I spent longer in the gym this morning than usual. I’ve been a member for as many as three days now, so still firmly in the honeymoon period. But I was under no obligation to rush home either: I’d woken up to the Microsoft outage and couldn’t get into my emails. It was a tad thrilling.
My Achilles, still recovering from April, might not thank me for the extra time on the machines. But for a change it was freeing to have a Friday morning with nothing much pinging on my phone.
The outage wasn’t even close to the biggest tech story of the week. Jensen Huang made sure of that. He’s resigned from Nvidia, the company at the centre of the AI boom, while its shares continued to tumble for a sixth straight week. An ironic twist that even the most valuable company in AI can be shaken by something entirely human.
Last month Google had the worst day in its history. Shares in its parent company, Alphabet, fell more than 12% in a single session, wiping out roughly half a trillion dollars. That was a steeper fall than any day the company suffered during Covid or the 2008 crash. This week Nvidia went further, losing a similar amount in a matter of days, on top of more than a trillion dollars since early October. I can’t even fathom the figures.
We’re told constantly that the future of work is digital, that everything will be automated and AI-driven. I don’t doubt it. Various AI tools already answer our questions, manage our emails, draft our contracts and make our music and art.
As a child of the 80s, I find this all a bit much at times. The pivot to digital was fast, and the pivot to AI faster still. It feels to me like the quicker the data and the screens move, the more I want things that don’t.
Saigon has always been good at analogue. I’ve been out walking more in the early mornings this week, and have enjoyed reconnecting with the city: locals doing tai chi in the park, smoke plumes from street vendors drifting across the road, fruit sellers chopping away before most of the city is awake.
Doing a quick audit of the week, every genuinely useful conversation I had was face to face.
In particular, I had coffees with two old friends, one in tourism and one in footwear. The first gave me the lowdown on the growth spurt in Phu Quoc. The other shared how compliance demands are changing for manufacturers operating across the region.
Yes, you can find the same figures online, but what you can’t always find is the bit that comes out over the second coffee.
Although through my mates I’ve been hearing about different industries, they were partly telling me the same story. In tourism, the hotels can be built faster than the people can be found and developed to run them. In footwear, the rules keep changing, and it falls to factory managers and supervisors to explain to their teams what the new rules actually mean on the line.
Neither problem is about technology. Both are about people: how they’re developed, how they’re led, and how well they talk to each other.
Similarly, in the absence of emails being sent around the world this this morning, people would have picked up the phone, or walked over to a colleague’s desk. Others perhaps stopped completely. The outage didn’t create either of these alternatives, it was more about revealing them.
And that’s the thing about digital tools. They don’t always fix communication, rather they magnify whatever’s already there. A team that works in silos on email will work in silos on Teams. A decision nobody really understands won’t become clearer because Copilot has summarised it. And a manager who avoids difficult conversations in person will find plenty of ways to avoid them online.
At Coracle, whenever a client asks for “communication training”, we answer with a question of our own: what is happening in the organisation that makes communication a priority right now?
We ask because the answer is rarely “we need better software”. It’s usually about people: who needs to develop, why it matters to the business, and what needs to change in practice.
I’ve lived in Saigon long enough to know that business here still runs on coffee conversations. Trust is built on plastic chairs on the pavement long before anything is signed. And I think it’s something we all crave, wherever we are: being in the same room, reading a face, sharing time that isn’t scheduled.
That’s why so much of Coracle’s work happens in the room. The moments that really change how people work together nearly always happen face to face.
So here’s this week’s question: if your digital tools went down tomorrow, which conversations in your organisation would still happen, and which would stop?
The answer might tell you more about how your team communicates than any survey.
Have a great weekend!
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