iTrust

I don’t have an iPad. I’m waiting for something a bit less proprietary to show up in that general space. But I have noticed something completely delightful and unexpected about the iPad, as I watch my colleagues use it.

Many of us have had the experience of being in a meeting where somebody has their laptop computer open. As the meeting goes on, this person is typing away, staring intently at their screen. If you ask them, they will usually swear up and down that they are paying attention to every word that is being said in the room, but nobody ever quite believes them.

Full confession: I’ve been that person. I never start out intending to be that person. I’ll be using my notebook computer to take notes about the meeting, when all of a sudden an email comes in that I just cannot ignore. My responsibilities to that vast world outside the room start to tug at my soul, and I end up switching contexts, telling myself that sending off a reply will only take a moment. But of course that’s irrelevant. By that time I’ve pulled out of the flow of the conversation, and on some level the meeting has already been damaged.

Which is why I think “laptops closed” is a great general policy for meetings. Nicely enough, this policy also causes people to take shorter meetings. 🙂

Which leads me to the iPad.

I have a colleague who always used to be looking at his iPhone during meetings. He claimed to be paying attention to the meeting, but it was hard to know whether to believe him.

Recently this colleague got an iPad. When meetings start he places it out lying flat on the table — and he no longer uses his iPhone during meetings. He looks down at the iPad quite often, but now everyone can see the screen, so everybody knows he is doing tasks that are relevant to the discussion — checking his calendar when we plan events, or typing little notes about what is being said in the room.

There is no doubt about what is going on, and therefore there is no mistrust about what he is doing. Even when he is looking at his list of emails, he knows that we all know what’s on his screen, so everyone is confident he is looking for something relevant to what is currently happening in the meeting room.

I don’t have any idea whether Apple planned this style of usage (a friend pointed out to me that they likely didn’t, given the way Steve Jobs demoed the iPad at its launch). It may just be one of those lucky accidents that only get discovered after a product is launched.

But it seems to me that this usage pattern is a very important development in the evolution of personal electronic media. At last we have a scenario in which individual access to an information appliance does not destroy — or even degrade — the integrity and connectedness of a meeting.

It would be nice to think that Apple actually worked all this out before the iPad was released. But somehow I doubt it. I think we all just got lucky.