We often talk about latency, friction and noise as relevant topics within IoT. The topic also exists one level up, when we look at communication among people. The context is this; I was looking at asynchronous meeting technologies within a globalizing business using new wave AI toolsets. I addressed the idea to our CEO in the context of “meetings” being big time sucks within business – a scaling issue.
Calibrating understanding in real-time
His position was that traditional meetings offer a quick way to tightly focus on complex tasks & technical concepts. Using question answer sequences and iterative communication, you uncover emergent properties in real-time. Not just transferring information, you’re calibrating understanding within a group. Our current office is co-located. A small team works within a 100m radius. We float in communicative nirvana. That organisational form is impossible to scale asynchronously via push or pull methods.
What we’re digging into is not the “format” of meetings or the quality of different toolsets, but friction, latency and speed. When the phone call to the office died, nothing clean replaced it. It was low friction, low bandwidth, async to sync; you caught someone, got a decision, moved on. Business norms delivered “professionalism.” Teams/Zoom/Meet turned a quick check-in into a performative event with social overhead.
Minimise the gap to decisioning
People aren’t resisting meetings. Work resists the ritualization of what used to be lightweight interactions. Nobody wants (friction) to listen to a loud (status elevation) bore drone on (bandwidth) about their pet peeve (relevance) for half an hour (latency)(waste). Efficient systems minimize the gap between a needed decision and a decision being made, within the least cumulative social/cognitive/time overhead possible.
Built in structural friction
Most organizations don’t consciously architect their friction. They inherit it in calendar systems, org structures, reporting lines and tool choices.
There are variables to consider: Initiation friction; how hard is it to start the exchange? The old style call to the secretary was near zero. Nowadays it’s work from home. Nobody sane, or senior, wants 24 hour direct access on a personal mobile device. Resolution friction; how many steps between communication and a decision? How long till I get an answer? Simple. Re-entry friction; the cost of being pulled out of deep work and then having to reconstruct your original context afterward?
The move from a quick call to the scheduled Zoom (… or its super-sized sibling; the “camera on” town hall) isn’t just friction, it’s a category shift.
A phone call lives in one cognitive register; the lower bandwidth of audio. A scheduled meeting lives in another. It colonizes anticipatory attention. People start managing around it before it even happens.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a structural tax on cognitive availability.
