358: Solving the Five Problems of Virtual Communication with Dr. Nick Morgan

Pete Mockaitis
Nick, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Nick Morgan
Pete, it’s a great pleasure to be with you again. We talked a while back.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Indeed. It was such a treat then because your book Give Your Speech, Change the World was such a hit with me and with many, many readers. You’ve got a new one coming out all about connecting in virtual spaces. First, I’ve got to see if you have seen this clip from the TV series Silicon Valley about the holographic communication chamber.

Nick Morgan
No, I haven’t, but it sounds cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my gosh. Well, the thing that gets me is that they start with – and we’ll link to it in the show notes – they start in a fancy holographic chamber and then it’s not working. Someone sticks his face up near the camera trying to fix. It was like, “Oh, we don’t have enough bandwidth.” They get on to a Skype-like program and then it sort of freezes up. It’s like, “Oh, you’ve got to update your software.” Then they’re on a cellphone and the connection goes bad.

It was like that is wise in terms of no matter what technology you’ve got, something can go awry technically. Then you’re speaking about things that aren’t quite working even beyond the technical difficulties. What’s the scoop in the book, Can You Hear Me?

Nick Morgan
That’s right. The technical stuff is what people tell me about first and of course, that’s very irritating as you just described it. That was sort of a great compendium of all the things that might go wrong. As we all know, they do. They do on a regular basis. Calls get dropped, the audio conferences mute button doesn’t work. The video conference is exhausting for some reason where it freezes up because there isn’t enough bandwidth. These things – it’s the stuff of daily life.

What’s fascinating to me is that people just sort of accept that. They don’t talk about it much except of course as it’s happening.

It’s a little bit like – I was reading about traffic jams the other day and it turns out that if you measure people’s blood pressure while they’re stuck in a traffic jam it goes way up, but as soon as the traffic starts moving, their blood pressure comes back down. They don’t stay that angry. That’s really interesting to me because it suggests that we have this tolerance for sort of low level, hassle at the technical level.

But what’s going on beneath that and what I found in doing the research for the book is that each of those forms of virtual communication basically strips out the essential thing that humans need to communicate with each other, which is clues that you get when you’re face to face and talking to someone easily and naturally about their intent.

That’s what we care about. We care about what is that other person thinking/feeling, what does that other person mean when they say what they say.

If you’re sitting across from somebody and they say, “Your hair is on fire,” and you know them, you can tell immediately whether they’re kidding or whether you actually need to get a fire extinguisher. Online, you can’t tell.

Most of our virtual communications, therefore, are endlessly frustrating and endlessly misunderstood because of that lack of emotional information, that lack of human intent. We imagine that we’re communicating the same way. We’re all generals fighting the last war.

We talk to each other via email, via audio conference and even via video conferences, which we can get into assuming that it’s the same as face to face because we don’t really think about it. We don’t know any other way to communicate. As a result, we communicate assuming that everything’s getting through, our intent is getting through and it actually isn’t.

We can offend the other person or the other person misunderstands us. Then we don’t quite understand why and we get cranky as a result and welcome to the virtual world. That was the territory that I discovered as I began my research.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. That assertion there is that what we fundamentally want to know is the intention of the person on the other side. We’re sort of – you’re suggesting your research reveals that we’re going to be more interested in what the human is thinking/feeling/believing than in the sort of word content that they’re projecting.

Nick Morgan
That’s absolutely right. We care about their emotions. It’s the emotions tell us how important is this communication. Is this person trying to get something across to us that’s desperately important? Is this person just making chit chat? Is this person flirting with us? Is this person angry at us? Is this person a threat?

All of those kind of questions play constantly in our unconscious minds. We want to know the answers to those things. When we don’t get the answers, then that makes us uncomfortable.

Here’s the added twist about this that I discovered. Imagine the human brain as a multi-channel organism that’s constantly seeking for other people’s intent and attitude. Then imagine that that attitude doesn’t come through, the intent doesn’t come through because it’s stripped out by virtual communication.

Then what happens is the brain doesn’t like empty channels, so it fills the channels with memories and assumptions and stuff it makes up. But, and here’s the thing, it fills it with negative information because it makes sense in evolutionary terms to assume the worst.

If you’re walking through the savannah and you see a shadow, it makes sense for your brain to assume that it’s a tiger and to make steps to get out of the way before you’re killed rather than to assume it’s just a friendly rabbit or something. Our brains do the same thing when we don’t get other people’s intent, we assume the worst.

That’s why virtual communications are always turning into trolling situations or people are always getting angry at you or you make what you assume is a joke in say, email, and the other person is offended for some reason. You think, “How could they be so stupid? I didn’t mean that at all.” Then you get angry at them. Then you have to spend six more emails straightening out the mess that’s been created.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is fascinating in terms of just fundamental human nature. I did not know that in terms of we are naturally filling in the empty channels and we have a strong bias for filling it in in a negative way. I guess I see that all the time, but I guess I didn’t stop to think that that is kind of hardwired into most people as opposed to, “Oh, I bumped into a couple touchy characters in my day.”

Nick Morgan
Sure. There are of course human exceptions, but what we’re talking about here is not the out loud things that people say. People are often more or less like Mr. Rodgers in that situation. We’re talking about the unconscious assumptions, of course. Those we’re less aware of, but they exist very powerfully nonetheless. They influence our decision making. They influence how we react to other people.

The brain is out there always asking “Is this person friend or foe? What’s this person’s intent?” When we’re not getting a clear answer, we assume the worst. That’s the nature of virtual communications. That’s the problem – in fact that’s the first of five problems that I talk about in the book that lead to so much of our frustration in the virtual world.

The reason why I think a large part of why so many people have noted that the world has turned angry in the last five, ten years and it’s a phenomena that many people ask about. They say, “Why is everybody so angry these days? Why is the conversation, the political conversation, the business conversation, why are all these things turned so sour?”

Hello, it’s because for the past ten years we’ve switched from mostly face to face communications to half virtual, half face to face or maybe it’s more like three-quarters virtual, a quarter face to face. It’s a huge unregulated social experiment that’s been going on for about a decade now since the mobile phone became ubiquitous. We’re only just now beginning to wake up to the dangers associated with it.

At first, the advantages were obvious. It’s easier to communicate, much less friction to use the Silicon Valley term. I can send out thousands of emails, it doesn’t cost me anything. I don’t have to lick any stamps. I don’t have to walk to the post office. There are all kinds of – there are unquestionable benefits with audio conferences and video conferences and email. I don’t travel as much so that cuts down on wear and tear. It saves the travel budget.

There are powerful incentives to use virtual communication. That’s why, especially as I say it the last ten years, that’s why it’s just swept the planet and swept the human race. But only now are we starting to wake up to the fact that there are some downsides.

For me the single most alarming statistic that captures this is that when a group of psychologists studied teenage girls and their time on cellphone. What they found was there’s a straight line relationship between the number of hours you spend on your mobile phone and the likelihood that you’re depressed.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh wow.

Nick Morgan
It just goes straight up. It goes straight up. Every hour you add – and it’s typical for a teenage girl to spend six hours on a cellphone.

Pete Mockaitis
In a day?

Nick Morgan
In a day. Yeah. The rates of depression are rising at a really alarming rate and suicide too tragically.

Pete Mockaitis
That is striking. Do you happen to recall – I’m such a dork for the data – roughly, what’s an extra hour do in terms of my odds for depression?

Nick Morgan
Well it’s – at the top end it’s like 30% of the cohort are depressed, so do the math backwards. That’s around six hours per day on the cellphone.

Pete Mockaitis
That is striking.

Nick Morgan
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
As you were sort of talking about this human nature stuff with emails, it reminds me one of my very first corporate internships, I remember, I was at Eaton Corporation, a diversified manufacturing. I had not heard of them before. I was like, “Oh wow, this is like a Fortune 500 company. This is pretty large and established.” It was cool.

It was like, oh man, it reminded me of – it was funny – I was familiar with Office Space before I had actually been in a cubicle-like environment. It was like there we were. I actually had a lot of fun. It was interesting characters and intellectual challenges. I was like, “Oh, working is fun. This is kind of cool.”

But one thing that really tripped me up was the emails because it’s sort of like when I would get an email, like, wait is that person – are they trying to – do they think that I’m not doing my job. I would have all these sort of paranoid thoughts pop in.

Nick Morgan
Right, right.

Pete Mockaitis
Then when I would send an email, I’d have a couple times in which someone seemed kind of rankled with me. I remember my buddy Dan and I, we sort of partnered up with each other. We called it PCS, Political Consulting Solutions, in which we would preview each other’s emails and provide feedback on how it could be misconstrued in a way that’s going to really upset the other person. We spent a lot of time on this. It was wild.

Nick Morgan
That’s such a great example of what I’m talking about. I love that. Your solution is one, broadly speaking, that I suggest, which is you begin to create a community that discusses the implications of this.

The reason why most people don’t do that is that one of the unintended consequences of making email easy compared to office memos back in the day or inner office mail or whatever it was people used to do, is that we get tons of it now. We’re buried. Everyone talks about information overload, that’s because it’s easy to do.

We have a difficult time just coping with it all, so we tend to go through it very quickly. We just react emotionally. We actually are using that unconscious brain in a way that also has its unintended consequences and leads to negativity and suspicion and paranoia and all those juicy things. Yeah, that’s a great example.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. You say you’ve laid out five key problems associated with this. I’d love to get your view on what are the problems and your sort of favorite practice to ameliorate that problem or to address it a bit.

Nick Morgan
Yeah, sure. The first one I talked about is this lack of feedback is the fact that I can’t detect what you’re intending toward me. It’s a like a sensory deprivation chamber, most virtual communications, in one form or another. Email is the worst because that’s just words, black and white marks on a screen.

Of course, audio conference, you’ve got a little bit of the people’s intent through the voice. Actually some of that is stripped out and I can talk about the technical reasons for that. That gets a chapter in my book. Audio conferences are worse than you think, which is why we find them so boring. Nonetheless there’s a little bit of information there.

And we get a little bit more in a video conference. But on the whole, video conferences, people think, “Well, I’m actually seeing the other person,” you have to remember, it’s still just a two dimensional representation of a three-dimensional person. It’s still screening out things that you get easily and instantly face to face that you don’t get in video conferencing, which is why video conferencing is so tiring for most people. That’s the first big problem is the lack of feedback.

The second one is that as a result of that lack of feedback, we lack empathy. Normally, say if you’re standing with somebody, you’re having a quick conversation and you say something sarcastic and you see the pain in their eyes, you can do something instantly, and people mostly do, nice people on the whole, they’ll pat you on the arm or say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” because they’ll see the reaction in your eyes. They’ll get right away that your intent back to me is “Oh, you hurt my feelings.” People can repair that because we have that empathic connection.

That’s the second big problem is that empathic connection is just largely gone.

The third problem is that you don’t have any control over your own persona or not enough control because what happens online since it’s done by machines for machines through machines is that it remembers forever.

The classic example of this is the drunken frat boy and the sorority girl pictures on Facebook that come back to haunt you when you’re trying to get your first job. We all can appreciate that that sometimes things happen in social media or online that we wish would go away.

Some governments around the world have started to rewrite the rules so that you are allowed to insist that information like that be pulled down, but it’s not universal yet. It’s very hard to do. It’s time consuming and a struggle. Lack of control over your persona, the information that’s out there, is a problem.

This is an interesting one because when I first started talking about this with my publishers, their reaction was, “Well, that doesn’t seem all that important really,” until I said – they said, “You might want to leave that one out.” I said, “Well, come on now. Think of the number of times in a day that somebody Googles you.”

They hadn’t really thought about it before, but people Google you now when they meet you. If you’re a potential customer or if they’re going to be your customer, you Google them. If you’re going to date a relative of theirs, they’ll Google you. People Google each other now often and on and on and on. The result is that there is information about you out there online, sort of whether you’re aware of it or not.

The other thing that happens is for people who do take control of this and create a website and a persona and you Google their name and up comes something that looks sort of bright and breezy and professional and interesting, compare that with somebody else who you Google and maybe there’s three or four different Nick Morgan’s that come up.

One of them looks a little sketchy. The other one might be me and whatnot. Then you think, “Oh, this person doesn’t exist. What’s the matter with them? Why don’t they have a website?”

In a way it’s also the competition that if you don’t control your persona, then people see you as less than human. That’s the third big problem.

The fourth problem, and this is a really subtle one, is that when you take out these emotions as I’ve been describing, then it actually makes it hard to make good decisions. The reason for that is we like to think of ourselves as logical beings who make logical decisions, but in fact, most of our decisions are based on emotions.

There’s a famous case of a stroke victim named HM, whose initials are used in the medical literature because he’s so famous. But he was kept anonymous, but his initials were used. He had a stroke which paralyzed his emotional centers of his brain. He was therefore unable to make decisions because it’s emotions we use to rate the importance of something.

This is easy to understand if you go back to a very simple example from your childhood that hopefully this never happened to you, but let’s pretend you walked up to a stove at age two and you saw this bright, glowing orange thing and you thought, “Oh, that looks cool,” and you put your finger on it.

Then what happened? Well, then suddenly you were subsumed with rage, and pain, and anger, and fear, and terror. You started screaming for your mother and all kinds of things happened. You never forgot that moment if that happened to you. You made a decision right then and there and you always followed it ever since never put your finger on a glowing hot stove ever again.

That goes up there because so much pain is associated with it as a very high and important decision. It sounds silly, but that’s the way in which our brain creates structures in order to allow us to make decisions. We rate things on their importance based on the number of times they come up in our memory and the amounts of emotion that are attached to them.

If you think of remodeling, recently we were remodeling our kitchen, there’s a ton of decisions you have to make when you’re remodeling a kitchen. You have to decide how much the surface is and what are the cabinets going to look like.

Pete Mockaitis
The knobs. There’s so many choices of knobs.

Nick Morgan
There are whole stores just devoted to knobs, Pete, it’s crazy. You can lose your mind trying to make these decisions.

Well, how do you make those decisions? Ultimately you start out all happy to do it. Let’s pick the best one and you do a little research. Then after a while you’ve made about 50 decisions, you just can’t stand it anymore. You just start going, “That one.” You just point and you say, “I’ll take that one.”

What are you basing it on? You’re basing it on some kind of emotional memory. That drawer pull reminded you of one that you used to have in your home when you were a kid and you loved it or you want one that’s different from the one you used to have in your home when you were a kid because you hated the home when you were a kid. That’s how we make those kind of decisions. We make them based on emotions and memories.

Pete Mockaitis
Or even if you’re imagining the future in terms of – or likening it too – it’s like, “Oh man, that’s so futuristic. That’s like some cutting edge Star Trek space-age knob there. I want to be like Captain Picard when I’m opening my drawer.”

Nick Morgan
That fits my image of myself or the image that I want to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Nick Morgan
Yeah, that’s the fourth problem.

Then the final one is that when you compromise this kind of decision making and emotional connection then what happens is people don’t commit in the same way. This is where we get into the whole trolling problem and the fact that we’ve all experienced at a very simple level if – contrast say the Amazon website, most of shop on Amazon and we keep going back to Amazon. Why? Because they’re completely obsessive about making that experience work for us.

But think about another shopping website that you’ve gone to that the experience wasn’t that great. Maybe the response was slow or it was hard to find the right product or in the end they sent you the wrong one and you had to send it back and that was an incredible hassle. How many times are you going to go back to that website? Never. You’re one and done.

That’s the nature of the online world is one and done compared to a face to face world where if you have a convenient coffee shop, maybe one time the barista screws up the coffee and gives you something that doesn’t taste very good, but you forgive him because he’s a human being and it’s local and convenient and you’re going to go back there again. If it happens enough times, maybe you won’t. You’ll find another place.

But face to face the experience is very different. We have a much higher tolerance and a much stronger sense of commitment to people that we meet face to face. That’s the final problem, just the online commitment, the online connection between people is very fragile and very transient.

If we try to communicate, and this is my main point in the book, is we’re still trying to communicate as if we were living in a face-to-face world, so we assume those kinds of connections are made on the same basis as they are in the real face-to-face world and they’re not.

I go into an email conversation. In a way I haven’t really reflected on kind of assuming the other person knows my intent. Why? Because when I talk to them face to face, they pick up my intent without any effort, so I don’t have to put a lot of that into my email if I’m thinking in those terms.

But in fact, I do and that’s really the beginning of the solution is I say, you need to start putting in the emotions and the clarity and intent, specifically the human intent into your email. It feels strange at first.

But I say it all begins with a question, which a neuroscientist told me he thinks about under the circumstances, which is “How does what I just said make you feel?” As soon as you ask that question, then the whole game changes and we can begin to turn virtual communications into something that words not quite as well as face to face, because of the way our unconscious minds are wired, but it’s going to work reasonably well. But that’s the key thing.

There are two implications of that. First of all, it allows you to tell me how you’re feeling emotionally because it gives time for that and it gives the space for it. But second, it also gives you the respect to say “I care about how you feel.”

Now face to face, I can’t help but care because if I say something and then that hurts your feelings and I see the pain in your eyes, then I’m hardwired to care about that because we humans are decent, most of us. The number of psychos, thank God, are fairly small. Most of us are hardwired to respond sympathetically that we have empathy, so we care.

But online, we don’t. That’s why we need to ask that question, “How does what I just said make you feel?” It’s about taking the time to do that and also showing the other person the respect and the empathy and the caring that says “I want to know these things. I’m going to take a moment to do that.”

It involves a real shift. It’s not difficult to understand or technically difficult to do, but it involves a huge shift in just the way we think about communication because essentially what we’re doing is putting back in the emotional connection, the intent, the clarity of that intent, which we do reasonably well most of the time face to face and we do horribly online, horribly.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s striking in terms of I can see – you made a compelling case here for why this is extra critically necessary when it comes to the online dimensions.

Although I don’t think it’s a bad question for in-person contexts either because I think a lot of times – we’re not, even though there’s – I guess for example, if you’re looking at a room of a dozen people in a conference room and you’re presenting something, it can be hard to kind of keep your eye on all of them at the same time.

Nick Morgan
That’s right. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
It would be great to get some of that feedback. What’s great is it can even surface information that’s not yet conscious I’d say. I’m just imagining this playing out.

Nick Morgan
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
To the person you’re saying it to because, “How does this make you feel?” Then especially if they’re on the spot and they can’t squirm out and say “Nothing,” they might say – if you have a decent relationship, I guess some people would just not say anything. Because I can imagine a lot of times they’ll say “How does it make you feel?” and they’re like, “Yeah, it’s fine, I guess,” it’s just like the emotion is sort of like uninspired.

Nick Morgan
Right, but then you’ll know.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Nick Morgan
Then you’ll know that. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like this proposal-

Nick Morgan
You can tell by the reaction.

Pete Mockaitis
-is fine I guess. It will probably get the job done, but it’s not going to inspire tremendous energy and enthusiasm and commitment from the people on my team. Are we okay with that or are we not okay with that?

Nick Morgan
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Now there’s a whole other conversation that maybe needs to be had.

Nick Morgan
That’s right and it’s a good thing to have. I think one of the things you’re pointing to is that what’s happening is that some of our bad behavior that we’ve learned online is in danger of leaking back into our face to face.

We’ve all complained about this when we go to a meeting and half the people are on their cellphones. You’re going, “Wait a minute, don’t you even have the courtesy to put down the cellphone and talk to me. Here we are face to face. We’ve gone to all the trouble to get together face to face and you’re still on your cellphone. Come on, that isn’t acceptable behavior.” Some people surface that and insist that people leave their cellphones at the door or turn them off or whatever.

I’ve noticed more and more and I know many other people have as well, I’m sure you have, bad behavior from virtual communications were leaking back into face to face and in effect making – the worst possible outcome would be if face to face were dragged down to the level of virtual communications.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just imagining we’d pull out an emoji notecard from our pockets and just display that. “This is my response to what you’ve said.”

Nick Morgan
Well, I say in the book that we’re in danger of raising a generation of people who are uncomfortable communicating face to face and incompetent communicating online.

Pete Mockaitis
That is quotable, Tweet that and spooky.

Nick Morgan
Yeah, scary.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to kind of hit something you said earlier before it disappears. I was quite intrigued. You mentioned that because of our kind of false assessment of what’s being transmitted in audio, that leads to it being very boring. Because of our false assessment with video, that results in a 2D versus 3D, that results in it being very tiring. Can you explain that pathway a little bit more in these two dimensions?

Nick Morgan
Yeah, sure. This involves a slightly technical explanation, but I’ll make it as simple and brief as I can.

What happens when the phones were invented and the engineers said we’ve got to get the human voice into twister copper pair, that was the original phone line, was that they studied the human voice and realized that the human voice covers three bands of sound.

There’s the basic pitch at which say you and I are speaking. If I held one of the vowels that I’m saying out loud and made kind of a note out of that, so nooo, if I held that tone, we could find that on the piano. We could find that pitch. The pitch at which people speak exists within a pretty narrow band of about around 200 Hertz. It goes up to about 300 – 350 and goes down to about 100, but it’s a pretty narrow band, several hundred Hertz wide.

The human – if you think about human hearing, one of the extraordinary things is we can hear up to 20,000 Hertz when we’re young and healthy. As time goes on if we listen to too much loud rock music, we lose a bit at the top. But the basic human hearing range is 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz.

Now you think about why did we evolve to do that and the reason is something quite extraordinary about the human voice, we can identify other people’s voices without any apparent effort at all. That’s an extraordinary achievement when you think about it.

As soon as you pick up the phone and it’s your significant other calling or a family member, your mother, your father, friends, family, or if you hear politicians or famous actor’s voices on television or on the radio, you instantly know who all these people are. You know without any effort several hundred voices. It’s an extraordinary thing when you think about it.

The way you know that is there’s the basic pitch that people speak, but every human voice is like a fingerprint in that it’s individual and it’s characterized by a certain set of overtones over the basic pitch and undertones under the basic pitch.

There are three bands, as I said, there are the overtones, that your voice makes, which we can’t hear consciously but are fed into the sound of Pete’s voice or Nick’s voice, and then there are the basic pitch at which we’re speaking, and then there are the undertones.

Now, what the engineers realized was you could leave off the overtones and undertones and you’d still be able to understand the basic pitch. You’d be able to hear and understand what people were saying. They noticed that the human voice became a little less distinctive. It was a little harder to tell people apart, but not impossible because you still got some of that sound richness even in the narrow band.

Okay, that’s what people did for telephones and then the same thing happened – there was never a time when it suddenly became convenient to put massive more bandwidth into the sound of the human voice. Once the original science had been done, nobody ever thought let’s redo this and suddenly increase the ear buds and the speaking phones and everything so they can get 20,000 to 20 Hertz.

They never did that. As a result, the sounds are vastly restricted to that narrow band of the basic pitch.

Now here’s why that’s important. When you take out the undertones especially, also the overtones to a certain extent, but when you take out the undertones, then you take out the emotion. Emotion is conveyed in the undertones.

Now, because of our earlier discussion, you’ll know that that’s very important. As soon as you take out the emotions, then it gets hard to make good decisions and it’s also very boring because emotions, other people’s intent, are what we care about.

Basically the simple way to put this is when you’re on a regular team meeting with your team, which is spread out all over the world, then your boss is droning on about something, you can’t tell as well what the emotions are being conveyed in his or her voice because the undertones are taken out. They’re edited out. As a result your boss is both boring and you can’t read him or her as well.

That’s why there’s the stories of what people do on audio conferences in order to stay human, alive and on the planet are hilarious and …. The vast majority of people as soon as they get in an audio conference put their phone on mute and start doing their email. They’re only half there.

Then there are lots of good stories when I was doing the research I came up with a number of hilarious stories about gross and disgusting things, some of which I couldn’t put in the book, that people do when they put the phone on mute instead of listening on the audio conference.

Pete Mockaitis
We can’t let that go. Give us just one or two examples please.

Nick Morgan
Of course, people go to the bathroom and then forget

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, bummer.

Nick Morgan
Make revolting noises.

Pete Mockaitis
Embarrassing.

Nick Morgan
Yeah, embarrassing noises. But my favorite, people have sex believe it or not. Sometimes that gets overheard. While you’re on the boring audio conference, imagine somebody else is having a good time.

But my favorite one, my favorite one is there was a team that had a group based in South America, in Brazil I think it was, and a team in Asia and a team in the United States.

Obviously everybody except whoever the poor soul was that was talking had their phones on mute because an earthquake happened to the Brazilian team. They left their phones on mute and fled the building and didn’t come back and nobody noticed. The rest of the world didn’t know. The rest of the team had no idea that their teammates in Brazil were suffering an earthquake. That tells you just how dissociated and ridiculous audio conferences are.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh man.

Nick Morgan
somewhere else on the phone can have an earthquake and you don’t even know, I mean come on.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. It’s not just one person. It’s numerous.

Nick Morgan
Right, there were several people sitting around that conference room table, which was by then shaking obviously.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. Well, thank you for that. Now these undertones, overtones business now I hear that, have a mental image I guess, audiogram, audio picture of what that sounds like in terms of when I’m speaking on the phone with someone or a conference call. But if I’m using something like a Zoom or a Skype, are we kind of collecting the full range from an audio bandwidth signal?

Nick Morgan
It depends a lot on the technology. What happens is though even if you use a good microphone, then the person at the other end may not be getting all of the information because of what he or she may be listening on.

If you’re listening on ear buds, ear buds are the worst, even good ones. Of course, they use this kind of trick technology. They don’t actually produce the low notes. They use a trick of the human ear to make you think you’re hearing it, by suggesting by doubling up on the note.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so I’m not actually hearing the real stuff, but it’s kind of trying to-

Nick Morgan
No, your brain is filling it in.

Pete Mockaitis
-give me something that resembles it. Whoa.

Nick Morgan
Right, the brain is filling it in to a certain extent. You’re not actually – we’re having this lovely conversation, Pete, but you’re not actually hearing my voice. You’re hearing a kind of memory and a construction of my voice.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. I want to get your quick view then on, while we’re on that subject, I’ve used a lot of meeting platforms in my day and you’ve done a boatload of research. I know that different circumstances and contexts call for different solutions, but if you had to give me your personal favorite in the world of Zoom versus BlueJeans versus GoToMeeting versus Adobe Connect, which one would you say reigns supreme?

Nick Morgan
What I’m liking is – there are some Zoom setups that I’ve seen – Zoom seems to be the easiest to me just of all the ones I’ve used. I’ve used them all. I have no particular beef or no investment in any particular one. But Zoom seems to be the easiest.

Some Zoom setups are starting to build in better speakers so that you can get a broader range of response built into the room for example. I’m in favor of those kind of setups where we start to put back in the sounds that have been stripped out.

But understand one other thing we were going to talk about, videos. Let me just quickly say the issue with video, and that’s another interesting one. We humans are brought up to think about the five senses. That’s sort of what we imagine we have. There’s actually a sixth sense that all of us have, which works very, very hard and that’s called proprioception.

Proprioception is the effort that your mind and my mind make to track our location in space and the location of everybody around us.

Just to pick a fun example, that’s why most people find cocktail parties so exhausting because there are a lot of people milling around. You keep track of where are all those people are. Your unconscious mind is keeping track of where all those people are even if you can’t see them, so even the ones behind you. you’re doing it with a little bit of sort of weird sixth sense again that people have of – you know the prickly feeling you have at the back of your neck. You kind of know somebody’s behind there so maybe you sneak a little look.

It’s a combination of looking and sort of the feeling that you get when there’s somebody behind you and physical sensation and shadows. You use all the means at your disposal. Proprioception is a very hardworking little sense to keep track of where everybody is.

Well, on video that doesn’t come through. Once again, that channel is emptied out pretty much because you can’t tell where that other person actually is in space because they’re sitting on a two dimensional screen, which is maybe four or five feet from your face. But you know they aren’t kind of there because you only see their head and shoulders.

You know they aren’t actually four feet away from you, but you don’t know where they are. Are they ten feet, twenty feet? Your brain works really hard and assumes that that person is both more dangerous than they actually are and farther away or closer than they actually are. You don’t get a good read on it. Your brain is working extra hard and it is again filling that channel with information which is made up essentially.

We find that very exhausting. That’s why people often end up shouting at each other on video conferences or report themselves fatigued after an hour of video conferences. It’s very hard unless you’re really practiced at it, to do a long, long video conference. Whereas, most people if they’re enjoying the conversation, wouldn’t mind an hour or two conversation face to face.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re bringing me back to some days which I’ve done 11 hours of video coaching calls in a day and I can confirm that tuckered me out good.

Nick Morgan
Wow. There you go. I’m impressed you went that long. That’s really-

Pete Mockaitis
I’m used to the load in video sense. Um, so—

Nick Morgan
Well, just remember, you’re making your unconscious brain work very hard. I talk in the book about things you can do to improve it.

One of the things – it sounds trivial, but it’s really not – is you can do this on your end, is set up your video conferencing to give the other person subtle clues as to the depth perception involved in the room.

I say have something that’s near you that they can easily estimate the size of and then put something like a plant a few feet back. Then have a wall clearly behind that with things on it that will help them size what they’re seeing.

If you give people those three layers of depth, then that’s actually visually very helpful for them. They’ll find talking to you much less stressful than they otherwise would. It takes a certain amount of effort.

And of course, adequate lighting. Everybody has heard that I’m sure now about video conferencing. It takes – because it’s just a camera, a TV camera, and it takes a lot of light to reproduce enough through the pixels that you need a lot of extra light. That’s something that most people don’t do, so we’re squinting into the gloom and we can’t see the other person very well.

Adequate lighting and a sense of depth perception really go a long way to improving that sense of ease that you’ll give the other person. Now that won’t help you unless the other person does the same thing, but at least you can be kind to whoever you’re talking to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now part of me is wondering if you did the reverse in terms of I put a giant can of Coca Cola just to really mess with their whole ….

Nick Morgan
You see that wicked thought, Pete, that comes from online communication. There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh man.

Nick Morgan
You’re prone to misbehave online.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m guilty. Well, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about a couple of your favorite things and see if there’s any new favorite things since last time?

Nick Morgan
Yeah, sure. I would just say one of the other quick fixes that I talk about, which I recommend very highly for anybody who has an ongoing team audio conference, that sort of arrangement, where you have people in Singapore and the US and Europe say and you talk to them all every week all the time and you need to keep an ongoing happy relationship with them.

Then at the beginning of every call, do the virtual temperature check is what I call it, where you ask them – think of a stop light, red, yellow, or green. You can also say amber if you like amber better, red, amber or green.

Red means “This is an awful day. There’s disaster. You probably should let me off this call.” Yellow means “I’m having a stressful day but I’m okay to be on the call, but cut me some slack.” Green means everything is great.

What you find is if you ask people just to do that simple check, they feel they have permission to do that, whereas often what happens on audio conferences is your world may be falling apart around you, but you get the … audio conference because you have to do it. It’s your job. You don’t feel comfortable saying online, on an audio conference like that, “Well, actually life’s awful right now and here’s what’s going on.”

That audio conference set up because it’s stripped of emotion, doesn’t give us the permission to do that typically. Audio conferences often get off to a bad start because half the team is missing in action literally or figuratively and nobody knows. Resentment builds up and misunderstandings build up.

This is a way of just getting clear and allowing whoever the team leader is to say if somebody does say red, say “Well, okay, sorry to hear that. Do you want to talk about it? Do you want to be let off the call? Shall I get back to you later? Do you want to have a side conversation?” It allows you just to handle that in a compassionate and thoughtful way.

Same with yellow. You can say, “I’m sorry that it’s not green. Do you want to talk about it or is it good enough that you can get along?” They’ll make a choice. Then do the same thing at the end of the call. It’s very quick. It’s easy to do. Yet it allows you to put some of that emotional connection back in that the internet and virtual communication has taken out.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nick Morgan
I always come back to “The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” That’s my favorite all time quote. I probably said that the last time, but I’m still – that’s still my all-time favorite quote.

I use that with clients all the time when we’re talking about asking does this speech have enough impact. Is it going to change the world? Of course, that means for a specific audience and specific moment. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be a politician announcing world peace or something like that. People can change the world in small but important ways.

I think it’s a great quote and a great test for any kind of public communication.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite book?

Nick Morgan
Favorite book, I just read the 12 Rules for Life, the Peterson book. I think that’s very thoughtful. It’s not that the 12 rules are so surprising. They aren’t. They’re basically the Golden rule and a few others of decent behavior to each other.

But what’s really incredible about that book is the discussion leading up to each of the 12 rules. It’s just very deep, thoughtful examination of human frailty and the nature of evil in the world and why we do the things we do and how we need to treat each other, just a very deep and important book I think. I got a lot out of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you.

Nick Morgan
Like I said, the rules won’t surprise you, but it’s the discussion that’s thoughtful and useful.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Nick Morgan
A favorite habit?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Nick Morgan
Besides coffee? Coffee and cookies. My new favorite habit is I’ve started to do more yoga and tai chi because tai chi is beautiful. It’s kind of like organized slow dance. I was never a very good dancer, so tai chi sort of gives me the illusion that I can kind of control my body in space.

My only fear about it is it doesn’t feel like much exercise. I’m not working up a sweat doing tai chi, but my tai chi instructor keeps telling me, “No, this is very good for you. This will be very good for your circulation and your balance and all kinds of good things.” I’ve really been enjoying tai chi. I recommend it highly, very good way to de-stress and to do a different thing than your normal day-to-day life, which involves much virtual communication.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Nick Morgan
PublicWords.com is our website, P-U-B-L-I-C-W-O-R-D-S. There’s a contact form on there. You can reach out or just shoot me an email at Nick@PublicWords.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Nick Morgan
Yes, I do. If you’re spending any kind of time communicating virtually, then I challenge you to think about how am I going to make clear what my intent is in these conversations and these communications and how am I going to give other people the respect to find out what their intent or reaction is.

It begins with asking yourself the question and asking other people around you the question, “How did what I just say make you feel?” and proceeding from there. But we need to put that respect and care for each other’s emotions and reactions back into virtual communication.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Nick, this has been a real treat. Thanks again for coming on back. I wish you tons of luck with Can You Hear Me? and all the good stuff you’re doing.

Nick Morgan
Pete, thank you so much. It’s always great to talk to you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.