White-Canvas Day

"This is a communication session in a corporate setting. The company is a software development company with about 20 staff. It is a new company but is already famous for its creative solutions in the software applications.  The person speaking (me) is the CEO of the company and these are the employees."

A very good evening to all of you. Thank you for attending our quarterly employee communication session, and tonight, I am afraid I bring with me some discouraging news. Our company's productivity has been on a steady decline since the start of this quarter and by the time the books closed for this quarter, we are at an all-time low. I have called for an emergency meeting with the heads of department, and we discussed, debated and developed certain measures that need to be set in place to stop this, and turn the situation around.

There are many factors that cause the drop in productivity, but today we would like to tackle just one very important aspect, that is the loss of concentration. We all know that as software developers we need the "flow"... The flow of thoughts when our creative juice runs... We commonly call these moments “in the zone". For all of us to be effective creative productive workers, we need to enter this state of flow for several hours during which time, our productivity will skyrocket and we come up with the most creative codes that produce the award winning software that our company is well known for.  As such we spared no effort in minimizing noise disturbance around here, and have tried to provide the calm, quiet, conducive environment for our software developers to get into the zone to produce good quality work.

However, in the last few months our department heads have observed frequent disruption of work among us, and we believe that these disruptions have substantially contributed to the poor and sometime illogical programming that causes a lot of rework, retesting and reconstruction of the whole software. This delayed our production schedule and caused our company valuable time and resources. Thus we need to stop such disruption of work at all costs! In order to stop these disruptions we need to know the source of it, and I believe we do. Emails, ladies and gentlemen, emails! They are the culprit!

How many times you have to stop in the middle of a sentence when the "you have mail" notification pops up from our email? How many times you tell yourself “I can quickly reply this email and then get back to my programming", only to realize that you have already spent 3 hours on it before you get back to your flow of programming? Guilty? Guilty? Even I, guilty as charged. Yes I am not spared of this email victimization, and I submit to you I know your pain!

I would like to announce, with effect from today, the company is going to propose a “white-canvas” day once a week. This is a day where our IT department has been instructed to shut down our email system. Only the mail system will be shut down for a day, and everything else you need for your work, such as programming software and applications will be up and running as usual. This is the day where we can tore ourselves away from the enchanting “reply” button and start doing some really value-added work. This is the day where we all can feel free to indulge in our creative zone without the disruption of the annoying emails.

Scary? Can’t believe anyone of us can survive without email for a day? Allow me to assure you, yes you can! White-Canvas Day can work and will work better for all of us! Think of all the benefits of not being compelled to check emails? It is like a chain in your mind that suddenly gets unlocked and slipped off to the floor. We are now free to stay in our creative zone without being disrupted. We are now free to schedule face to face meetings to brainstorm and bounce off ideas from one another. We are now free to fill up the white space in our mind with brilliant, ingenious ideas and finally be able to give it rainbow colors to help boost our creativity.

White-Canvas Day will not only remove the unnecessary email disruption, it will also allow us to increase our productivity by having to work on only one task at a time. Contrary to what we all believe, multi-tasking is not the way to greater productivity. Studies have shown that – our brains can’t do even 2 independent things that require conscious thought, especially if those two things involve different goals. When you multitask, your mind move sequentially from one thought to another thought, and it takes time for our brain to do the switching.  Therefore, let’s use our brains the way they are meant to be, one task at a time. Give it 100% and do it well.

Now, I understand that some of you may still be doubtful. And so did I, when the department heads proposed White-Canvas Day to me. The immediate thought that came to my mind was - “how unproductive! Now I have to go talk to someone instead of sending him an email.” I am sure the same thought crossed your mind too! But think of it this way, emails has since eons ago replaced our face time with our colleagues, and reduced our precious human touch to mere words on the computer screen. It is now time to get up, go to someone and say “hey, let’s discuss.” And trust me, you might actually find it refreshing to discover the joy of human interaction.

My fellow colleagues, I hope tonight I have presented to you a compelling business case for change that stirred your hearts to embrace our proposed White-Canvas Day where emails are banned for the benefit of all of us – better concentration, 100% devotion to one task and increased interpersonal face time. I know it could be a huge step for all of us to take, but I am willing to take this step. Who will join me?

Thank you, TMD.

This is an Advanced Project from the Speech by Management Manual - Communicating Change. This is a hypothetical situation with a realistic setting. The hardest part of the speech was to coin an appropriate name for this 'day', and it was changed from white-space to white-canvas at the last minute. Evaluation - the whole scope of the change was not communicated clearly. Was it once a week and was it to last one whole day?