Is face-to-face the best way to convey information?
The agile manifesto says that face-to-face conversation is the best way to communicate in a team. This is a rather simplistic notion.
- In-person interactions win on speed and fidelity but these aren't the only parameters that make communication effective.
- Asynchronous ways of communicating promote inclusion and help disseminate context at scale. Most synchronous communication is effective when it follows or references asynchronous artefacts.
- Written communication may not convey tone and emotion as well as in-person communication, but a lot of business communication is factual, not emotional. By adopting a journalistic style of writing, we can convey facts efficiently. Modern tools help us get better at writing in this manner.
- There are asynchronous ways to convey emotion too. Skilled writers can use the written word. Others can use recorded audio or video or include emojis in their writing to convey emotion.
- Even if we concede that face-to-face communication is more effective and efficient than remote-first, asynchronous methods, there are costs to it. Distributed teams should consider the trade-offs and use synchronous and face-to-face interactions where they truly shine - building strong relationships.
As I write this post, I wonder if it fits better into my list of corporate superstitions. To be honest, the trigger for this post was a conversation with my wife, after she’d read an executive’s guide to asynchronous company communication. She mentioned that the post started off feeling counterintuitive. I’d written about the perils of being sync-first in our communication approach while a principle of the agile manifesto says the opposite.
“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” - The agile manifesto
Of course, she and I discussed this, and we reached a consensus which I’ll share with you today. I understand that this article could easily be a subtopic in one of my earlier posts. But what the heck! In the interest of sharing my thoughts as they come to me, I’ll keep this separate. Tell me what you think.
Face to face communication wins on speed and fidelity
Sidu Ponappa is an ex-colleague, and one of the superstar tech leaders of our time. He made some very interesting points about the effectiveness of face to face communication in a recent podcast. I’ll leave you to listen from the 64th minute onwards but let me paraphrase his arguments.
Sidu compares communication efficiency between humans to the efficiency of a network.
“You increase the latency, increase the error rate, reduce the throughput, and there are direct consequences on the quality of the processing that the network carries on.”
He expands his argument to compare human communication to how computers communicate. The sender serialises, compresses, and transmits data. The receiver reverses the process to interpret the data. In the context of team communication, Sidu argues that the act of serialising a concept into English language or a diagram, compressing it for brevity or efficiency and then transmitting it over your communication channels is lossy and error prone. The act of decompressing and interpreting information is equally, if not more error prone.
In contrast, he explains, face-to-face communication has higher fidelity due to body language and non-verbal communication. Sidu also adds that you can make decisions faster in a face-to-face setting than in a remote setup. This explanation summarises why the agile manifesto advocated for face-to-face communication. Sidu’s right of course, but I’d like to add some nuance to his argument.
Non-obvious parameters for effective communication
So yes, face to face communication is faster and it has higher fidelity. But are those the only parameters that make communication effective? In a fast-talking, primarily English-speaking setup, whose points of view usually make it to the top? You know this already. It’s the extroverts, people who speak English fluently and people who are neurotypical. In a business we want the best ideas to win, not the loudest voices. Inclusion is a key parameter for decision hygiene.
Sarvenaz Myslicki, Vice President, Technology at American Express
“Anyone who has a say in how they run brainstorming sessions or idea gathering sessions (should) embrace the fact that everyone has different styles and try to accommodate them. So instead of getting everyone together for a one-hour brainstorm where they're constantly talking over each other, maybe do an offline document where people contribute all their ideas, not just their best one that they can get in during the time allotted. It's all about inclusivity.”
“Context” is another parameter for communication effectiveness. If a group of people must make the right decision, it helps if they all are acting based on the same information. This information serves as context to the decision they’ll eventually make. The more loaded this context, the less effective an impromptu side-of-desk conversation gets. Complex topics need structure. Writing helps create structure and share context at scale. Once everyone has shared context, a face-to-face or synchronous conversation can help them arrive at a decision.
“You could listen to a podcast at 10x speed, and it would be far more efficient than listening at 1x speed. Yet if you can’t digest the information at 10x speed, then it’s not effective, is it? While a synchronous exchange can certainly be beneficial, it’s usually best when it occurs after an asynchronous one. And synchronous should certainly not be used in isolation regarding topics of any complexity.” - Remote Java Dev, A problem with the agile manifesto
Communication is rarely a one-and-done event. It’s a process. A solely synchronous, or face-to-face communication event can be useful if the topic is simple and has zero context. For almost every other type of communication, you need an artefact to reference which in turn needs some deep thinking in advance. Sometimes you need to sacrifice decision speed for decision quality.
Ditch the emotion. Be a journalist.
I often hear the criticism that people can misinterpret writing; especially when it comes to emotion and tone. We’ll address that in a bit, but let’s agree that a lot of business communication is factual, not emotional. You need to write like a journalist. Dry, straightforward, plain English. No fluff, no literary callisthenics, just get to the point.
Inverted pyramid of journalism
A few years back I learned about the inverted pyramid of journalism. The most substantial information sits up-top. As you go through the article, the information in it diminishes in importance. From a reader’s perspective, this means that you could just read the first parts of a story and get its gist. From an editor’s standpoint, you can easily edit a story by “cutting from the bottom”. This is useful if you’re going to press in soon and you have limited space to accommodate a story.
Writing at work isn’t vastly different. You want to get to the point as quickly as possible and write with the assumption that people will only read the first few bits. This contrasts with editorial writing which makes long drawn, emotional points which can be open to interpretation depending on your background, personal beliefs, and political stance. This article is an example of editorial writing. I wouldn’t write this way when I design a feature.
I’m not for a moment saying that journalistic writing is an easy skill. I’m just saying that journalistic writing is an effective way to share information at scale. I also think that with the writing tools we have at our disposal these days, it’s easier to be a journalistic writer than it is to get out of your introverted skins or to become a fast-talking, fluent English speaker, or to overcome your neurodiverse nature.
There are ways to convey emotion too!
Readability statistics and the spelling and grammar check in Microsoft word
I’m sure you’ll tell me that there are times when you need to convey emotion. This is where I agree, writing is difficult. I also agree that face-to-face communication, or even synchronous video communication conveys emotional messages with a level of fidelity that most people struggle to convey through writing.
With that said, if you trust your writing skills, you should absolutely write away! Emojis aren’t just for millennials and zoomers. Use them to explicitly convey emotion. Editors like Hemingway and Microsoft Word have powerful tools to help you write clearly, concisely and in an inclusive manner.
The act of writing and then editing your thoughts helps you slow down so you can diffuse your emotions and focus on your message. I like using the Flesch-Kincaid reading tests that are part of Microsoft Word, to help me learn how difficult it may be to read what I’ve written. This is a bit like writing code. You must refactor your document till the point that an eighth-grade student can understand it. By the way, you can refactor what you’ve written even after sharing it with people. That’s something you can’t do with your real-time speech!
The other choice you have is to record yourself and do a short video presentation. If you trust your presentation skills, this is an effective way to create a short, referenceable, easy to consume artefact that can convey emotion the way you intend it to.
How much more effective is face-to-face communication?
For a moment, let’s accept the thesis that face-to-face communication is the best way to convey information in a development team. Now let’s ask ourselves a few questions.
How much more effective is it?
In what contexts is it truly effective?
What’s the cost you incur for face-to-face communication?
How do you weigh the benefits in comparison to those costs?
And here are a few questions for distributed teams that can’t be face-to-face all the time even if they wanted to.
Is a 20-person Zoom call with video off and mics on mute the same thing as face-to-face?
Does your message really need multiple people to interrupt their work so they can attend a conference call?
The unequivocal arguments in favour of face-to-face communication, especially in this era are superstitious at best. While I say this, I also believe that short bursts of face-to-face interactions are a terrific way to build relationships and camaraderie. When companies and teams stop being trigger happy about synchronous and in-person interactions, they can plough back the time savings to use these interactions in meaningful ways.
This article comes 21 years after the agile manifesto came to life. I think of it less as a critique of the one principle about face-to-face communication. It’s more about how tools, technology, and our behaviours and relationships to work have changed since 2001. Think about it. There’s so much that wasn’t around in 2001. Real-time, collaborative editing; video conferencing with screen sharing; digital whiteboards; asynchronous audio and video; or platforms like YouTube or Spotify. Heck, even emojis became popular only after 2010!
Moreover, we didn’t know at the time that our work could adapt to our life. That it was OK to hug our kids in the middle of a workday. In theory, we could connect to the internet and work from anywhere, but it took a pandemic to convince us that remote work could be a sensible default for so many of us. I’m sure you agree that the world has changed considerably since 2001 and more so since 2020. Our mindset about communication and collaboration needs to change as well. Thankfully, there’s precedent in a familiar part of the knowledge work industry. And while I differ with Sidu’s points about face-to-face communication, he’s spot on about who should inspire us.
“Open-source projects are doing stuff for 40 years without any face-to-face meetings without conference calls. But they do it because they have exceptionally high adherence to process. And frankly, the truth is, most companies can't even come within shouting distance.”
So maybe, the corporate world can take a leaf out of the volunteer world of open-source and improve their processes and communication. That’s the opportunity this new normal of remote work affords us.