Scaling Conversations

CHAPTER 5Why Are Conversations So Hard to Scale Online?

Prior to COVID‐19, global organizations and remote companies were already experienced in online communication for all aspects of business. Post‐COVID‐19, the rest of the world caught up. Quick. As the pandemic took hold across the planet, anyone wishing to collaborate with groups was forced to do so with technology. Video meetings, messaging apps, online conferences, social media, surveys, e‐learning, and all manner of group communications became the norm for every organization. Necessity is the mother of invention adoption. Companies providing online collaboration tools, such as Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and my company, ThoughtExchange, experienced an enormous increase in usage as leaders scrambled to find ways of bringing people together utilizing technology.

Whether organizations you are involved with have been conversing digitally for decades or only a single year, you have by now experienced all sorts of attempts at digital interactions to make up for the lack of face‐to‐face ones.

But more than just a replacement for a face‐to‐face interaction, the promise of online communication is enormous. Transcendent actually. The promise is far beyond the range of normal human experience. Software dramatically reduces, or removes, the limitations of space and time and cost; it allows any number of people to connect with each other's thinking instantly, in any language, in any location on the planet. It's both a painfully ...