Instant Communication as an Excuse for Bad Planning

Seems a lot of organizations are using instant communication technologies to try to compensate for poor planning. Just because you can get hold of anyone almost instantaneously doesn't mean you should rely on this to operate your business. Case in point...

I was meeting with an office manager about some improvement efforts we were doing. The meeting had been set up three days earlier and we had jointly outlined what we'd be covering and what information and data we thought we'd need. During the meeting, which lasted about an hour, this manager contacted no less than eight people, asking them to get This report, or fetch That information, or find out the status of The Other Thing.

All of these items had been on our preparation list, but none of them had been prepared in advance. Instead, at least eight people were texted, emailed, phoned, or paged, interrupting whatever they were doing to try to get the information. Five out of eight actually managed to get us the information before the end of the meeting. While we were waiting, the manager celebrated how all this wonderful technology allowed him to get all this information "just in time" and wondered aloud how managers ever got things done before everyone had smart phones.

After the eighth such call, I leaped across his desk, grabbed him by the shirt collar, slapped him upside the head a few times with the desk phone (whap! whap!), gave him a nasty papercut using the large, empty planning calendar on his desk and said, "THEY PLANNED! THEY ORGANIZED! THEY DID WHAT THEY SAID THEY WOULD DO!"

Er...oops...ah...did I actually type that stuff out loud? Sorry, I get a little emotional when faced with people who think that technology WILL SOLVE ALL THEIR PROBLEMS!!

Oh...excuse me...sorry...again.

Thinking. Planning. Organizing. Giving advance notice. These things still actually work, even in this age of instant communication. Try them sometime.