Learning, Deciding and Zooming

Listening to my peers from Learning teams over the period of the crisis has been instructive.

After the initial rapid adjustment and a little time to discuss and reflect arrived, I was struck by how frantic everyone was. Quite apart from the furlough-ing and other immediate concerns, I heard how overloaded L&D teams were. Consultancies, generally, got quiet as programmes were cut; in-house teams, generally, got busy rapidly adapting material for delivery through desktops. 

I heard about zoom fatigue, the syndrome acquired through back-to-back video calls, and I heard concern for teams who had crashed all boundaries, spending their daytime fitting work around new domestic demands and evening hours catching up.

I also heard paradoxical admiration for the efficiency of the novel work channel. Meetings that used to take hours were accomplished in minutes, tricky issues requiring careful alignment of different views seemed to be nodded through surprisingly quickly and suspiciously easily.

This is dangerous.

Cortisol-filled brains don’t mix well with fatigue. Decisions requiring thoughtful reflection don’t always sit well after the crisis thinking that got them made quickly has passed. Perhaps more than any other recent crisis, Covid-19 is bound to leave lasting changes behind. We need to work out what new products and services suit our new world and how we go about creating them. We need to learn how to keep a newly distributed workforce energised and focused, thinking and feeling as well as meeting and doing.

In a world where executive positions are filled by those demonstrating technical expertise first and people management ability is imperfectly grafted on later, we have seen business leaders quick to fall back on their familiar technical skills to manage the crisis. Now is the time to help leaders facilitate the co-creation of the space that allow the pattern to shift to a place they may be less comfortable and balance the emotional needs that deliver quality as well as efficiency.

Learning on line and decision-making on line are both more complex than signing into zoom. Focus on ‘what’ needs to be learned or decided, cognitive processes, can be beneficiaries of the laptop on the kitchen table but we ignore the socio-emotional aspects of how we work at our peril.

However much we forget it we all know that we learn in our relationships with one another. That is where the purpose of what we learn sits. That is where understanding lies and experiences are shared to inform consensus. That is where the ideal models our intellect creates become meaningfully adapted to the messy, emotional, complicated, reliably human people that enact them.

Starting (not ending) a call with a ‘check in’, using Nancy Kline’s ‘turns’ or Sociocracy’s ‘rounds’ to manage contributions, maybe working out what a consent model looks like when body language is hard to read all sound like simple places to start. They may make the call longer but they may also make it more valid, worthwhile, meaningful and nourishing for all concerned.

I heard recently of one new starter navigating virtual on-boarding with colleagues whose concern about their ‘covid-hair’ made them reluctant to turn their cameras on. I understand. But this is what happens when we forget to pay attention to people as well as process to get good things done.