement call about what deserves our attention (now), what can wait and what can be placed onto that mysterious pile of things we fully intend to come back to later.
Multiply those tiny interruptions across an entire week and the cumulative effect becomes significant. Research into workplace distraction varies in exact numbers, but the broader point is difficult to ignore: we are continuously receiving small pieces of information and making micro-decisions about what deserves access to our limited cognitive capacity. Some studies have suggested that workers are being distracted by another activity roughly every 3 minutes. And as humans, we’ve become remarkably well-conditioned to deal with this abundance by filtering almost everything that comes our way. We scan, scroll, swipe and summarise at lightning speed and are becoming increasingly selective about what we properly absorb and give our attention.
Do I read this? Is it important? Who sent it? Do I know them? Should I respond? Can it wait? Is this relevant? Do I delete it? Do I need to remember it? Should I come back to it later? we decide within seconds!
Anyone who has worked in sales long enough has heard a customer say, “Sorry, I’ve been meaning to get back to you,” and I’m beginning to wonder whether we should believe people more often when they say it. The customer might actually be interested, the proposition might be very relevant and the timing might even be bloody good, but the message might just have landed into an environment where dozens of other things are competing for the same finite amount of attention.
The Human Constraint
It’s definitely got me thinking more about cognitive capacity, because before we properly engage with something, there appears to be a remarkably quick judgement about whether we’re prepared to let it into our thinking at that particular moment. There’s no doubt that familiarity, relevance, timing and trust all play their part, but so does…do I actually have the mental space for this right now?
AI makes this whole subject even more intriguing. I’m incredibly optimistic about its potential and find many of the things it can already do genuinely exciting, but there is a wonderful irony in using AI to help solve an overload problem while simultaneously giving ourselves the most powerful information-production capability we’ve ever had. The effort required to produce a perfectly competent email, report, presentation, marketing sequence or article is falling dramatically, which is likely to mean that we are going to produce considerably more of all of them, while the amount of attention available to consume the output remains stubbornly human.
That imbalance could become important. If information becomes abundant and the ability to produce it becomes commonplace, simply creating more of it may eventually offer very little advantage. The things that could become valuable just might be the distinctly human qualities surrounding the information: judgement about what matters, relevance to the person receiving it, trust in where it came from and a perspective that gives someone a reason to stop and think. Something that makes it easy for the customer to engage and act!
This is where my interest in Human Constraints is coming from. Cognitive capacity is clearly part of it, but I’m equally interested in the personal and professional limitations around our time, attention, decision-making, ability to build trust, willingness to change, develop real relationships and capacity to adapt. None of these characteristics suddenly appeared because somebody invented artificial intelligence or Microsoft Teams; they have always been part of being human.
These also aren’t ‘soft’ issues sitting quietly around the edges of commercial performance. A customer who doesn’t have the capacity to properly consider a proposal may not buy, regardless of how good the proposal is. A leadership team without bandwidth will find execution difficult, even if the strategy makes perfect sense, while an organisation that continually increases the amount of tools it gives its people shouldn’t automatically assume that it is creating greater efficiencies, value, engagement or understanding.
This is what makes the subject so interesting to me because technology isn’t necessarily causing these constraints, nor is technology the only villain in the story.
The future of business will undoubtedly be shaped by what technology makes possible and there is an enormous amount to be excited about, but the success of that technology will still depend heavily on the people using it, receiving it, interpreting it and deciding what to do next. For me, it seems that we are competing for a finite amount of attention and cognitive capacity, so relevance, timing, trust and clarity will matter enormously. So, whether you’re trying to engage a customer, communicate with your team or influence a sales decision, the real challenge is to make what you’re putting in front of someone worth their attention, easy to understand and importantly, easy to act upon.
And perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing modern business isn’t working out how to send more; it’s working out how to become worth receiving.