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How many times have you wanted to kick a colleague under the table to get him to keep his big mouth shut during a sensitive meeting? Or, maybe more likely, how many times do you wish someone had kicked you? Well, technology is riding to the rescue, even for meetings that are held virtually, in so many locations you couldn’t possibly reach a colleague’s shins. Ready for the answer to this problem of galactic proportions? It was revealed during the negotiation of a large transaction with one of the bigger names in on-line commerce. During the negotiations, which took place on lots of conference calls that involved numerous people in all sorts of locations, my side of the negotiation noticed an excessive amount of clicking on computer keyboards as background noise. You know what I mean, that sound you hear when you are on the phone with someone and you know he is playing with the computer rather than paying attention to you (a sound that is getting to be one of the top 10 peeves of our modern digital society). It took awhile, but our team (ever alert) eventually figured out the other side was using America Online’s instant messaging to give itself really long legs. It was my 11-year-old son Michael who enlightened me. Michael, who is my personal digital consultant, has been observed using instant messaging to hold eight or more simultaneous conversations with buddies from school and around the world. Michael explained that instant messaging lets anyone send notes to any number of people in a predetermined group, as long as they are logged on to AOL (or are using another instant-messaging product) at the same time as the sender. The result is that messages pop up on recipients’ screens a moment after they are sent. Please do not ask me how it works. It just does. And the technology is available to mere adults, even lawyers. As our team (and Michael) realized, the other team was using notes to direct their side of the conversation, to gossip about our side, and generally to operate a back channel even as negotiations were going on—all much more effectively than if they had been in the same room. Pretty cute, huh? Technology gives you some other possible back channels. Just look at the kids in Finland, who tap out short messages on the tiny keyboards of their Nokia cell phones during class, to comment on the teacher or arrange a rendezvous. Or observe the corporate types who use two-way pagers to send each other messages, even if they are in the same room, to keep a running conversation going during a negotiation or any other type of meeting. But the keyboards on phones and pagers are too small to send much information quickly. They are really just useful for something short and sweet, like proclaiming that you have won at a surreptitious game such as buzzword bingo. (You know, the game in which some smart-aleck gives his friends bingo cards where each space has a favorite example of corporatespeak, such as "customer-centric," "net-net," and "incentivize." As a meeting progresses and many of the terms inevitably are uttered, whoever first fills in a full row needs some way to announce himself as the winner, without getting fired.) There is always the old-fashioned way people have used to develop back channels within a dispersed group—using second phone lines or cellular phones to talk to colleagues away from the all-hands conference call. This is clever, but there are usually too many people and not enough phone lines. It is just too sloppy. The AOL instant messaging is a far better idea—the best that has yet emerged. Actually, remember that 11-year-old I mentioned? The real solution for establishing a back channel during meetings may be to hire him before he raises his rates. The family could always use the cash.
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