Silicon Valley Musings

A month ago Robert came in to work and announced, “Office is Dead.” He went on to write. “Today I saw something that will totally transform my work life. SmartSheet. …. I’m going to use it to totally change how I work with other people.”

Well, It’s been a month. I am still using Microsoft Word and Excel almost every day. Are you all still using SmartSheet?

I would be surprised if you were. There are two reasons why. First, Microsoft Office does a pretty good job for what it was designed to do. There is very little benefit to be gained by switching to a different office productivity tool.

Switching to SmartSheet could be beneficial  if you “transformed” how you work. Changing basic human work habits its very, very hard. It is even harder when the benefits come only when a whole group of people changes their habits, all at the same time. It needs to be very easy, very useful, and or very enjoyable to do so.

Unfortunately for SmartSheet and similar products, the average information worker doesn’t perceive much benefit in collaborating. They have been assigned their particular tasks and they like being responsible for these tasks, ideally in their entirety.

If there is a collaborative step to a project, it is usually during the initial phase, a milestone, or the final phase where the efforts of several people are combined into a single project or presentation. This roll up is generally the responsibility of the project lead, editor, or manager. This is rarely done by consensus or in a collaborative setting.

So is this pattern of work due to the tools or human nature? I would say both. Collaboration is pretty difficult. IDEO is arguably one of the best companies in the world doing collaborative design. They have honed a process that fosters collaboration they call a deep dive.

IDEO’s staff are trained and hands on experience with the deep drive process. It is a skill some can learn to do very well, but in my experience is not one that comes naturally to all. It is also a fairly structured process limited to two or three days. Even IDEO’s design projects have large amounts of time where the designers use traditional office productivity tools while working independently on the ideas refined during the deep dive sessions.

So it SmartSheet dead? No. But neither is Microsoft Office.