In the first section of this book, we looked at the way in which authentic outcomes can occur when a human being oversees a transaction, even if that transaction is aided by technology. Pairing that concept to our current topic creates a moment of powerful synthesis: immediacy paired with authenticity, just‐in‐time resources provided within a deeply human context.

Hopefully, you can begin to generate your own ideas around this synthesis and its driving question: What happens when a human gesture shows up at the precisely right time for someone?

For us, two of our favorite examples come from the world of Slack (a communication platform), 18F (a user‐experience design firm that partners with government agencies), and Lyft, a ride‐share service. It should be noted that none of these “research subjects” knew one another and that it's highly doubtful that they were all reading the same playbook or attending the same professional development conferences. From what we could tell, they all came to value and practice immediacy by paying attention to the people they served, whether that was a customer or an employee. (Like good progressive teachers, then, they were using the needs of learners to figure out what to do with their “classroom” time.)

Train Systems to Be Immediate

At the time of our writing of this book, Slack described itself as a “cloud‐based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services” (Slack, 2018). In essence, it created seamless digital communication, allowing teams (like Nico's, described earlier) to work effectively in a distributed manner. It also worked well for nondistributed companies that wanted to bundle their internal communications in a single environment. 18F was “an office of federal employees with the General Services Administration that collaborates with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve how government serves the public through technology” (18F, 2018).

In a blog post, Maya Benari, who worked for 18F, explained how to “hack inclusivity” within Slack's burgeoning communication channels. Since the digitization of communication made possible by Slack also made possible, programmable, and repeatable an educational intervention, one geared to making workplaces more inclusive, Benari and her team saw a chance to make a simple and important training point more immediate.

Before looking closely at Benari's intervention, let's take a step back to create some imagined context. Let's assume that, as a leader of a company, you begin to sense that your company is not doing all that it can to help women thrive. Perhaps you have heard from some women about perceived limitations around promotions. Perhaps you have done some studies to find that women are not compensated as well as men. Perhaps you have received a complaint about harassment. Perhaps you simply have been paying attention to the news and decided to make some changes in an arena that you can control. Perhaps you have been talking honestly with some of the men in your office and come to a conclusion that, indeed, the workplace is slanted in their favor and needs to be reset. And, due to one or more of these instances, you have decided to take action.

After considering the issues further with your executive leadership team, typical moves at this point could include: a speech from the CEO or an executive, a speaker or consultant and a workshop for all employees, recurring visits by someone from an HR department, case‐study work, surveys, formal policy shifts, and so on. All of that adds up to traditional teaching and learning measures with the hope that the training sticks, behavior changes, and the workplace improves.

All of that can be useful and often is necessary. But it can fall short if it doesn't do the deep work of helping employers to address their company's blind spots and some of their micro‐level behaviors. Because, after all of those trainings, workshops, guest speakers, and policy changes, residues of bias can linger, and those residues, over time, can demonstrate to your employees an asymmetry between mission and what matters – the day‐to‐day work, action, interactions, and output of a company. An asymmetry between talk and walk. A negative, creeping form of immediacy that appears just in time to remind people of a gap between understanding and action.

An example of an added measure, assuming your company uses Slack or something like it to manage internal communications, comes from Benari, to whom we now return. In the blog post referenced earlier, she describes a method to program the Slack environment to send a gentle reminder to users anytime they fall back on language that works against the company's diversity and inclusivity efforts.

[We] noticed people saying the word “guys” to describe groups of people in our internal Slack chat rooms. Not a terrible error, but we want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace where people use more inclusive language. (Benari, 2016)

Having identified the problem, and being aware of a solution that would address it every time without the need for further human intervention, they “customized Slackbot's auto‐responses to respond automatically with different phrases if someone uses the words ‘guys' or ‘guyz.'” The bot would pop up automatically with alternative phrasings from which to choose: “Did you mean team?” or “Did you mean y'all?”

Here's what it looks like in action.

Benari's blog post then went on to unpack the move it described. Its authors did not want to make anyone feel bad. But they did want to step into the middle of an automated behavior, to interrupt a habit that many, many people have. Many people, when they address groups, use the word “guys.” On the flipside, if they instead addressed a group as “gals,” they would immediately feel a slight tension. It's better to choose a word that won't isolate the gender of anyone in the room.

According to Benari (and all points with which we agree), this kind of attention to the finer points of language is necessary:

[We] cultivate an inclusive culture by valuing, respecting, and supporting the needs of every individual. It's important to listen to voices from a range of backgrounds, races, locations, gender identities, income levels, ages, and levels of experience. This ensures that every person feels comfortable to be themselves at work. (Benari, 2016)

This kind of thing can't replace the other intentional work mentioned above – the training sessions, the aligning of company talk and behaviors to new norms, the rethinking and revision of policies, the ongoing collection of data to ensure that things are really changing. But it's a powerful partner to that work – a reminder that, on the most granular level, the very sentences we use to loop humans together should reflect the highest intentions and aspirations of the company. We all have blind spots; it would be awkward to continually point them out in person; Benari's solution sidesteps that, automating something respectful of humans in a manner that is also respectful to humans.

We noticed that Lyft made a similarly automated move – for a seemingly similar purpose of reducing some of the rough edges around diversity and inclusion work and so allowing that work to flourish.

This simple “inclusivity hack” allowed someone deaf or hard of hearing to contribute seamlessly to an occupation by interrupting and repurposing the typical, most likely unchosen, norms of that occupation. If customers were used to calling their Lyft drivers on a cell phone, then the company might not be able to hire someone who could not respond in that instance. By shifting the channel – to text‐based messaging – at the outset, certain problems dissolve. The driver benefits; the customers gets what they thought they were paying for, in terms of service; and the company and the industry benefits by being able to hire the best drivers rather than the people with the best hearing capacity. Win‐win‐win.

Ignore Immediacy at Your Own Peril

As we tie more of our work, interactions, and transactions together with technology, we're generating more “pop‐up” type experiences. First, we want you to know that such things are possible, and we want you to notice them in your lives. Second, we want you to know that, just because such things are possible, doesn't mean that all examples are beneficial to either the recipient or the sender. If you're going to employ immediacy, make sure it reflects your (or your company's) values, mission, and beliefs. Make sure it feels human and additive rather than merely efficient. Seth Godin's “permission marketing” rule should still be in effect (Godin, 1999).

At the same time, if you're going to sidestep or ignore immediacy‐based solutions, make sure your silence isn't speaking too loudly. Here's the problem with immediacy in general, and the earlier examples in particular: we know they exist. We know they are possible. Increasingly, your employees will know they are possible. The fact that you can program a bot in a communication platform within your work environment to say anything in response to certain language (e.g., unnecessarily gendered or intentionally hateful) means you probably should, especially if you start to notice that such language exists in the environments that you allow to flourish at your workplace. So you can preset the immediacy with intentionality, with authenticity.

Such a move could certainly get out of hand or start to lose its authentic feel. You can't just set these things and forget them. You have to monitor them, check in with the people they affect, so that even when delegating work to bots you keep your human fingers on it.

As immediacy moves from a nice‐to‐have to a need‐to‐have, from a distant frequency of leadership to a core dimension, the leader doesn't have to know everything about it or even how to leverage it him or herself…but knowing that it is possible, and knowing how to ask questions around it or promote it – or pay for it – is a necessary instinct.

Communicate in Immediate Environments

Let's work our way through some examples to demonstrate, and train, what the immediacy instinct can look like from the granular level to the global level.

Here is something you might be missing, or skipping, in your efforts to communicate with others so as to build their understanding (another name for teaching). In a text‐based environment, it is often possible to know when someone else has received your message. Either your message changes color or a read receipt is triggered or you see three bubbles pop onto your phone's screen to indicate that someone is typing a response. As the sender, then, more immediate information is available to you. As the recipient, on the flipside, more immediate information is available about you as you scroll through endless messages, ignore some, react to others. The ways in which immediacy has been baked into some SMS and email systems, then, affects the continuing communication transaction in which you are seeking to engage.

Here is why that matters:

Say, for example, you were riding on a subway toward the airport at the start of a three‐day business trip. Freed up from your usual grind, you had a new idea, one you thought was possibly brilliant. Excited, you pulled out your phone and texted your manager – the idea of email did not seem immediate enough, at least from your perspective.

Even more excited, you saw that your manager received your message and apparently reviewed it, because text bubbles appeared. She was responding.

Then she was not responding. For some reason, she pulled back, erased whatever she had composed, and moved on with her day.

As you hustled toward your connection, you kept checking your texts each time you had a moment or delay, eager to see if she had responded.

When, after several days, your text, your brilliant idea, remained unanswered, you would be forgiven for doing what even the most optimistic among us might do – totally and completely question the original idea. It's not uncommon for humans to fill empty space with worst‐case scenarios; that's how many of us are wired. By the time you walked back into the office after your trip, you might be nursing a sense of embarrassment, if not dread.

Now let's pretend you're the boss who received the text. You took the time to read it. That much is known by the sender. You knew the sender was going to be out of the office for a few days. Regardless of whether you loved the idea or hated it, were in the middle of an emergency or had plenty of time, the least – and also probably most – you would have had to do in this situation to keep the communication loop feeling positive, was to write a quick text in response: “Thx, swamped, let's meet on this when you return.” Or, “Nice idea. Set a meeting with me when u can 2 discuss.” And if you wanted to be really positive, you could throw in a “have a nice trip.”

As a receiver of information, especially if you're in a position of power, you have to be aware of the ways in which immediacy changes the communication game, even if ever so slightly. Anyone who has ever been managed, successfully or unsuccessfully, knows that small gestures add up. EQ in a manager often matters more than IQ. And much about communication has not changed – except that it has been magnified, made articulate and immediate.

People have always had an expectation that others with whom they are communicating will close loops. People have always wanted to be heard, even if the listener ultimately disagrees with them. These are baseline expectations. Human expectations.

People's digital markers have evolved, telling them when their leaders and colleagues are closing loops or listening. As a communicator, being aware of such markers, and how your actions or nonactions might be interpreted within such communication contexts, is part of mastering the communication game. At the very least – and often at the very most – if you're not ready to respond to a text or even email, you can acknowledge it and let other people know an estimated time for a response or a timeframe for review. Even if it's going to take you a week, naming the silence is often better than letting it fester, especially if you're in a position of power. “I'll be able to give this attention next week. Thanks for sending.” How long would it take you to write and send that?

Less granularly, and as a devotee of immediacy, Reshan handled communication within his company with immediacy at the forefront of his mind. As someone who respected his colleagues enough to try to give them information at the highest point of impact rather than simply when he wanted to move it off his desk or mind, Reshan made very conscious choices about his communication practices. As the leader of an organization that rarely met in the same room (and really, what organization, these days, does?), he could not simply think about the message he wanted to send; he also had to think about how he wanted to send it, through which channel. And, what's more, he had to think about how the choice of channel would impact the content of the message itself. All channels have affordances; all channels have limitations.

And finally, we come to an even wider application: the flipside of immediacy, where all communication is crisis communication. Where, because of immediacy and its tools, stories can whip around the world almost as soon as people experience them.

Manage Crises Born of Immediacy

The tools of immediacy have altered the environment, and the muscle, of crisis communication. While schools and companies want their actions to reflect their missions, stumbles and silences off mission can and do happen and are often magnified, shared, and discussed on a mass scale. The communications around these stumbles – or lack of communications in the case of silence – can change perceptions of stakeholders, shareholders, and/or clients and customers.

The management of all of the above has shifted, too. It's not just about getting back on mission. It's about getting back on mission in a way that others, within and outside your company, can see when they are considering a transaction with your company. It's about rebuilding or reclaiming an understanding in the most unknowable and unpredictable of spaces – the minds of others. It's about – what so much of your business is about – teaching your way back to symmetry, whether it is symmetry between what a buyer understands and what a seller understands, between what a chief learning officer knows and what a workforce knows, or between the CEO's intentions and the public's reception.

We spoke to Keri Potts, senior director, PR for college sports, ESPN, to help us understand the broadest possible implications of immediacy on communication. Steady, funny, honest, and with deep roots in the PR industry, she was particularly qualified to comment on a peculiar modern inversion of a crumbling axiom about change and sameness: the more things stay the same, the more they change.

According to Potts, there was a time when there were rules about how to handle your company's public relations needs. A clear strategy or goal could be executed based on an industry accepted cadence and rollout.

There used to be a known element of newspapers, filed at 5 o'clock. That was your opportunity. If you missed that deadline, then you had another day to work on whatever it was that they were coming at you with. A lot of newspaper reporters would call you at 4:30 or 4:45 and tell you that you had 15 minutes. (Potts, personal statement, 2018)

Such consistency allowed PR to be managed in a way that was thoughtful, even civilized. You could pick the time, path, and placement of your communication. You could decide which audience would see it, and when. You could decide these things, according to Potts, based on whom you wanted to “influence, convince, or bring on board.” Then, when you were ready, you issued the press release or provided the information.

With immediacy, and the tools of immediacy at many people's disposal, everything has changed. The cadence has changed. Thoughtfulness is a luxury – one rarely enjoyed.

Potts explains simply: “Everyone on Twitter is a quasi‐news person now; everyone is a town crier.” There are pros and cons to this commingling of professionalism with amateurism. It's good that stories about company misbehavior get out, for example. It's good that we hear about executive decisions that, at one time, might have floated below the public radar. As customers of certain companies, we want to know about the way they handle issues that matter to us, so that we can decide if we want to continue to spend our money there.

But regardless of the merit of some of the stories that gain wider exposure – and there are plenty – many stories are launched with “no vetting and without the traditional ways we have been taught.” This leads to not only an erosion of a cadence, which can be downplayed as a mere convenience, but also to an erosion of ethics and integrity, which can never be downplayed. Potts explains further:

The thing with immediacy that has changed in my industry is having to let go of the foundation that so many of us were brought up with. That is, doing things the right way – everything from getting people on‐board, agreeing with the message and how you are going to approach it, [and thinking about] what is responsible, what is ethical – all those kinds of things. If you try to hold onto that now, it is the scenario of, “the operation was a success, but the patient died.” (Personal statement, 2018)

When pressed for ways around this or out of it, Potts acknowledges that the work is difficult, if not impossible. Fact finding, by definition and design, is slow. Organizing executives and building consensus, in any particular company, is even slower. While you're busy doing your work thoroughly and well, “public opinion is off and running.” So, in some cases, you simply have to weather the storm; you simply have to wait until the news cycles catch onto another story and yours fades from view.

During the weathering, though, silence is rarely the best option. It's simply too loud. Potts continues:

When you're silent for a long time, there is a belief that there is some kind of conspiracy or you are hiding something. It is the weirdest thing to me that it is an admission of wrongdoing instead of [a sign that you are] taking time to get things right.

Which returns us to the miniscule, the granular. Think of those three dots that show an individual that you are in the process of replying to a text, one‐to‐one. This is the same thing, on a broad scale, when you represent your company, one‐to‐many. People see the dots. They see you typing. They are waiting for your text. They have an expectation that you are going to close any loop that's been ripped open. If you don't respond…or stop responding…or only half respond…they're going to notice. They're going to, at that point, fill in the blanks themselves, telling the story that most suits their purposes.

And, as mentioned earlier, there are small moves that work in the one‐to‐one situation; writ larger, they also work in the one‐to‐many situation. Potts concludes:

If you get an inquiry that is about something that you cannot get to, that you cannot do quickly, at least say “We were just made aware of this. This is an extremely serious topic. We ask for patience so we can get it right.” (Personal statement, 2018)