Last week, I canceled the phone number to my fax machine and then unplugged the machine. After only getting 3 faxes in the last year, it was time. Nowadays, everything comes via e-mail and as a PDF. Still, for me, it was the end of an era.
I am old enough to remember running a business before there were fax machines. We mailed everything to everyone or just called them on the phone. Time and expectations around communication were different back then.
Then one day about a year or two ago, I realized I was behind the times. I was talking with a client and I said to them, “Just fax it over to me when you are done.”
There was a long pause, and then the person responded by saying, “I don’t know if we have a fax machine and I don’t know how to use it if we do. I’ve never sent a fax before.”
I just smiled and thought “my how time flies when we are having fun.”
From the perspective of doing business for 35 years, I remember when the fax machine was cutting edge technology. As Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D wrote in their book, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time (Currency Doubleday, 1993): “In late 1991, the telegraph industry's life was taken suddenly and brutally, by the facsimile machine. For more than 150 years, the telegram stood for immediacy and importance. It was an icon for urgency. But now, Western Union has closed down its telegraph service around the world. The fax was a new technology the telegram could not survive. The shift from teletype and telegram to facsimile represents one aspect of what business consultants term a "paradigm shift" - a discontinuity in the otherwise steady march of business progress.”
My first fax machine was the kind that used thermal paper on a big roll. Plain paper faxes were very expensive so most of us got the one with the large roll of thermal paper. Once we received a fax, we needed to cut the paper into pages. If it was something really important, then we would make a copy of it because over time the thermal paper would fade.
For many years, having a fax machine and a dedicated fax line was standard business practice. On one level, it revolutionized communication with clients. Things speeded up and so much information could be communicated quickly and efficiently.
Now there are new ways of doing things and new frontiers for communicating with people. However, after many decades, it is not the loss of a fax line and a machine that concerns me. Instead, it is the worry that people who are communicating in new ways may loose perspective about two important things.
First, they may forget that the goal of communication is to build and maintain a relationship, not just push data and information faster and faster to people. And, second, upon receiving the desired information that all involved reach a greater depth of understanding rather than simply a degree of awareness that the message has been received.
As Margaret Wheatley wrote in her book, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity (Berrett-Koehler, 2017): “We may be in contact, but we’re not connecting.” The goal is connecting whether that is by phone, fax, e-mail or text message.
For now, I will focus on making better and better connections during the coming weeks, months and years. I will miss my old fax machine and I will donate it to a place to be recycled. But, when it comes to having a big picture perspective, I will continue to focus on creating new and better connections, because I know we all have important work to do as we slowly transition from a global pandemic to a time of recovery and reintegration.
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