I was driving home from DU today, where Ben Casnocha and I did a tag-team guest lecture (also known as “winging it”) in a class on entrepreneurship.
Right afterward, I had a “quick” board call to discuss one issue that ended up taking 20 minutes. This issue was really just approval of a major decision and everyone just wanted to hear each other say “ok” out loud. It had taken us a while to arrive at a short notice time that we could all sync up on the phone, and we made one poor assistants life difficult trying to sort it out.
There were 4 or 5 people on the call, many coming and going with dropped calls. I was driving, so I had to mute often to keep everyone from hearing the roar of my car. People came back on the call to address the last statement that was made, which the conversation had already moved away from. At one point I laughed out loud as a key word in a very key statement in the conversation was “dinged” out by a rejoining caller, almost as if it were a curse word.
At the end of the call, Ben asked “Do you really find that to be more effective than email?” I thought about that for a minute and I think that it was certainly just as effective (the end result was the same), but nowhere near as efficient as say, email.
Ben recently said that email is not a collaboration medium (or at least it shouldn’t be). I would tend to agree. So I think it should be up to the meeting organizer to make sure there is a need for collaboration before going to a synchronous solution. In this case, there was no debate that couldn’t have easily occurred just as easily by email, and no “yes” vote that couldn’t have been cast that way.
I did a conservative estimate, and I think what could have occurred in 10 minutes of combined effort asynchronously instead occurred with about 100 minutes of combined effort synchronously. So in this case, email would have been an order of magnitude more effective, not to mention convenient. Sure, the end result might have been that we really needed to have a call, and figure some stuff out. But in this case, it really wasn’t one of those situations.
TIP: Aside from the Police album, synchronicity usually sucks. With a known nomadic group and existing strong relationships, reserve it for truly collaborative efforts.
Having been on the same call, I couldn’t agree more. I don’t really know why we did that call.
It may be worth noting that state corporation law requires syncronicity for official board meetings. Both Delaware and Colorado law, for example, require that all directors must be able to “hear” each other during a meeting that is conducted by remote communication. E-mail would work for informal discussion, but cannot be considered an official board “meeting.” It may be possible to agree on action by consent using e-mail (at least in Delaware — questionable in Colorado), but then 100% of directors must consent and e-mails would have to be printed and filed with corporate minutes.
Excellent point Bruce. This was more of a “quick decision” call, outside of our regular meeting.
While frustrating as all hell for those of you involved, I found that post hilarious. I’m one to err on the side of email myself (unless of course, like you said, we need to work something out). It’s less intrusive and even if you don’t hear it “out of their mouth” you do have it in writing, which is sometimes even better. 😉