I am currently consulting with a large diverse organization about technology and communication. Listening to the people on the front lines, I discovered once again that the collective wisdom of the work force is immense, but building structures to enable that wisdom to flow freely isn't easy.

Every introduction of new technology in the organization created problems. The "efficiency" of voice mail left people dangling. They didn't know if messages had been heard, action was being taken, or what. Email has solved some of those problems, but created others. You get a response, one said, but people often hide behind email, staying out of reach. They use words to duck for cover, not communicate.

My mantra -- "Mutuality - Feedback - Accountability" -- holds true here too. Unless all three are maintained, an organization skews in predictable ways. Technology creates mutuality and feedback only if the leader holds people accountable to how it's used.

This particular business spent lots of money on hardware, less on software, and almost nothing on training people to use email effectively -- not how to use email programs, but how to use words in a high-context medium.

When we need to communicate, we can walk down a hallway and speak face-to-face, or pick up a telephone, or send email. Each medium creates a different context. When building a virtual group, it works best to have plenty of face-time up front, then use email to sustain -- not replace -- those relationships.

Something that works when said face-to-face can feel like a boxing-glove coming out of a closet when an email pops up on the monitor and delivers the same words.

Computer networks are only half the solution. Computer networks are fused to people networks. We humans beings animate the network, making it alive. Otherwise it's a monster that over-controls us. How we manage, not the computer network, but the integrated human-computer system determines how knowledge is leveraged in an enterprise.

Because "soft skills" are harder to teach and supervise than tasks, we often spend more time buying chips and switches or choosing software programs than wrestling with the real struggles of the folks on the front lines.

We can use emoticons like smiley faces all we want -- adding
:-) or '-) or :-0 -- but emoticons don't convey subtleties or innuendoes. Besides, different cultures use them differently.

The best carrier of meaning in the digital world is text. Using speech -- including virtual speech -- and text effectively is seldom taught. Yet "soft skills" are more important than ever in a work place that relies more and more on computer technology.

The CEO of a large utility company told me he used to spend 85% of his time on the generation and distribution of power, only 15% on process issues. Now, he said, those percentages are reversed. He agreed that 85% of the effectiveness of anyone at any job is the "soft stuff" -- attitude, working well with others, communication.

That CEO is not a touchy-feely kind of guy who can't wait to get to the office to get his hugs. He's a left-brain executive more comfortable with power grids than personnel. But managing people during times of change requires that we pay attention to how human beings link to one another, how energy and information moves through the human as well as the electronic system. That determines the real distribution of power.

The latest books addressing this issue call it management of intellectual capital. When so many books on a single subject show up on best-seller lists, it's best to treat the event as a symptom rather than a solution. The symptoms show up for good reasons, signaling a real need, but seldom provide the whole answer.

Re-engineering, for example. Re-engineering was invented (duh!) by engineers. They understood systems as if they were mechanical and taught a process that restructured businesses through brute force, a process better suited for rearranging marbles in boxes than human beings in cubicles. In a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Hammer, one of the original re-engineering gurus, acknowledged that he added two days to his three-day seminar because he had not anticipated difficulty with people. When asked what to do with people who could not adapt easily to change. he had always replied, "Shoot them." He is learning that the people are the system, and the coupling of networked people and networked computers creates a single beast. Ignoring how that hybrid learns, grows, and produces value wreaked havoc in organizations that thought they were taking the easy way out.

The recent emphasis on the proper use of intellectual capital is one antidote to the excesses of re-engineering, a way to say that knowledge and wisdom have to be managed, not ignored.

Of course, good leaders always knew that the engine of any enterprise is the people who make it up, how they have learned to work together, how they train and sustain one another -- in short, the culture of the organization. They know too that how a culture works is not always measurable. Their intuitive understanding of creativity is a butterfly that can't be caught with a calibrated net. So beware of books that reduce complex human processes to simple grids.

Any integration of human beings and their technologies requires that humans learn how to those technologies effectively to minimize friction, generate and sustain energy, and keep tacking back and forth across a straight line to our goal or vision. That journey is a long-distance run, not a sprint, and a long-distance run requires a different kind of training and a different kind of discipline.

There are plenty of smart people in the work place, but sometimes we need perspective rather than a quick fix. Perspective, Alan Kay said. is worth 50 points of IQ. Wisdom may be scarcer than intelligence, but it's nuclear fuel that burns clean and burns a lot longer.

January 24 1998