technology – Find Joy in the Middle

It was my birthday recently. There were cards on the window sill, thoughtful texts arriving throughout the day, WhatsApp messages from friends I haven’t seen for years, LinkedIn notifications from professional contacts and the familiar stream of digital kindness that reminds us we are remembered. I was genuinely grateful for every one of them.

Yet among all those messages, there was just one telephone call. Something that caused me to paraphrase Cliff Richard.

This isn’t a complaint. I didn’t feel unloved or overlooked. Quite the opposite. The messages were warm, generous and heartfelt. But the imbalance struck me as an observation worth pondering.

Once upon a time, birthdays involved sitting near the telephone, as it would ring continuously. The call itself was never simply about saying “Happy Birthday”. It was the opening line of a much longer conversation. The birthday greeting soon drifted into other territory. How are things really? Have you heard from so-and-so lately? What happened with that project you were worried about? How are the children? Before long, twenty or thirty minutes had passed. Sometimes longer. The conversation wandered and meandered, discovering things neither person had intended to discuss. There was no agenda and no objective other than human connection. The unexpected happened.

Today, the message arrives instead. A quick “Happy Birthday, James”, perhaps accompanied by an emoji or a thumbs-up, and the exchange is complete. The sentiment is still sincere and the affection is still real, but the experience feels different. Less expansive. More transactional. A thoughtful gesture, certainly, but often a completed task rather than the beginning of a conversation.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that we have never been more connected to our phones. We carry them everywhere, rarely letting them out of our sight. We sleep beside them, check them before getting out of bed and glance at them hundreds of times every day. Yet we seem increasingly reluctant to use them for the very purpose they were originally designed for: talking to another human being.

I notice this phenomenon everywhere. People frequently send a message asking whether they can call. I’ve often wondered what response they are expecting. Increasingly, asking permission to make a phone call has become a social ritual, almost an acknowledgement that an unsolicited conversation feels intrusive in a way it never used to.

I see it in the workplace too. Some younger colleagues visibly tense when the office phone rings. The ringing itself appears to create anxiety. Who could it be? What do they want? Why didn’t they send a message first? To many people, a ringing telephone is no longer an invitation but an interruption, a risk rather than an opportunity.

Then there are the callers who politely ask whether I can talk after I have answered the phone – another ritual I feel. I always find myself smiling at that moment. Well, yes, that’s why I chose to pick up, I have that sort of agency. Yet the question reveals something about the way our culture has changed. We have become accustomed to scheduling and managing communication so carefully that even a spontaneous conversation can feel unusual.

This is not intended as criticism. Every generation develops its own communication norms. Text messaging solves genuine problems. It is efficient, convenient, fast-paced, and respectful of people’s time. It allows us to respond when we are ready rather than forcing an immediate interaction. For busy lives, that flexibility matters.

But I do wonder what we lose when conversation becomes increasingly filtered, managed and controlled. A text message delivers information, but a phone call reveals mood. A WhatsApp message conveys words, while a conversation communicates hesitation, laughter, uncertainty, excitement and emotion. We hear the pause before somebody answers. We notice when their voice sounds tired. We recognise enthusiasm that would never fit inside an emoji. We discover things we didn’t know to ask.

Perhaps this is one reason why loneliness continues to feature so prominently in public conversations despite our endless digital connectedness. We have become remarkably effective at communication, but have we weakened conversation? The distinction matters. Communication is the exchange of information. Conversation is the exchange of humanity.

In Find Joy in the Middle, I explore the importance of living in the spaces between life’s milestones. The middle is where relationships deepen, where understanding grows and where meaning often emerges unexpectedly. It struck me on my birthday that phone conversations inhabit a similar kind of middle. A text message takes us directly to the destination, whereas a conversation allows us to wander through the landscape. Often it is in that wandering that joy is found.

I don’t know whether the decline of voice calls is a temporary cultural shift or a permanent change in how we relate to one another. Perhaps future generations will find our nostalgia for telephone conversations as quaint as handwritten letters. Maybe we can ask AI bots to talk to our friends whilst we are busy doing something (I don’t know what) that’s a better use of our time. But I do know this: the one person who called me on my birthday didn’t simply wish me a happy birthday. We talked, laughed and caught up. We discovered things neither of us knew when the call began. Long after many of the messages had disappeared beneath newer notifications, that conversation stayed with me.

Maybe that’s what all this means.

Not that messaging is wrong. Not that technology has failed us. Not that we should abandon convenience for nostalgia. Rather, that amidst all the pings, alerts, notifications and unread messages, there remains something uniquely powerful about hearing another human voice unexpectedly reach across the distance and ask, “How are you?”

And perhaps, every now and then, that question deserves more than a text.

There’s a moment in almost every meeting about children’s services where someone leans forward and says, with a kind of weary authority, “the problem is, we all work in silos.” Everyone nods. It sounds right. It feels truthful. And then, more often than not, we move on.

I’ve heard it so many times now that I find myself getting impatient with it. Not because it’s completely wrong, but because it’s become a stopping point rather than a starting point. It’s the sort of phrase that sounds like insight but often functions as an excuse. It’s a cop out.

Of course, services can feel fragmented. Of course, people are under pressure, operating in different ecosystems, with different targets, languages, acronyms, and accountabilities. None of that is in dispute. But “silos” has become a convenient shorthand that appears to let all of us off the hook. It wraps up a complicated set of choices and behaviours into something that feels structural, inevitable and therefore nobody’s particular responsibility. We work in silos, it is someone else’s fault, and we can’t do anything about it.

The truth is, silos don’t just exist out there somewhere, imposed on us by fate or organisational charts. They are created, and recreated, in small, everyday ways. They show up when we don’t pick up the phone because things are busy. When we stick closely to our remit because it feels risky not to. When we attend a meeting, agree broadly that things should be more joined up, and then go back to doing things exactly as we did before.

None of that is malicious. Most of the time it’s understandable. People are stretched, and systems are complicated. But it does mean that when we say “we work in silos,” what we’re often describing is something we are also participating in. Something we are reinforcing.

There’s something else that bothers me about the phrase, too. It’s completely detached from how children, young people, and families experience their lives. A child doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking about which part of their life belongs to which service. They don’t separate out their mental health from their education, or their safety from their relationships, or their housing from their wellbeing. It all comes as one whole, complicated, human experience.

Yet we design support in neat compartments and then act surprised when it doesn’t join up properly. Calling that silos almost disguises the deeper issue, which is that we’ve built systems around organisations rather than around people. What’s more frustrating is that the phrase carries a kind of shrug with it. It can sound like we’re saying, “this is just how it is.” And if that’s the case, then it’s hard to see where the energy for change comes from. You can’t shift something that feels inevitable.

I’d rather we were a bit more direct with ourselves. Instead of saying we work in silos, we might admit that we don’t always prioritise working together in the way we should. That we sometimes make information too hard to share. That our processes get in the way. That we haven’t invested enough time in building relationships across teams and organisations.

Those are more uncomfortable things to say, but they have an advantage: they point to things we can actually do something about.

Because for all the talk of structures and systems, collaboration is still, at heart, about people. It’s about whether we know each other, trust each other, and feel able to pick up the phone without worrying about whether this is “our bit” or “their bit.” It’s about whether leaders model that behaviour or simply talk about it. It’s about whether we measure success in terms of shared outcomes, or retreat back into what we can individually control. None of that is fixed. None of it is beyond our influence.

Language matters more than we sometimes think. The words we reach for shape how we understand a problem, and what we believe is possible. Silos has become one of those words that closes things down rather than opens them up. It names the issue in a way that feels tidy, but leaves everything else untouched. So perhaps it’s time we retired it. I really don’t want to think that three years into delivering the Best Start in Life strategy that we will still be trolling out this hackneyed get-out. Do you?

Not because the underlying challenges aren’t real, they are, but because repeating the same phrase over and over again isn’t getting us any further forward. Children, young people, families and I must say our workforce don’t need us to keep describing the fragmentation of the system. They need us to behave differently within it. That might sound simple, but it’s not easy. It requires intention, curiosity and, at times, a willingness to step slightly outside of what feels safe or familiar. It asks more of us than a well-worn phrase ever will.

If we’re serious about improving how services work together, then that’s the work. Not naming the silos. Dismantling them, piece by piece, through what we choose to do next.

Tag: technology

It’s so funny, how we don’t call anymore.

Can we please stop saying “we work in silos”?