Distance

I looked over the plate of onion bhaji at Patrick. “I think I spent 4 hours of the flight from Beijing just do­ing email. You know what I no­ticed? I could feel it all week in Shang­hai, but I really picked up on it while fo­cus­ing… it was ever-so-slightly harder to care about all that stuff hap­pen­ing on the oth­er side of the plan­et in Cam­bridge. Even though its stuff we do care about in­tensely, it’s like… if it’s twelve time zones away, it’s just a little bit less … real. You know?”

We’d just spent an in­tense, en­er­get­ic week with the team in No­vartis Shang­hai, dig­ging in­to what’s go­ing on, listen­ing to sci­ent­ists, and ad­just­ing plans to sup­port Shang­hai’s grow­ing need. It’s amaz­ing, ex­cit­ing, and daunt­ing. I’m sure you’ve read about or ex­per­i­enced the things un­der­way in China - the ex­plos­ive growth, the massive in­vest­ment in in­fra­struc­ture, the chal­lenges of do­ing busi­ness in a slightly-less-than-straight­for­ward com­mun­ist/cap­it­al­ist en­vir­on­ment.

That’s all true, but for the en­tire week, the thing that was be­hind the scenes at all times is the huge time & space gap between No­vartis Shang­hai and the rest of us.

Here are a few things that we could feel eat­ing at us.

  1. Email waves. You wake up every morn­ing with a day full of email from Basel and Cam­bridge wait­ing for you. It’s a pretty rough way to start the day: you’ve got your stuff you planned to get done, but the en­tire world man­aged to un­load a full work day of com­mu­nic­a­tion at you. Ouch. It’s hard to get your head to­geth­er, to have a re­laxed break­fast or to go for a run when you know you have a dozen new fires just wait­ing for you.
  2. Work lag. As you’re work­ing through the day, everything is quiet. In the middle of the af­ter­noon, Basel be­gins to wake up… email starts pour­ing in, text mes­sages pick up. A few hours after you’ve stopped for the day and are be­gin­ning to fo­cus on the form­al din­ner you and all your col­leagues are at (and, by the way, is that food still mov­ing?) - Cam­bridge wakes up. Dam­mit! Even though you know it’s not true, it gives you this bizarre feel­ing that those guys over in the West don’t really work quite so much, really only get out at night, and have to both­er you all the time when you’re try­ing to re­lax after a long day at work.
  3. Bru­tal con­fer­en­cing. Every­one in Shang­hai who is part of some glob­al activ­ity - and that’s a lot of them - is on two to three glob­al phone or video con­fer­ences a week. At 8pm, 9pm… some­times 11pm or mid­night. Every­where in No­vartis, every­one does this every once in a while, but in Shang­hai, it’s a reg­u­lar part of the job – at least if you want to be able to work well with your glob­al col­leagues. It’s really hard on them.
  4. No in­stant com­mu­nic­a­tions. You get on Same­time or any oth­er glob­al in­stant mes­sage ser­vice, and it’s EMPTY. It’s a waste­land out there… or if you do see someone, they’re about to fall asleep. No way to get quick an­swers, no way to be part of the buzz.
  5. Simple de­cision lag. All of the above adds up to a situ­ation that feels like try­ing to run through really deep mud: dis­cus­sions that can get re­solved in 5 minutes if the par­ti­cipants are in the same place can take days or weeks. You send email. You get a re­sponse back dur­ing your night. You reply. You get a re­sponse back. Three days have passed, and it was just a quick give-and-take. So you stretch your work day to get some over­lap time, but that means stretch­ing in­to 5am or 9pm. All the time. Ooof.

The ob­vi­ous and easy re­ac­tion to all of this is to slowly dis­con­nect from the glob­al scene. What’s in front of you is real. What you can’t touch, and what’s SO HARD to con­nect with … well, it might be real, but it feels less im­port­ant. I mean, c’mon.. those guys don’t really un­der­stand what’s go­ing on over here, or what’s im­port­ant to get right, right now.

I am amazed that the Shang­hai com­munity is suc­ceed­ing so well at be­ing part of the glob­al NIBR com­munity. Des­pite all the chal­lenges of be­ing in China, des­pite all the chal­lenges of be­ing a new site in a com­plex glob­al com­pany, des­pite the time-and-space prob­lem. Amaz­ing and im­press­ive.

(This situ­ation, by the way, is not all that dif­fer­ent between Emeryville and Basel. How­ever, both sites are es­tab­lished, both sites have over­lap with Cam­bridge dur­ing work hours, and 9 hours is, in the grand scheme of time zones, con­sid­er­ably less than 12. Still, this ap­plies to them too.)

Here are a few things we who live in the lar­ger sites can do to help our col­leagues in Shang­hai. And Singa­pore. And Emeryville.

  1. Keep the faith. It’s so easy… so easy… to jump to con­clu­sions that someone on the oth­er side of the world doesn’t get it, doesn’t un­der­stand it, isn’t work­ing hard, isn’t cap­able, is work­ing at cross-pur­poses. Don’t do that. Time and dis­tance cre­ate amaz­ing gaps in what would oth­er­wise be per­fect align­ment. The folks on the oth­er side of the plan­et are work­ing as hard as you are and are over­com­ing tough­er align­ment chal­lenges. If you think things aren’t work­ing, give them the be­ne­fit of the doubt. Wait, be­lieve. Then, if you need to, give them a call. Late in your night.
  2. Put bet­ter in­form­a­tion on the web. Full pro­ject in­form­a­tion, plan­ning doc­u­ments, dis­cus­sions, in­ter­ac­tions, sum­mar­ies - the more that’s on the web, the bet­ter. We’ve all got a lot of work to do here. Sigh…
  3. Use per­sist­ent com­mu­nic­a­tion tools. In­stant mes­saging is handy, but dis­cus­sions van­ish when you fin­ish. If in­stead you use tools that keep dis­cus­sions around - tools like for­ums, dis­cus­sion boards, and logged mes­saging like Yam­mer or oth­er tools - then col­leagues from around the globe can jump in and par­ti­cip­ate in the world-wide dis­cus­sion. This is one of the many reas­ons why I be­lieve an in­tern­al tool like Face­book will make a huge dif­fer­ence to our glob­al ef­fect­ive­ness, and is why we’re push­ing so hard for the Sci­entif­ic Web. (This is a place where I would like to see NITAS get out in front and show oth­ers how to work in this way.)
  4. Share the time zone pain. Oc­ca­sion­ally do the late-night call on our time, not on China time. This is very tough to do when 95% of the callers are based in the US and Europe, but for 1:1 calls, ser­i­ously con­sider this.
  5. Lever­age European and Cali­for­nia over­lap. Ar­range pro­jects and sys­tems such that in­ter­ac­tions with Shang­hai can be done from Basel and Emeryville, where there is at least some work time zone over­lap.
  6. Re­cog­nize when in­clu­sion is needed. It’s easy to for­get, when sit­ting in Bo­ston, that people in Shang­hai need to be aware of dis­cus­sions and plan­ning. The sci­ent­ists and sup­port teams in Shang­hai have ex­actly the same chal­lenges, goals, and ways of work­ing that the rest of us do. We must re­cog­nize when we should reach out to in­volve them.
  7. Re­cog­nize when live par­ti­cip­a­tion isn’t needed. If you have reg­u­lar TCs or VCS that people in Shang­hai at­tend, but noth­ing is rel­ev­ant to them, then give them a break. Or let them send in an up­date via email. And don’t slide in­to the easy con­clu­sion that they aren’t really en­gaged or aren’t work­ing.

Patrick snagged an­oth­er bhaji and nod­ded sol­emnly. “Yep,” he said, “everything back home does feel a little less rel­ev­ant. It’s really in­ter­est­ing how that hap­pens. Tough on every­one.”

We watched the tour­ists stroll along the Singa­pore River and con­tem­plated the trop­ic­al rain­storm com­ing our way as you slept.