It Seemed Brilliant at the Time
By Michael Schrage

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Sometimes I even bug myself. Electronically. Like Nixon but with fewer expletives. Or like Tripp but with less incriminating sex. Fortunately for me, my self-surveillance is legal, on the up-and-up, and absolutely essential to my work. Unfortunately, my current surveillance technologies--sorry, Sony!--are cumbersome, unwieldy, and time consuming.

I have zero interest in hearing myself talk; on the other hand, I'm exceedingly interested in seeing what I actually said. As the English novelist E.M. Forster once remarked, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" Malicious gossip aside, the most interesting workplace conversations tend to be those where smart people think out loud about questions that matter. Telephonic improvisations with colleagues or clients often yield the pithiest analyses. But who thinks to take notes during these chats? The very act of note taking corrupts the spontaneity. A smooth transcript of these kinds of collaborative interactions would offer a treasure trove of insight. Sure, there's bafflegab and blah blah blah, but that's what delete keys are for, no?

What people need--what would help make knowledge workers far more creative and productive--are tools that give them the chance to be caught in the act of thinking out loud. They need to see what they--and others--have said. I know I do. Every day, knowledge workers worldwide brainstorm over phone lines and in meetings, yet their very best comments are literally vanishing into thin air. Who hasn't hung up after a 40-minute phone call crackling with ideas to the unhappy realization that you can barely even remember the top two? How often have you been in that meeting where the participants spend a frustrating half-hour struggling to reconstruct that seven-minute stream-of-consciousness breakthrough?

If we could quickly, easily, and cheaply look at transcripts of phone conversations with colleagues or at design reviews with clients within minutes of their conclusion--and then be able to capture and highlight the comments worth preserving or sending on or enhancing or plugging directly into a presentation or report--white-collar work as we know it would be transformed. To be able to "interrogate" via computer the transcripts of one's workday interactions--to spot which ideas should be clustered together and what comments merit further development--would fundamentally change how we communicate with colleagues and clients. For the better.

By now, of course, everybody in a high-tech office knows somebody afflicted with tendinitis or a repetitive-strain injury who relies on the latest in voice-recognition technology to dictate work to their PC. Sadly, however, this "Dictaphone" mindset has utterly dominated both the design and adoption of voice-recognition technologies in the postmodern office. It's time for the technologists to recognize that the marketplace for the not-quite-real-time transcription of conversations is at least two orders of magnitude larger than the marketplace for enabling dictation. Think of what a McKinsey, a Goldman Sachs, or a $550-an-hour white-shoe law firm could do if it was able to build "transcript databases" that could be as searchable and editable as any other document in the firm. The ability to almost instantaneously turn a conversation or meeting into an actual information "product" holds a special appeal to any knowledge-intensive firm that depends upon human interaction to generate innovation.

As these "transcription technologies" come online in professional service firms, I'm totally confident that they will quickly become as integral to profitable communications as e-mail or intranets. Indeed, it's easy to imagine that (edited) transcripts will quickly become a major part of the content that these firms send on their networks. Rapid textual transcripts of acoustic conversations fall perfectly within the dominant trend of convergence: Capturing the spoken word should be as easy and essential as capturing the keystroked word. Digital technology is merging the two in ways that make both even more valuable.

What's really going on, however, is far more significant than the prospect of instant transcripts. In the same way that seeing a videotape of yourself swinging a golf club or making a presentation changes forever your mind's-eye image of yourself, a network's ability to visually present your words--raw and unvarnished--changes your perception of (successful) conversation.

Technological infrastructures aren't just becoming our infrastructures for innovation; they're rapidly evolving into "introspection infrastructures" as well. They're mirrors for seeing ourselves at work. As a general rule, an abundance of mirrors can make people self-conscious. That seems the clear destiny of technology in tomorrow's workplace. Will these nascent introspection infrastructures inhibit or enable the sorts of spontaneous conversation and collaborative interaction that make profitable innovation possible?

I had discussed a very clever answer to that very question with my editor, but unfortunately, neither of us was taping at the time. See what I mean?

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is a Merrill Lynch Forum Innovation Fellow and a research associate with the MIT Media Lab. He may be reached at michael_schrage@