The discourse around ‘flexible working’ has degenerated into a narrow debate over whether people come into the office on three days of the week or four. But this risks distracting us from a more interesting question: do people work better in parallel or in series?
When the pandemic hugely accelerated the adoption of video-calling, many people took to comparing the quality of meetings carried out via video with those conducted face to face. In general, they divide into two camps: those who believe that there is no substitute for meeting in person, and those who concede there are some disadvantages to meeting on a screen, but suggest these are far outweighed by the time and cost savings.
This is a perfectly natural comparison to make. We are, after all, drawn to like-for-like comparisons. We call Olympic champion swimmers ‘fast’ because they are faster than other swimmers. But this illusion would be shattered if televised Olympic swimming events showed someone on foot keeping pace with the participants poolside. We would then see that champion swimmers are easily outpaced by almost anyone who can break into a gentle jog.
When we use words like ‘fast’, it pays to ask ‘fast compared with what?’ And comparing a video-call to a physical meeting, while it seems the obvious comparison to make, is in fact largely fallacious, because in most cases the video-calls do not replace what would have been a physical meeting. They are conversations which in the real world would never have taken place, or else would have taken place over a vastly protracted timescale in some asynchronous medium – typically email.
So the real question is this. When making a decision, is a group of people discussing a problem in parallel better than a series of people addressing a problem one at a time in a sequential process? The reason this matters is that the rise of asynchronous communication tools such as email have caused sequential decision–making to supplant parallel deliberation. It is possible that – almost unnoticed – this has had a catastrophic effect on the speed and quality of decision-making, and on the ability of any large organisation – including governments – to do anything quickly or well.
If you asked each juror to give their opinion independently, no one would ever be convicted – or acquitted
A perfect example. I recently met someone from a highly innovative company which offered a new service of considerable value to the NHS. To sell this alternative solution, the decision needed to be approved by 11 different NHS bureaucrats sequentially, any one of whom had the power to veto the appointment.
This sequential approach gets even worse when you add self-interested or risk-averse entities such as compliance, procurement or HR into the approval process. Like finance people, they may have something valuable to add to a conversation, but it is catastrophic to give them power over any one stage of a decision-making process, since they are too focused on one dimension of the problem to make a sensible decision on their own.
There are two ways to make anything happen at scale. Tyranny works well (Sir James Goldsmith said that ‘Teamworking means 12 people all doing what I say’). Emergent consensus works too. By contrast, sequential decision-making is almost always a disaster. If you removed collective deliberation from the jury process, and asked each juror to give their opinion independently, no one would ever be convicted of anything – or acquitted. Few people asked to make a decision in their personal life adopt the approach which institutions do, considering a question sequentially, one factor at a time.
Meetings, whether in person or on a screen, are often a terrible waste of time – but compared to the alternative, they work rather well.
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