EMAIL STOP TWEET STOP PLEASE STOP! ‘Doesn’t anyone want to sit about anymore?’

I know I’ll be twitting soon, oops I mean tweeting soon. In-fact, I have been strongly advised to... although I’m not really sure what will happen if I don’t, or indeed if I do, but ‘they’ say I should and after all, look at me, I’m already blogging!

It’s a sobering thought that just that last sentence would blow the twitter budget for characters in a tweet. This is starting to read like lines from the Cat in the Hat. Do the digital natives know about the Cat in the Hat? Even thinking about tweeting has got me writing in short bursts. I need to slow down... this isn’t funny.

A colleague’s 82 year old father asked him a very good question after being told that all those people ‘on their machines’ on the tube are doing their emails or playing games. ‘Doesn’t anyone want to sit about anymore?’ I sat about for a while and thought about it. I was making connections with other ideas that were knocking around in my mind, about the kind of thinking that is required if we are to get ourselves out of the fine mess we have found ourselves in (the small matters of a sustainable planet, consumption gone wild, the economic mess). I already knew that something was wrong because I felt a bit sick. And then it dawned on me – this was ‘paradox sickness’, a disturbance created by the dissonance of holding both these places in my mind. The ‘quick fire, two lines, don’t polish, just send’ twitter world, and the ‘Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer still, contemplative and meditative’ world of being fully present in order to ‘create the future as it emerges’.
   
It seems that the various extremes of human thinking paradigms may be getting further apart, and that those of us who want to embrace it all are going to need to extend our minds even further. I have a strange image of sitting in Lotus position on a mountain side with an ipad reporting in 140 character messages the progress of my meditation. The good news is that even the king of cultural dichotomies, Fons Trompenaars, was yesterday talking ‘anti bipolar’ thinking at the CIPD Annual Conference.  In the context of innovation he has seen that he must include both ends of his cultural dimensions. Trompenaars described innovation as requiring both creativity and adaption skills ‘integrated’ and dismissed the good old Kirton ‘Adaption Innovation inventory’ as bi-polar and so no longer fit for purpose.

The CEO of the Hong Kong office of a global business recently told me that his people seem to think their work is their emails. We know that the typical corporate user spends around 4 ½ hours per week on email and the average person another 4 ½ hours on social media networks.  That’s more than a day per person, per week already. A Thai manager told me he spends 7 out of 8 hours per day in meetings, so what time is left for the thinking bit?

I received a telegram once in my 20s and I still remember every word: ‘I’LL BE AT SHORE BAR ANJUNA STOP 7.30 STOP JUNE 12TH STOP MISS YOU STOP. I also remember a time when we received our ‘post’ in the morning and we wrote our letters in the late afternoon in time to catch the last post, and that was it; until the next morning’s post. Is all this communicating devaluing our words and replacing the real work? Are we ready for the great ‘turn off’? Only if we can all learn to manage our anxiety?