Collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Slack have become part of the day-to-day operations of many businesses. With the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerating the adoption of collaboration tools, more and more companies now look to adopt other technology to integrate with these systems to avoid learning entirely new software.
In this episode, we chat with Phil Simon, future of work guru and author of multiple books, including ‘Reimagining Collaboration’, on the importance of embracing collaboration tools within the workplace, how best to use them and how other technology that integrates with tools such as Teams and Slack can further benefit businesses.
Tom Dunlop:
Hello and welcome back to the Summize Legal Disruptors Podcast. I am Tom Dunlop, the co-founder and CEO of Summize. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Phil Simon, one of the world's leading independent experts on workplace collaboration and technology. So, Phil's a keynote speaker, award-winning author of 14 books and most recently The Nine, which is the Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace. And today we're talking about all thing's collaboration. It's a subject very close to my heart and Summize, and certainly how businesses can ensure their teams are collaborating successfully and why that's so important. So welcome to the podcast, Phil.
Phil Simon:
Tom, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to our chat.
Tom Dunlop:
No problem. So first, I guess just to set the scene, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, how you got to where you are today?
Phil Simon:
I've written a bunch of books and resources, and I wasn't terribly good at it. I was much more about data and technology and historically those attributes haven't really been synonymous with your typical human resource department. But yeah, over the last, oh gosh, 25 years, I've spent most of my career around enterprise technology. Even when I was a college professor, I forced my students to use Slack. My colleagues wouldn't use it as much. And that was also frustrating because I taught in the information systems department and this wasn't poetry or English literature, this was tech. So, I joke that I write a lot of my books out of frustration or at least my desire not to see a therapist.
Tom Dunlop:
It's nice. It's a good outlet. It's a creative outlet. I like it.
Phil Simon:
Catharsis.
Tom Dunlop:
Yeah, nice. Well, I guess jumping into certainly a book that I've looked at, which is the Reimagining Collaboration, something which will be the predominant topic for today. What that really highlights is, I guess the rise of collaboration tools with Teams and Slack as you just mentioned, certainly following the COVID pandemic. So, I guess, just give us a bit more color around where that came from, whether that was the frustration that led to writing that book? And certainly I guess what you noticed around the pandemic era around this prominence of these collaboration tools?
Phil Simon:
Yeah, the tools have been popular for a long time. I'm old enough to remember Internet Relay Chat back in the late '80s, proceeded Skype and the basic building blocks around the contemporary collaboration tools. But we were using them before lockdown, but like e-commerce and a bunch of other trends, online learning, the pandemic accelerated it. And I'm a data guy, so when I was working on Slack for Dummies in late 2019, I want to say that Slack had about 10 million primarily of business users. And when we started to work from home, and the Zoom numbers went from, oh gosh, 10 million to about 200 million in March of 2020 and then 300 million in April of 2020, it just became obvious that these tools were going to explode. In fact, Microsoft which had tried to buy Slack back in 2016 or 2017, eventually just said, we'll just build our own tool.
Even though they had built, as we were talking before the pod, collaborative tools like SharePoint, even buying Yammer for I think it was $1.2 billion back in, I think it was 2012. So now Microsoft Teams, last time I checked is over 300 million users. But Tom, as I was writing Slack and Zoom for Dummies, it became obvious to me that the tools had so much more power to them. So Slack is not just email 2.0, Zoom is not Skype 2.0. There's so much you can do with these tools, particularly around integrations.
And that's when in Reimagining Collaboration, it dawned upon me that we were thinking about collaboration all wrong as a bunch of these disparate tools that weren't connected. And Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, all of these, what I call collaboration hubs, make it very easy to connect what I call spoke. So, you're still going to use a project management tool, whether it's Asana or Monday or there are a million others. You're still going to use content creation tools, whether that's Canva, whether that's Microsoft Word or Google Docs or something. So, stitching them together to form one single gestalt, to me offered so many benefits and we can get into them, but that's the book at a sort of 30,000 foot level.
Tom Dunlop:
No, that makes sense. And I think you touched on an interesting point there, which is probably what a lot of people don't necessarily think of with these tools, which is that I hear it a lot, particularly from the legal side of things, where I think the perception might be email is better because it's a lot more of a traceable, you can search and they, I guess see Teams and Slack as being a replacement for email.
In terms of the kind of spokes and the collaboration, and I guess we talk about the legal front door and the legal world, which is I guess the interception between the business and the legal team and that being how they interface with legal. In terms of this hub, what do you think is the potential there? Do you think that everyone will be using these kind of Teams and Slack and Zoom tools and that will be the start of the computer in the morning and they'll go into these hubs and then from there, they'll access the different spokes that they need, but they'll always come to these central places, so it's a lot more than email?
Phil Simon:
That's the goal. I suspect though that there's still plenty of folks resisting using Teams, using Slack, nevermind the integrations and forget what I think as Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft when he was talking about Teams a couple of years ago, I think it's when they announced Project Viva, and now of course their focus is on AI with ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. But Nadella saw Teams as basically the operating system for work. So rather than Windows or Mac OS, or Linux open-source alternative, basically that would be the layer in which you spend most of your time. It doesn't mean that you don't need a CRM or an ERP system or different product lifecycle management tools, you do, but fortunately you can connect hubs to spokes very easily. Many times, there's a native app or integration.
So, Asana is a perfect example. You can install the Asana app for Slack for Microsoft Teams digital for tools like Notion and Coda last time I checked. But if there isn't a native integration, then you can use third party tools, some of which I discussed in my book, Low-Code/No-Code. So Zapier, Make (formerly Integro...) I forget the name of it, now it's Make. Even Microsoft with Power Automate. So, there are ways to stitch them together without really knowing how to code. And if there really is a legacy system or something particularly bespoke or custom, you can always have your developers or hire developers to build a third-party integration using the vendor's application programming interface or API. So, there's really no excuse for using all these tools in a disparate manner. In fact, if you look at their research around what Slack has been putting out lately around automation and productivity, in part spurred by all this hubbub about generative AI, these tools.
Tom Dunlop:
So, I guess picking up on the point around certainly if that's going to be the central place where people access the workplace and essentially have these spokes that go off to different applications. If you are, I guess, it's probably the same question, but if you are sat on the kind of customer side and you're looking for potential solutions to a particular problem that you have, so you're looking for one of these applications, how important is it that those applications, I guess have an existing integration into those tools? And do you think that should be, I guess, a key criteria for evaluating potential vendors if you are on the company side?
Phil Simon:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, to me, if there's truly something out there that meets this very distinct business need and it doesn't integrate, you might just basically have to deal with it. But if you give me the choice between two tools that perform the same purpose, let's say it's for document creation. So I'm a big fan of, have you heard of Notion?
Tom Dunlop:
Yes. Yeah.
Phil Simon:
Big fan. And I love the integration with Slack and I'm sure it integrates with my Microsoft Teams, even though I'm more of a Slack guy. Now, there are other tools. Let's say that you've built an internal one that's got years and years of knowledge and just moving over to a new tool would be too cumbersome or expensive. Okay, I could understand the point for doing that, but if you were certainly adopting a new tool and notion integrated natively with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, whatever, and tool X did not, yeah, for me, that would be a deal breaker. Because it's not just a matter of convenience, I would argue that it's a matter of the way the organization views itself. Do you want to be this standalone entity that exists in this independent silo, or do you make it easy to play with other tools? And I think Zapier is a great example though.
Zapier is basically saying, we will help you stitch together thousands of different apps in all sorts of creative ways because there just is a lack of programmers, very much so. I don't know about the UK, but certainly in the US it's a big issue and AI will alleviate some of that. But there are all sorts of issues around that we can get into. So yeah, if I were starting a software company, I'd think long and hard about trying to be an island, because the need to integrate with these other tools is essential. There was an Okta study that I saw a couple of years ago researching, I think it was the Project Management book. And they found that their average customer used about 88 different apps and web services. And in the case of large organizations it was double that. So, imagine having to maintain different usernames and passwords, but apart from that, if three different parts of the organization use three different storage tools or communication and collaboration tools, that's three different licenses, that's all sorts of issues around renewing agreements and costs.
And just finding basic documents is something that we continue to struggle doing. So, I would rather pick one single powerful, integrated, contemporary tool, even if that meant moving off of a legacy one that had no plans to play with these other tools. I'm a big believer that we should stitch them all together and make the context switching and the "multitasking," I put that in quotes, much more manageable for people. Because by the end of the day, and there's plenty of neurological research behind this, we're just fried.
Even though we're working from home, we're bouncing back and forth. I mean, I read some statistics that we switch apps sometimes 200 times a day. That's just not... Your brain just wasn't meant for that. So if we can keep a lot of our information in one place, yeah, we're still going to use different apps, you're not going to be able to do everything in Microsoft Word or Google Docs or Excel or whatever inside of Slack or Microsoft Teams. But if I could switch five times an hour as opposed to 25 times an hour, I do think that I'll be more productive and less burned out.
Tom Dunlop:
Yeah, it's a great point. And I think that you've hit on one of the things which is software is meant to be, I guess, make people more efficient. And I think the sheer number of applications and how they're all been set up, essentially as islands is having the complete opposite effects of efficiency. It's actually causing a huge lag on efficiency because of the number of tools in the majority of cases. And just-
Phil Simon:
I mean, there's so many benefits to sticking with one tool. It could become challenging when you're dealing with third parties because they might not have a license board, but Slack and Microsoft Teams offer the ability, whether it's through Slack Connect or inviting guests to basically share channels or team spaces or workspaces. So there really isn't a good reason to pretend like it's 1995, the world on so many levels isn't going back.
Tom Dunlop:
Well, I guess on that point, because one of the favorite bits of the book that you spoke about, which is very relevant for I guess, ourselves as a software vendor dealing with change in people in an organization that may be resistant to change. I love the names of Holdout, Henry and Emily, the email addicts, which are two of the personas that you mentioned in your book. I guess, talks to me a little bit about some of these personas and I guess, ways that you can, I guess, convince these people to move to this new, I say new world, in this case, it's been around for a while, but this way of working.
Phil Simon:
Yeah, the personas are all fictionalized versions of people I met in real life. I changed the name so I wouldn't get sued. But yeah, there are lots of folks who resist using new tools in general. And when it comes to communication and collaboration, a lot of us over the years have developed very email centric systems. And with, I think it was Emily, the email addict who was a woman who worked with me when I was a college professor. And we'd have to update our syllabi and we're talking about thousands of professors each teaching multiple courses. And she would just email people updates sometimes two or three times a week. And the better approach would have been to have every professor point to the same text on the university website, and then you can make whatever changes you want. But by forcing professors to make these changes, even if it took three to five minutes per change, you're talking about thousands of professors and that isn't very collaborative, it's a very old school way of thinking. In terms of getting people to change. Therein lies the challenge.
For a long time, Tom, I had this very simplistic three-pronged view of the world. There are folks that get it. Clearly, you're in that boat, you and I would get along swimmingly. There are folks who don't get it but want to get it. And I love those folks, because they're open to new ways of doing things. When I lived in Las Vegas, I bought a home for the first time with some land, and I didn't know anything about landscaping. So, I found a landscaper, 55-year-old guy, very nice guy, knows a lot about landscaping, but his website had been built in 1997 and looked like it. This was back in 2011. So, I said, "Jeff, why don't you knock a couple of thousand dollars off the price of the landscape and I will build you a responsive, contemporary cool website." So, we did. And then I remember he came over one day to check the trees or something, but he brought a WordPress book and he said, "I had some questions about embedding a YouTube video in the sidebar."
I love that. To me, you're never too old to learn. So those folks are great because they're basically saying, "Show me a better way and I'll listen." The folks that I want to avoid. The third group are those that don't get it and won't get it. So, in terms of change management, if you've identified those folks in your team, it's probably time to have a serious conversation with them. I'm not talking about someone who forgets to tag someone in a Slack channel, I'm not talking about someone who posts something in the wrong channel because we all make mistakes. I'm talking about employees who are willingly defiant. Also, when I lived in Vegas, I spoke with a startup owner, and he said he had to fire a new hire because she just would not get off of email. And he explained to her consistently, "We all use Slack."
"This is where work happens." To quote one of Slack's credos. So, either basically get on board or get out, and she had to get out. So ideally, you're finding folks, and even when you interview, as I write in the Project Management book, someone can say, "Oh, I'm very collaborative." What else are you going to say when ask the question. But give them a project, do the interview over a tool like Teams or Slack or correspond with that person. If that person doesn't use the new tools during the recruiting process, when they're ostensibly putting their best foot forward, what does that mean when they get the job in two months and they say, "Yeah, I don't do that."
I do think that the title Reimagining Collaboration is a pretty apropos because we're collaborating with folks, we're not working independently. This notion that I'm going to use whatever tools I want, I think bring your own device, BYOD sort of ushered in that error. But there are all sorts of benefits to using the same tools and all sorts of costs, things like security and creating alternate versions of the truth cost as well, of using these different tools. So, it's not the longest book, but I think the concepts in it still apply today because we're still struggling with change in management, particularly as we try to figure out hybrid work.
Tom Dunlop:
Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think this plays into the next question a little bit as well, which is, I guess you could look at Teams and Slack in isolation today and how they function and how that can improve collaboration. But with the advent of things like Copilot with Microsoft Loop, for example, which is a huge, I guess, forward thinking initiative to do with collaboration across these platforms, what do you think the future looks like? So, I guess, trying to get these people on board to I guess, the status quo, what people understand today. But paint that picture for if you don't get on board today, in five years' time, this is what it'll look like. What's your view as to what that'll look like? I like the reference to a salesperson in 2028 in the book as well about this, about a day in the life almost of what will it be like?
Phil Simon:
Yeah, I've been around technology for a long time. I got my first computer when I was 12, a long time ago. And if you stick around, you can observe trends and no, I can't predict the future, I won't tell you some of the horrible decisions I've made around selling certain stock. I don't like to think about that too much. But I mean, in that it would get acquired. I thought it would be Apple because it's got a similar design aesthetic, and Tim Cook is very much pushing Apple beyond hardware and into services and software. Salesforce of course bought it, but I wasn't wrong on that one. So, I'd like to think that I've got a relatively educated viewpoint about where these things are going, and certainly my brand is all about collaboration and workplace tech.
So, the tools will get smarter. We can unpack that if you want, but whether it's open AI or Slack, GPT or Claude from Anthropic, I mean these bots already exist and I feel pretty good about in chapter 15 of Reimagining Collaboration, kind of putting on my swami hat and saying, "How does this all play out?" And I do think that the more that people use these tools, remember Slack is a pretty generic acronym for Searchable Log of All Communications and Knowledge. People don't realize that. It becomes smarter when you put more into it. So as a perfect example, if you and I worked together for 10 years and I'm typing a DM to you in Slack, then maybe I'm going on too long and go, "You know what? You may want to stop right here because Tom doesn't read messages this long or a video would be better." That's why something like Slack Clips. Makes sense. In fact, I don't know if you saw this, but a couple of days ago Zoom dropped basically the same product Zoom Clips.
So, all these tools are converging. If one vendor, Microsoft, Zoom puts out a killer feature, other vendors will integrate it. That's pretty standard, and that's been around for decades. That's basically a me too or copycat philosophy. They'll also get more integrated. So additional integrations, If Slack's got Workflow Builder, but they blew up their platform about a year ago to make it even easier for non-developers to create their own bespoke apps or mini apps inside. And I think they'll get more integrated. So maybe there's a future in which you don't need a tool like Zapier quite as much because these third-party apps integrate more natively.
But they certainly won't stand still, and I'm excited to see what they'll come out with. When I was writing The Nine, I discovered how augmented and virtual reality or mixed reality are making training even better. And the notion that we're doing this on Microsoft Teams, that this is the best we can do is, of course, absurd. I'm sure there will be ways in the future around whether it's mixed reality or augmented or virtual reality to make these immersive experiences even more real, because as I'm sure you'd agree, hybrid work is here to stay.
Tom Dunlop:
Yeah, no, definitely. And I really like the point that you could almost predict, or you could almost educate people that the best way of communicating with other people, either in the business or externally due to that conversation history and that learning that's gone on. I think that's a really powerful concept, that it not only becomes, I guess a facilitator to a collaboration, but it actually becomes almost an advisor on how to collaborate based on previous behavior-
Phil Simon:
Or something that can identify distant early warnings. So, let's say that you and I used to communicate a lot and then I'm not as active on channels or I don't vote in polls. Maybe that's a sign that I'm starting to disengage and I'm not happy with something. And there are analytics in Slack, of course they're going to get better over time, even with Microsoft, with Teams and Viva, the whole point was to basically help you run your workplace because we're overworked, we can't observe every trend, and no AI isn't perfect, but maybe it could provide nudges to employees or nudges to managers or HR folks that, "Hey, we have a potential problem here." If there's perhaps a toxic discussion going on in one of the channels or just potentially a breach or something like that.
So, the possibilities are limitless in my opinion. They don't replace the need for talking to people in person on occasion, but I'm no expert on large language models, I know a decent amount based over the last year or so. But to me it's important to keep as much information as possible in the hub. That way your AI will be that much more intelligent and less generic. That doesn't happen if you're using 26 different tools to collaborate.
Tom Dunlop:
No, totally. And if you were, I mean it is a bit of a essential random question, but if you were the helm of a business or you mentioned a person that actually, I guess fired a person from a business because they wouldn't get on board with one of these collaboration tools, would you make the bold move to say, because I know companies that do this, no more email, we have to put all our information into this tool. What do you think we're at that point where that would be a decision you'd make?
Phil Simon:
I'd say no, but I want as much internal communication in there as possible. If you are, let's say, trying to sign up a new client and they say flat out we have banned Slack or blacklisted Zoom or Teams or whatever, if you want to do business with us, you have to learn a new tool or you have to use email, I'd evaluate that on a case by case basis. If it's a $100 project, is it really worth it? Probably not. If it's a hundred million dollars project, you might think about things a bit differently. But I try to evaluate clients and vendors based on their facility for using new tools. In some of the stories in the book, Reimagining Collaboration stem from my frustrations at getting folks. So, I do run two businesses, a small publishing company, and basically me, Phil Simon Inc.
To use certain tools. It's a challenge sometimes, particularly when they do agree to use teams or Zoom or whatever, and then they won't, and then it goes back and forth to emails. So Slack and the other internal collaboration hubs, Tom, as you know, don't eliminate the need for email. And there are good emails and bad emails. There's an email from someone who's legitimately interested in purchasing Summize products and services. That's a good email. You probably want to get that into a CRM or into Notion or Slack at some point. But if you start off that way, that's fine. That's a lot different as a sort of an initial query than routine discussions and meetings among employees that are always in email, because email is ephemeral, right? Your employee leads the information in the inbox basically goes away, whereas Slack is a lot more permanent as you know ditto for Teams and Zoom, if you leave the company, you're just deactivated, but you don't want someone saying, "Yeah, what did Tom decide about that a year ago?"
And then when you think about AI, you could be searching for a template for some sort of ROI calculation or a spreadsheet or PowerPoint slides, but then if you keep all that in there, again in the future, what's to stop Claude or some other generative AI tool from going, "I think you're looking for this." Which of course is going to save you a bunch of time and rework. So, if I were king of a larger company, I would be pretty dictatorial about it because one mistake or two doesn't really kill you, but it's death by a thousand cuts. It's basically allowing for exception. So, Tom's the CEO, he doesn't do Slack. Well, then how come I have to do it? And then the conversation as I write in the book, it's bifurcated. Some of it's in email, some of it's in Slack, some of it's in Notion or whatever, and that makes it very difficult to efficiently run your business.
Tom Dunlop:
Interesting, okay. So, I guess, one thing that email has traditionally been used for is things like marketing campaigns, sales campaigns. It is part of how a lot of people's go to the market model. Do you foresee that in any way advertisement sales will come into this kind of hub and the collaboration tools? Or do you think that basically people have to reinvent, I guess the wheel on how they might prospect? Obviously, there's other channels, but just interested to understand what your view is on how they might interplay with these tools?
Phil Simon:
Yeah, I can just tell you that I get annoyed when I go into Zoom or Slack and it tries to upgrade me. I don't like ads there. I'm there to work. So, I could see how if you used, let's just say, Notion and they were doing a promotion, all right, fine, good to know. But if you overdo that, I'm in Slack or Microsoft Teams fundamentally to work, it's not Discord or Reddit where you might just be posting pictures of English bulldogs or Lionel Messi's most recent goal in what you guys would call football, what we would call soccer. So, I'd be careful about that. And again, email does not go away, but I'd like to think that internal email effectively does, or at least is significantly reduced. So, I would be really careful about bugging people when they're there to do work. In fact, Slack, you probably saw this yesterday, announced a forthcoming redesign to help people focus a bit more.
Ads by definition take away your focus. So, I would be really careful about flooding channels with ads or upgrade notices because we do want people to use them to work. And also, and this is one of my pet peeves about notifications on phones or devices, I really feel like there should be a consumer's bill of rights around letting you at a granular level say, "I want to receive notifications about these types of things." And Slack, even a couple of days ago, announced that you're going to be able now to mute people, not just conversations. So if someone's just constantly needy, God knows I had that experience as a professor for three or four years, I've been saying, please give me the ability, I can't kick someone out of the workspace that would get me in trouble with the administration, but I want there to be friction for you to contact me because some people just... You manage people.
The 90/10 rule, you probably spend, I shouldn't say you specifically. I'm sure you've got a great team, but typically managers spend a lot of their time on few people. And also, I'm a big proponent of a three email or three message rule. So, if you and I really need to have a discussion, let's do that in real time, versus "I don't understand. Send." Well, you're eight hours away here, it's 7:30, 8:00 in the morning. What is it there, 3:30 or 3:38 PM. So, you don't get it, there's a huge difference in time zones and something that could take five minutes to hash out in real time as the kids say or would take days or sometimes even weeks. There's an example in my Project Management book about a developer who had a very simple question. It took him a week to get an answer.
And he needed that answer in order to proceed, because he was kind of at a fork in the road. So yeah, I've got no shortage of opinions about collaboration, and I think they're rooted in, I think efficiency and research. But not everyone is as excited about these tools. But I do think that they can make us work in a much more efficient way and reduce the amount of time we spend, quite frankly, on bullshit, scheduling meetings, Calendly, I'm not doing that. There's so many ways to make life better, but resistance to change is very real.
Tom Dunlop:
Yeah, no, totally. So, I guess, last question, well, I guess you can answer this in maybe two different ways. First, what's next for you? And then I'll follow this up with a question as well, which you could talk about. We've talked about a few of the things today, which is what's the next big breakthrough that you see in terms of workplace collaboration? We've talked about VR, AR, we've talked about AI assistance getting cleverer and how that can advise on behavior issues, analytics, things like that. So, what's next for you? And then do you think there's a, are we on the cusp of a potential new big breakthrough or trend?
Phil Simon:
All right, so I definitely have ideas for additional books. I just finished ghost writing a book, so that's taken up some of my time. I think that the new book, The Nine does have legs and will lead to speaking gigs, webinars, workshops, all sorts of opportunities, certainly consulting. I think we just saw the next big break with generative AI. What goes beyond that? I don't know, five, 10 years quantum computing. But rather than thinking about one big thing coming, I wrote The Nine because I saw nine powerful inexorable trends, whether it's inflation or disbursement, employee empowerment, blockchain, generative AI, fractions. I don't think that there's necessarily one big breakthrough coming beyond what we just saw back in November, but I think that there'll be a bunch of forces that are going to interact in ways that we can't possibly predict. There's an example in the new book, The Nine, about how a company startup, I think it might've been based out of Boston, tried to fuse generative AI with immersive tech and through basically a headgear, you'd be able to listen to the judge and then respond.
So, you wouldn't need a lawyer. And the premise was to use this to fight traffic tickets. I think the startup's called Do Not Pay, and I think it was a judge and several assistant districts of attorney said, "If you basically pull this again, we will put you in jail." So, it's right now, it's very chaotic, as you know, and I don't know what plays out when for which industry or which company, but the premise of the new book is that the workplace is not reverting to pre pandemic times, and I will die on that hill.
Tom Dunlop:
Yeah, I think that's a fair prediction. Well listen, Phil, it's been great to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for your time and I wish you the best with the launch of The Nine as well. It's a great book, great topics, and certainly if anyone's interested in looking at the future of workplace collaboration, it's really insightful. And a lot of really interesting topics to think about. So, thank you.
Phil Simon:
Thanks, Tom. I enjoyed it.
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