The Blackberry Prayer

By Dominic Mason

There they sit, head reverently bowed, silent in their prayer, hardly moving. How committed... How ignorant! If you’ve ever been in a meeting with someone doing ‘The Blackberry Prayer’ then you’ll know what I mean. It’s bad enough keeping control and driving energy levels along in meetings at the best of times, but if people are simply present in body but not in mind then, you’ve got to ask, what’s the point in attending?

Of course, communication issues surrounding meetings are nothing new. A quick straw poll of my MSN contacts reveals some top meeting ‘hates’:

1. Accepting and then not turning up
2. Not supplying agenda points then complaining about lack of relevant agenda points
3. Failing to log the meeting under the correct code in a diary (I think someone’s on SAP?)
4. Lack of agenda before a meeting
5. Regular meetings that occur for no purpose
6. Being nominated to write up the meeting, when involvement is minimal
7. No meeting follow-up

I think we can all identify with most of those, and hopefully most of us would either not commit them or know how to fix them if they occurred. The bigger point is that meetings don’t need more issues, they need better solutions. There’s simply not enough structured, but no rigid, meeting etiquette in place in many organisations. Adding ’The Blackberry Prayer’ to the above list, doesn’t make things any easier. However, it’s not just Blackberry users that are ‘praying’. SMS, phone calls, calendar updates and emails are all delivered via mobile devices all the time – that’s largely the point of them, that they are ‘always on, always connected’.

However, simply because digital devices work best with tiny ‘packets’ of data doesn’t mean that we do. Humans work better with reasonably chunked, isolated work blocks, yes, but 160 characters at a time? No. Time and time again it’s shown that the most effective people:

• Work in highly-focused 20-ish minute blocks
• Engage in frequent, informal conversations
• Manage their time efficiently
• Are open, engaged and engaging

Not many of those characteristics apply to someone who attends, monk-like, to their handheld device and is:

• Disengaged
• Distracted
• Working in 2-3 minute blocks
• Instantly reactive

Of course, it’s easy to pick faults as all human communications away from face-to-face are second best, and no-one would argue that being in communication isn’t better than not being in communication until you can have a face-to-face meeting. However, let’s think for a moment about the perception of someone in your presence, who is instantly reactive to other communications. How do we feel about someone who’s supposed to be ‘with us’ and always seems to be ‘away’ or ‘busy’? In our personal lives it’s, frankly, rude, and in business we tend to gravitate away from people like that, towards better sources of information, understanding and capability. We think of them as ‘too busy’ or ‘ill-focused’ so they will tend to become isolated to some extent.

Can anyone afford to become isolated in a business environment? Of course not, so maybe that’s the real prayer that we need – have your Blackberry and use it, but please save yourselves from isolation - look up, look for opportunities and engage.