Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan

With all this email changing hands, we should have all the information we need at our fingertips, right? But that’s not the case, not by a long shot. And the reason isn’t that we’re bad at email; the reason is that email is a completely inferior way to share information within an organization. It has three fatal flaws. First, email defaults to privacy rather than transparency. When you send an email, you have to decide in that moment who needs to know. Forget to include people who need it, and they’ll be clueless. Throw caution to the wind and blast everyone, and you’re wasting precious time and attention. Second, email is an information sinkhole. Sure, you might be able to find the email you need when you need it, but what about someone who never got it? What if a new employee joined your team today? Do they get the benefit of the thirty thousand emails buried in your inbox? What if you quit? What happens to all that information then? And finally, email is context free. Every email, regardless of whom it came from or how important it is, lands in your inbox in the exact same way. You want to know what it’s about? You have to read it. If you’re Seth Godin and you’re sending your thoughts to hundreds of thousands of people, send an email. If you’re trying to ensure information symmetry with a thousand trusted colleagues, you need a different approach.