Pocket Zeitgeist - le blog de Louis Morales-Chanard

Just read a depressing piece from Mumbrella documenting a shift in Australian media agencies: less chit-chat and zero tolerance for agenda-free interactions. Research by the local consultancy We Grow found that 41% of agency pros now default to email over conversation — up to 68% among junior collaborators.

You actually do not have to go down under to feel such a change. When is the last time you had a long, live, non-linear and non-transactional conversation at work?

In his book Cracker l’algorithme, my friend and strategist Laurent François documents how digital platforms intensify our every moment, cramming it with information and strong emotions. Since we lack time, we might as well fill each minute to the brim in a quest for performance. To that extent, having a free-flowing conversation certainly does not feel intense or productive enough.

There is a paradox here. Some podcasts run over three unstructured hours, we operate 20+ group chats across 5 different apps at any given moment and our days are essentially back-to-back meetings. Now, that’s I what I call conversation! However, none of these are live, non-linear and non-transactional at the same time.

The danger looming over good ol’ convos is not new. In 2015, the MIT professor Sherry Turkle published a book titled Reclaiming Conversation. Turkle spent decades studying technology’s impact on human behaviour and saw how digital and mobile gnawed away at our capacity for empathy, tolerating ambiguity, and building thoughts in the presence of another person.

The market has noticed the gap too. I came across a game in an Amsterdam gift shop which simply aimed at getting people to start conversations. Mind you, it was also presented next to a card game promising their owner to “train their brain” while in the loos.

Jokes aside, for organisations, what is at stake is not trivial. Conversation is a glu that binds people together. The sociologist Richard Sennett’s work on cooperation suggests informal exchanges serve functions no structured interaction can replicate. It is where trust is built and people develop a feel for how colleagues actually think. If you cut conversation time, you slowly but surely weaken relationships… and the very output of team work.

I know this might all sound romantic. But, I do think the intensification of work driven by AI will push this dynamic further and faster. Conversation that is not linked to a tangible deliverable will become unjustifiable. As a consequence, the possibility to sit with people and think out loud, without a clear outcome in mind, will be less common and, precisely because of that scarcity, more valuable.

Productless conversation, blending chit-chat, personal observations and debates will become a luxury, a marker of trust, taste and, ultimately, power. Let us try to preserve at all costs these live, non-linear and non-transactional safe space for ideas to bloom.