Too Much of a Good Thing?

Maybe, just maybe, we're focusing on technology too much.

Roger D'Aprix thinks so. D'Aprix has been writing about and teaching organizational communication for decades. He has watched the people in this business -- including himself -- move from being corporate journalists to strategic advisers, and now to webmasters.

Despite what may appear on the surface to be a real revolution, when you read between his lines, we're singing the same tune. Or to mince some more metaphors, the landscape may have changed, but we still can't see the forest for the trees.

"We are so enamored with technology that we think it can do anything," he said. "It is an all-encompassing part of our environment now. It's very seductive."

It just may have seduced us away from thinking of communication as a total process, circling from sender to receiver and back again. Instead, we think of digital delivery of targeted bits. "The tendency is to focus on sending messages," he said. It's a reprise of the days when we were seduced by our journalistic and creative skills and forgot that we were business people.

The Process and the People

The appropriate focus, D'Aprix preaches, is on the people in the marketplace conversation. "People claim they are sensitive to the receiver, but if you look at the behavior, it's been almost exclusively focused on sending messages efficiently and quickly. The great strength of technology is volume and speed," he conceded, but "communicators have got to see communication as a human process."

Not incidentally, it's a process that is largely outside the realm of our media -- Internet, intranet, and all the newsletters and campaigns and news releases we create. "The stuff we've been responsible for is probably only 15 percent of the total communication experience." The interactive, informal communication in any business needs our attention.

D'Aprix has long spotlighted supervisors as a neglected piece of the organizational communication interchange. Obviously, he points out, companies need to pick the right supervisors -- people with people skills, not only technical skills -- but that's beyond your control or mine. Communicators, however, might influence how supervisors communicate.

He questions the supervisor who delivers a performance appraisal by e-mail. "The most important thing is to be sensitive to the receiver," he said. "We have to use this technology intelligently and with empathy." Maybe just talking (old-style communication) about appropriate uses of new-style communication can bring some sense to technology.

"The primary effect of technology is the depersonalization of the communication process. That's obvious," he said. "Along with that comes greater alienation. We are social animals. We require the full communication experience, which in my mind means the ability to read body language, see gestures, and read facial expressions. People I know who have been heavily into technology for years are regretting the amount of time they have to spend in front of the computer screen instead of having social contact."

Let Go!

D'Aprix calls "staying in contact all the time" the greatest advantage of technology. We can communicate globally, across time zones. Our laptops and cell phones can follow us anywhere.

"But we don't have to become obsessive about it," he said. "I heard a story of a senior manager who had to stay up until 2 o'clock in the morning for a teleconference. I can't believe that a person is fully engaged and fully effective in a situation like that. It defies the limit of concentration."

Embrace It!

But in true D'Aprix style, he sees business communication -- and the effect of technology -- as a truly big picture and he has a hopeful attitude.

"Business used to be a simple process. People met in the marketplace, squeezed the fruit, and carried on conversations. The industrial revolution screwed all that up." Mass production separated the buyer and the seller, but along came mass communication to mediate. Now communication technology is bringing new connections.

"With the availability of the Internet, customers can now talk with one another and compare notes. With the intranet, employees can do the same thing," he said. "And the ability for customers to talk to employees is subverting the command-and-control style of companies. Companies don't like this. What goes on inside companies is pretty messy."

He's not saying it's bad, though. "The employee is now better able to be connected to the marketplace, to get a healthy dose of reality in dealing with customers," he said. "The extent to which you enable that conversation, even create a whole dialog that exists outside the leadership's ability to control it, you now have much more sophisticated employees in the marketplace, and that's very powerful. Given the nature of knowledge work and the need to get out of the way of knowledge workers and provide them with information, the implications are revolutionary.

Communication technology as media or message vehicle, no. As a part of a conversation and process, yes. With that future, the once-reluctant D'Aprix, who admits to delaying his dive into word processing until 1991, said, "Now I get excited about technology."

Shari Rosen, ABC, is director of organizational communication at USAA, a financial services company in San Antonio, Texas.