The introduction of personal computers, followed soon after by electronic communication tools like email, transformed office collaboration into an ongoing, haphazard bazaar of asynchronous, back-and-forth messaging—a colleague asks you to handle something, you reply to clarify what he means, you then write another colleague to gather the needed information, but based on her response, you realize you don’t fully understand the task, so you send a new message to the original requester, and so on.
