![]() ![]() An hour saved by skipping a meeting is worth a great deal if it is applied to something of higher value, like closing the door to read a colleague’s comments on a product plan and which sparks a new insight. ![]() Different sorts of time vary widely in value. Therefore, time is more important than money.īut we really should reconsider the implicit assertion that time is homogeneous. ![]() Someone once countered the saying ‘time is money’ by pointing out time is a limited resource: you only have so much of it, and can’t acquire more, unlike money. We’ll see that keeping out the noise is the key to improvements in productivity, decision-making, and creativity that can’t necessarily be achieved otherwise. “Silence is no longer today an autonomous world of its own it is simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated.” – Max Picard Counter to what was previously thought, we use one set of neurons for listening to speech, and a second that is activated by the silence between words, to find the places where talking stops. There is research that shows humans have two neuronal systems for parsing speech. And first, we must understand how silence and noise interact, and how we think about them. The value of the time spent working in silence is what we do with it. Silence is not just the absence of noise, although often positioned as such. Through that, I will demonstrate the principle that changing the pace of how we work holds the promise of a foundational change in work culture, and how changing pace may be the fastest and surest route to outpacing change. Here, I explore research about the most tangible benefits from shifting the ratio of silence-to-noise, asynchronous-to-synchronous, in work communications. What if this shift not only raised productivity, increased engagement, and better decision-making, but also spurred second-order impacts, like an increase in resilience across the business, and a greater openness to adopting new ideas, practices, and technologies? What if downshifting business communications to incorporate a greater proportion of asynchronous communication could be a profound catalyst for change in business culture. The behavior of many senior leaders signals a resistance to any deep changes, but what will come remains to be seen. ![]() The question is whether these top-layer changes will ultimately be reflected in long-term shifts in governance and culture. Consider the shift to dispersed work with higher reliance on team communication technologies and the cascade of secondary effects like meeting fatigue and the great resignation. The extrinsic force of the pandemic has certainly introduced a broad spectrum of changes at the three top layers of the Pace Layers of work. So, adoption of new ways of work by individuals percolates to groups, which influences infrastructure, which shifts patterns of governance, and finally impacts the foundational culture of the business. The core idea is that change is mediated by layers in civilizations or businesses, those at the top change more quickly than those lower in the stack of layers.Īny cultural change in business comes from a cascade of faster and smaller-scale changes in higher layers. In The Pace Layers of Workarticle, I introduced Stewart Brand’s model of Pace Layers and recontextualized it into the world of work instead of his target context: civilizations. “Nothing has changed human nature more than the loss of silence.” – Max Picard So much about work depends on the pace of alternating between noise and silence. ![]()
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