Buzzwords, Bots & Bad Data

Jenni: Okay. Welcome to Frequency. I’m Jenni Field.

Chuck: I’m Chuck Gose.

Jenni: Frequency is your go-to for real talk about comms, culture, and employee experience. Beyond the buzzwords and straight to what matters. Hello, Chuck.

Chuck: Hello, Jenni.

Jenni: So it’s my turn to kick off with some things this week. And I really want to start by hearing about your few days with Jon Acuff this week, because I know you’ve been at his event. It was his first in-person event in Nashville. And I just want to hear how it went. What was your big takeaway? How was it? All those things.

Chuck: Yeah, it makes it sound like I had a lot of personal one-on-one time with Jon. I did get to say hello. There were 300 people there. And when you think about a first-time in-person event, not in a major city — yes, it was near Nashville, in Franklin, Tennessee, which is the town he lives in — that many people came out for a day-and-a-half event. I think one of my bigger learnings that I’m bringing back to ICology is the power of community. Over the years, he’s built such an amazing community of people who are all over the board. I don’t remember everyone’s names, but there was — here I am, a community founder, ICology founder. Another gentleman ran a construction business but also taught entrepreneurship at Florida State. One of the women up front was a former mayor of Minneapolis. A Chick-fil-A owner was another person who was there. So it just shows there’s a lot of people out there trying to make these dreams come true, and he’s pulled them all together into this one community, and they all showed up for him. I thought that part was really cool. He’s doing an event again next year — scaled back a little, which I also think is interesting, I’ve not heard why — back in Franklin, Tennessee. I already bought my ticket, so I’ll report back on how that one goes.

Jenni: How long was this one? Was it two days or one day?

Chuck: It was a full day and then a half day. And I do want to point out, I was also a VIP at the event, Jenni — I bought the VIP ticket, which included a reception the night before, a little snack room during the event, and a table you could actually sit at. The VIP proved worthy of that additional investment.

Jenni: Of course.

Chuck: But yeah, it was a solid day and a half of content.

Jenni: Nice. Yeah, I think there’s something about coming together with people where you’ve got something in common — like following someone like Jon and his work and wanting to develop some of the models and things he talks about — but you’ve got such different backgrounds. It’s what I like about all of the entrepreneurial communities I’m part of. I’m part of one with Chris Ducker that’s full of people running all different sorts of businesses, and I love that because you get such different perspectives and insight. I think it’s really powerful.

Chuck: To show my ego a little here — I had this weird challenge getting ready for the event, realizing I had no role to play other than just attend. I wasn’t speaking, hosting, it was just — I was an attendee, and that was a weird thing to sit with. But to your point, the fact that there’s this variety of people, it was nice to be at an event that wasn’t about comms or wasn’t about HR, but I could still talk about those things to people no differently than the gentleman talking about Chick-fil-A or the construction business. That part was actually quite refreshing.

Jenni: Good, cool, love that. So one of the questions I had for you this week was about games — any kind of games. In our family, we play quite a lot of games. My husband makes video games for a living, so that plays quite a big role for him, and we’re big fans of board games. At the moment we’re playing D&D, Dungeons and Dragons. So I was curious whether in your household there were any games you play, or whether you’re a game-free zone over there.

Chuck: Interesting conversation, because it’s a little bit of a house of conflict here — I do love playing games, board games, card games, Uno, Euchre, all of the above. My wife Kristen could not care less. Not a remotely competitive bone in her body when it comes to games — if we start a game, she’s just waiting for it to be over. That’s the exciting part for her. So no, I actually miss people getting together to play cards. That was one of my earlier memories as a kid, watching my parents get together with their friends and play Euchre, Spades, Hearts, or Rummy. I wondered if that even still goes on, because we’re not a big games house.

Jenni: Yeah, fair. I grew up playing crib — cribbage. I’ve got my own crib board, and even when I get together with my mum and my sister now, if we go away for a few days, we’ll always play crib at the end of an evening, and I love it. So next time we’re together, we’ll have to bring some cards and play together.

Chuck: Do you know how to play Euchre? Okay, that’s a classic Midwestern U.S. card game, Jenni, that you will love.

Jenni: Okay, I will learn. I will learn. Good, that’s on our list. And the final thing I wanted to talk about was the big debate you started on LinkedIn recently about podcast speed. When we started talking about recording this, you said most people listen at one and a half times speed, and I said, okay, I sometimes speed things up, but generally I listen to podcasts at normal speed. So you asked people — and I took great glee in the fact that you’re more in the minority, because 41% said they listen at normal speed, 30% at 1.2x, 25% at 1.5x, and hardly anyone at 2x. I just thought that was interesting, because I think sometimes we assume everyone’s trying to rush through stuff, whereas actually people are taking their time.

Chuck: This is the interesting thing about data — I believe I said more people listen at accelerated speeds, which proves that 59% of those responding do speed things up. So the 41% listening at normal speed either like the slower pace, or honestly may not know they can speed it up.

Jenni: This is true. It’s interesting how we change our perception of what the data was trying to find out, around the one-and-a-half versus everybody. I love it. So anyway, if you’re listening to this at two times the speed, or one and a half, I apologize, because I talk quite quickly and that’s probably quite annoying. I’ll try to slow it down if you’re listening a bit sped up.

Chuck: Absolutely. I don’t think we need to accommodate the people going 1.8x and 2x — that just seems a little extreme.

Jenni: I don’t know how you’re capturing anything if you’re doing that. It kind of blows my mind.

Chuck: Yeah, I agree — it’s like skimming or speed-reading a book just to get done with it. So if you’re listening at 1.8 or 2x, maybe just knock it back a little. Sit back, enjoy the listen.

Jenni: I love that. Right, what’s on your list of articles for this week?

Chuck: I have an absolute bevy of content for you today, Jenni. First, something I noticed on LinkedIn last week that got a bit peculiar — some very intelligent people were sharing some very bad data, and I don’t think they knew it was bad data. Once you start looking for something, you see it everywhere. It seemed like a lot of people were talking about this McKinsey study that says employees spend nine hours a week searching for information on the internet, and the takeaway was that intranets are bad or not working right. But everything cited was nine hours, nine hours, nine hours. So I went digging for this data point, and everything I came up with was just other blog posts citing the same McKinsey study — nobody was linking to the actual study, nobody was sharing where it came from. After ten, fifteen minutes of searching — which in Google years feels like hours — I found a McKinsey study that cited employees spending somewhere between 1.8 and two-something hours per day searching for information. It mentioned intranets, but not really the internet. And Jenni, it’s from 2012. This is thirteen-year-old data, and if you look at what technology was like thirteen years ago, trust me, it’s gotten a lot better. So it’s very smart people sharing very bad data. My takeaway is it’s similar to when I hear speakers at an event reference the “goldfish attention span” thing — we supposedly have shorter attention spans than a goldfish — and I lose my mind, because it’s not real data. It’s bad data, a flippant line from some Microsoft study out of Canada. Now we’re trusting Microsoft researchers in Canada on attention spans? It sounds good, so it gets repeated like it’s fact. That was a bit of a rant, but I had to get it out. I feel a lot better now.

Jenni: Do you feel better now? Good. I mean, we both saw it and were chatting about it, and it’s interesting — there are two things going on: we’re still using data that’s quite old, maybe because there isn’t newer data, and people are quick to share something from another blog post without going to the true source. I think it’s a lesson to get to the source of where something’s coming from. And if you’re worried about people spending too much time searching, do your own research in your own organization and find out what’s really going on, because that data isn’t helpful en masse — it’s going to be different for every organization.

Chuck: And McKinsey, if you’re listening — maybe help us out with an update, because people are still sharing this. It was clearly good, interesting data back in 2012. It’s just not interesting to me anymore because it’s twelve, thirteen years old. Anyway, let’s get into some real news items I thought were fascinating this week. One was in Harvard Business Review — there’s a lot of conversation in the comms world about AI, content creation, and attribution. Researchers ran what they called the Wade Test. They had the Zapier CEO answer a bunch of employee-submitted questions, then had an AI trained on the CEO’s past communications answer the exact same questions. Employees were shown the responses and asked to guess: human or AI? CEO or machine? Employees only guessed correctly 59% of the time — no different than flipping a coin. But the other interesting part: if they thought the message came from AI, they rated it as less helpful, even if it was actually written by the CEO. So my takeaway — we say we love innovation, but the moment something is labeled AI, we trust it less, even if it’s solid, even if it’s accurate. And while the AI responses in the study were strong, they just didn’t carry the same weight, because the CEO’s words are more than just sentences — they mean something because of who says them. So I’m curious, Jenni — how should internal comms work with leaders who want to use AI but risk losing trust by doing so? Is there a best use case for AI in leadership comms? And comms has been ghostwriting CEO material forever — what do we take away from that?

Jenni: It’s such an interesting study, because it proves this debate that’s been going on for a while about how, as human beings, we can tell if something’s written by a robot. I’ve looked at some of the evolution of AI in terms of faces and things like that, and you can generally always tell, because it’s part of who we are. For this, I think it’s about the type of message. If you’re using AI to help come up with ideas or a first draft and then you’re editing that, I think that’s fine. Where it gets dangerous is when you’re using it to do the work for you and you’re not editing it at all, because you will always be able to tell. We use AI for stuff quite a lot, and it takes a lot of editing to get it right, but it starts the shape of the content and gets that work coming together. If you want to use it because you want to save time, we’ve got to think about what time that’s saving and who was doing it before — to your point, comms has been ghostwriting for leaders for a long time, so is this replacing that function? Because that’s not a like-for-like change. But if you’ve got to write really personal messages or difficult messages, AI is not the right tool. If you’ve got to do an update on policy changes or something more factual, it’s probably quite helpful to get that structure together. So you can choose what a message is for, but don’t use it for the stuff that needs to be vulnerable, needs high levels of empathy, significant change — things that need real human-centric comms — because it’s not going to be your friend there, and it’s going to do more damage. That’s what this 59% figure kind of proves — that’s such a huge number of people who will know, and that will be so damaging to your credibility and reputation.

Chuck: I think even if they just suspect it was AI-written, it’s done — it doesn’t even matter. We had an interesting conversation inside ICology — we started a monthly group call with community members around AI insights, and people are sharing their stories, their prompts, their policies. One of our members shared that her husband is a developer, a coder, and in that world, if you’re writing code — which I do not know how to do — it’s common practice to bury the prompt you used to help generate the code inside the code, to help whoever comes in later. A communicator would never in a million years hide “here’s the prompt I used” inside their comms, because we feel like that would completely eliminate our credibility. But to coders, there’s no stigma — they’re actually sharing that information. Writing code, writing comms — there’s such a difference there. One is, “here, this is a helpful tool, this is helping us be better at what we do.” On the comms side, there’s a bit of embarrassment, an admission of, “no, it might have helped us, but it didn’t do the work for us.”

Jenni: Yes. There’s a definite difference around our comfort levels with it, and how it’s helping. And then there’s an ethical debate about how much you share — whether it was assisted, whether you need to talk about that. There’s so much within it, but I think if your organization is going through any level of significant change, or you’ve got issues around engagement and trust — then don’t do it.

Chuck: Yeah, agreed. Next item — a Stanford professor, an economist named Nick Bloom, believes companies should simply let employees choose where they work. He’s an advocate for flexibility in hybrid work, making the case that employees should be able to choose where they work based on what helps them thrive. He emphasizes that productivity data overwhelmingly supports autonomy, and that forcing people into rigid structures often leads to disengagement or attrition. To me it’s a simple reminder that culture isn’t built through mandates — which we see a lot of companies do — but through trust and choice. Jenni, why do you think companies are resisting this data? Is it fear of losing control, or do leaders just not trust employees?

Jenni: I find this conversation really interesting, because there’s also data that says the exact opposite — data that people are less productive at home, that people are lonelier and our mental wellbeing suffers when we’re not working in an office, reports over the pandemic of people’s homes becoming unsafe spaces because work moved in and those relationships weren’t always positive, and any bullying culture at work moved in with it. I think part of the challenge is you can find data to support whatever narrative you want — that’s true in every area of life, you can find nutrition reports that tell you to do one thing and its opposite. I think what’s genuinely challenging here is the power dynamic — letting employees choose goes against the normal power relationship and constructs we’ve had in work for a long time, which is why the fallout of the pandemic is going to take a long time to unravel. There’s research that supports how human beings have evolved to like structure and hierarchy — we like to know where we’re meant to be, we like some of those norms. If we have too much choice, that can be paralyzing. I was reading this week that we now make something like 35,000 decisions a day — if I’ve got to add on top of that where I’m working and what I’m doing, that isn’t always helpful. But it’s about flexibility, and I think that’s the bit to focus on: letting leaders talk about why we need to be in the office on a certain day, and what we’re doing together on that day that means coming together, then choosing one or other days for some structure and some choice. But also — this is such a small population of the workforce, and I always have to bring this up: deskless and frontline workers, something like 20% of the people at work, this only impacts a fairly small population, though it’s important nonetheless.

Jenni: I think some structure plus some choice in that flexibility works best, because if you give people all the choice, we don’t always make the best decisions for ourselves either. We might think working at home is the best thing for us because it lets us do all these other things and avoid a commute, and then a month or two or three in, we start showing signs of feeling anxious or lonely, and we don’t link those two things together — whereas actually we’re social animals, we need connection beyond a screen, and I think we can’t ignore that, because we don’t always make the best decisions for us — we want to make the easiest decisions, because that’s how our brains are wired.

Chuck: If we’re already making 35,000 decisions, I think 35,001 is manageable. I think there’s a good middle ground — if data shows work-from-home is great, or data shows in-office is great, then let people choose. Maybe it’s not full autonomy to work from home forever — it’s the choice of which days make sense to come in. I saw one company say everybody’s got to be in on Thursday, but the other day or two, you choose based on what’s best for you. That’s the negotiation that can happen, versus everybody in the office five days a week or else — I just think that approach isn’t conducive to a healthy employer-employee relationship.

Jenni: Possibly, but I don’t believe there’s a right and wrong here. It’s down to your culture and what you want your organization to stand for. If you believe, based on your data, that you need people in the office — you’ve got young, junior people who need to be surrounded by others to learn, people are more productive collaborating in person — then as a leader you make the decision that you want people in four days a week, because you can show through the last five years of data the impact of not being together, and you want to trial that for eighteen months and see if it makes a difference. That’s fine. Then people have the choice of whether they want to be in that environment. I know that sounds privileged to say “you’ve got a choice” — it’s a tough job market, I know that — but there are ways of saying “this company isn’t right for me” and starting to look, even if it takes six months to move. It’s still a choice. For me it’s not a case of right and wrong — it’s whether this is the right place for me, and if not, I need to go work somewhere my values are more aligned.

Chuck: So it is a case of right or wrong — it’s either right for me or it’s wrong for me.

Jenni: Yes, but right for me or right for you — not just right and wrong, good and bad. Not as blanket as that.

Chuck: Moving along — to the debate that will never end. I thought this was an interesting LinkedIn post looking back at the internal communication profession — are we over-complicating internal comms? The poster argued that instead of focusing on simple connection between employees and the business, comms is veering into almost academic territory, buzzwords and frameworks and models, often at the expense of actually clarifying what communication is — something we’ve talked about before. The post struck a chord, with a lot of replies about the balance between the strategic side of comms and the human side. So my question, Jenni: is internal comms becoming more about proving we belong in the business than actually helping people understand what’s happening at work?

Jenni: I had a read through the post and the comments, which were full of joy. I totally agree with this. I’ve been saying for a long time there’s a language being created in comms that doesn’t help us have the outcome we want, which is being involved at a senior level in strategic decisions. Even something like “employee voice” — we know what that means, but to other people it doesn’t really mean anything, and it’s not a phrase I’d use outside the world of comms; I barely use it inside comms, honestly, because it doesn’t mean that much — we’ve just created something around it. Same with “employee engagement” as a phrase. Where we’ve tried to create an industry or profession — which it is — that comes with words and phrases everyone talks about. It’d be the same in HR, the same in finance — there’s jargon in all of those. For me it’s about how it leaks out into other parts of the organization, which leaves people more confused, and our job is to do the opposite — I talk about taking people from chaos to calm, and we both talk a lot about making things simple and easy to understand to create connection. The more we use jargon, the harder that gets. But I liked the point in the post that the theory behind what we’re doing isn’t unneeded — that’s an important foundation — it’s the jargon-y words, and those words don’t do us any favors and leave people very confused.

Chuck: It’s a great point that every profession, every department, every industry has its own jargon, and at times that’s actually unifying. All jargon isn’t bad — it depends on the recipient. If I were at the Jon Acuff event talking about employee voice and employee experience and strategic comms, that’s not going to mean anything to that room. But you go into our communities, and it does — it can be very unifying. You just have to be mindful of the audience. Go to a frontline employee and say something about employee voice or employee experience — not that they won’t understand it, but it’s not going to land the same way it does when a comms person or an HR person says it. So I’ve never thought all jargon is bad — it just depends on how it’s used.

Jenni: Yeah, and you’re right, it’s about the audience and how you’re using it. I think it’s an interesting question whether comms is becoming too intellectualized — I thought that was a really interesting way to frame it, and I don’t fully know what that means either, ironically.

Chuck: You know what I think my takeaway on that was — and this is maybe where we differ a bit, what you’re seeing on your side of the world versus ours. For a long time, in EMEA, everything seemed to be “we’ve got to be strategic, we’ve got to have a strategy.” On the North American side, it was more “but we’ve got to actually do something” — very tactically focused. We were always wondering why everyone’s talking about strategy all the time, what are you actually doing — and you all probably think we’re a bunch of cowboys over here, wildly sending out emails without any strategy behind it. So I wonder if there was a bit of that intellectualization, coming up with common approaches, frameworks, and structure for it.

Jenni: Yeah. I think you’re right — I remember coming to my first IABC World Conference, the International Association of Business Communicators, in 2019 in Vancouver. There was such a broad range of topics — some really strategic conversations about all sorts of things, and then there was a session that was basically “the ten things you need to create good comms,” and I went in to take some photos and could barely get in the door. I remember thinking, this probably wouldn’t be as busy at a UK or European conference — maybe it would have been — but it was some of the real foundational things of comms, and it surprised me how popular it was, while some sessions I really wanted to attend weren’t as busy. I think we have to bring those two together. I hate the narrative that we’ve all got to have a seat at the table and be strategic — that’s not what all comms people need to be. We need to help organizations in the right way with a strategic lens on what we’re doing, but we could be sending out loads of tactical stuff with a broader, bigger thinking behind it, and sometimes we get lost in that. I think you’re right that we’re now starting to come together a bit more — being strategic with the tactical, and maybe just losing the jargon words along the way, to help people in the broader organization understand what we’re trying to do.

Chuck: We’re going to wrap this up with an article you sent me that I thought was something people maybe haven’t given a lot of thought to. A recent Harvard Business Review article explores the trend of recording meetings — the convenience and the risks. On the surface it feels obvious: great for flexibility, accessibility, clarity, note-taking, being able to go back and watch, AI summaries. But there are ethical considerations — do people feel like they can be themselves on a recording? If it’s kept in perpetuity, who’s going to watch it later, who has access to the footage, will their words live on forever, and if someone makes a mistake, will it get spliced and shared internally? It’s a fascinating tension between transparency and surveillance, and it raises the question of whether good comms is more about documentation — this happened, these were the results — or about presence and trust. So do you think recording meetings improves communication, or does it create an effect where people don’t feel like they can speak freely?

Jenni: I think it depends. What’s happened is it’s become the default thing to do, regardless of any governance around it — not that we need big governance for everything, but just stopping to check “do we need to record this, and why” is always worth doing. I record conversations when I’m doing one-to-one interviews with leaders, but I’m always clear upfront that I’m recording it and only I’ll see it, so I can go back and watch it and get the transcript. When I host things like my quarterly Ask Me Anything, which anyone can join on Zoom, I don’t record that — people often ask if there’ll be a recording if they can’t make it, and I say no, because I want people to feel able to ask anything without it being recorded and shared. So I think it’s about putting your own rules around things. If you’ve got an all-staff meeting and you want people to be able to watch it back, do it — but look at the data, are people actually watching it back, or has it just become habit to make it accessible when you don’t actually need to? I’d encourage people to look at what they’re recording and why, and put some rules around what’s recorded and what’s not, so it’s not just the default — because people will hold back if they know it’s being recorded. If I had a question for my CEO with five hundred people on the call, I would absolutely not ask it there.

Chuck: My two thoughts on this — as a Zoom user, not a Teams user, it does let you know “this meeting is being recorded.” I would love to see someone have the courage to just leave when that notice pops up. There have been times where companies haven’t set it up to auto-record, and customers I’ve worked with have said “this cannot be recorded” — so it sounds like some organizations have done that due diligence of having those conversations. I think your take is right, that as the steward of a meeting you own the accountability of letting people know the intent and who’s going to see it, so there’s at least some awareness they can make a call on. But it’s become so ubiquitous. My other point — can we talk about the “is this going to be recorded” crowd? Because I’ve done my own scientific research on this, Jenni, and of the people who ask that question, 1.3% actually go back and watch the recording. I wonder where that knee-jerk reaction comes from — is it genuine intent to watch it, or is it just an expression of “I’m interested, but not interested enough to be there”? Is their schedule chaotic and they want to signal they care, even though a lot of people don’t have time to go back and watch a lot of recorded content — same with webinars and other virtual events.

Jenni: Yeah. I’m not someone who learns well online — despite running masterclasses myself, I know that’s really helpful for other people, but for me, I like to be in a room, so I’m more likely to go to a conference or event than watch it online, and I won’t watch something back. I’ve got a load of stuff I need to watch for my own learning for the business, and I’ve had to put it in the diary with a friend so we do it together — almost like we’re going to an event together, so I’ll actually do it, otherwise I just won’t. There’s a really good book called Remote Not Distant by Gustavo Razzetti that I’ve recommended a lot, about staying connected but not distant at work, with some good rules and guides around this. We’ll pop a link in the show notes in case people want to pick it up.

Chuck: Yep — so just something to keep in mind for anyone out there hosting meetings. Maybe let people know beyond just the automatic alert — this is being recorded, this is who’s going to see it — hopefully that makes the meeting worthwhile and people feel able to share more of themselves. That wraps up the articles I queued up for us, Jenni. I hope others jump into the show notes, click those links, read more about them, and let us know what you think — especially about the McKinsey nine-hours thing. I’m just really glad I got that off my chest, Jenni, honestly — it’s going to come back up again, that’s just how I work, it’s not over. I was actually saving it for this recording. Let’s go into what we’re each freq-ing out about this week — what’s on your mind, Jenni?

Jenni: Really, this is just some therapy for you this week. So, things on my mind — I’m reading a really good book called Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s about the three different conversations that are often going on at once, and how that mismatch causes friction. I’m at a really interesting part about COVID and vaccines, and how people had their minds changed and why some people didn’t. So I’m loving that — I’ve got my highlighter out and everything, very excited. That’s my first freq-out this week.

Chuck: What else do you have?

Jenni: Only that my Harvard Business Review print copy arrived in the post, and I’m super excited to read it — I just resubscribed because I keep finding articles I want to read, and I find their data-based reporting really helpful for the work we’re doing and talking about. The print copy’s just arrived, so I’m quite excited — I like a good magazine, and one talking about leadership and culture is what gets me excited. And playing some D&D, so I’m totally nerding out this weekend.

Chuck: Apparently — here’s what I find fascinating about Harvard Business Review, their digital and their digital-plus-print subscription prices are exactly the same, which is interesting from a publishing standpoint, but I agree it’s a hundred percent worth it. Here’s a couple of things I’m freq-ing out about, Jenni. One just popped up this morning — I got an email from Subway, the sandwich shop, that they’re now doing foot-long Doritos nachos, which I’m a little intrigued by, because I feel like that’s Taco Bell’s domain — the Doritos Locos Tacos is a family favorite, so did Subway steal Doritos from Taco Bell and start doing nachos? It’s apparently a limited run, so I’ll have to give it a go.

Jenni: You’re going to have to do it before one of our future episodes so you can report back.

Chuck: I’ve got to do it soon, because I don’t know how long it’ll be there — I appreciate some restaurant ingenuity, so I’ll be giving these Doritos nachos a try.

Jenni: I’m going to see if we’ve got that here — I bet it’s not over this side, I bet it’s just for you. I’ll check and let you know.

Chuck: I hope you don’t have it, I hope it’s exclusive to us for a little bit. The other thing I’m freq-ing out about — is the show The Pit available in the UK? Are you familiar with this show?

Jenni: I don’t think so — on what streaming service?

Chuck: Max. It’s streaming on Max.

Jenni: I don’t think I even know what that is, Chuck. I’m going to say no, it’s not here.

Chuck: Okay, so there you go — maybe we get the Doritos nachos and The Pit both. Here’s why I’m freq-ing out about this show — it’s brought back the concept of must-see TV for me. There’s this great TikTok series of, I think, a liquor store in the Northeast US where they hold up a bottle of something and say “you should be drinking this instead” — something not as well known, maybe cheaper, but better. That’s what I’m doing with The Pit — you might be watching Severance or Real Housewives of whatever, but you should be watching The Pit, because it’s remarkable television. If the show ER and the show 24 had a baby, it would be The Pit. It’s brilliant storytelling, self-contained in this ER the entire time — every episode is one hour of a shift for the ER workers. It’s apparently very accurate — there’s all sorts of Instagram reels and TikToks of ER physicians watching the show and reacting, “yep, that’s accurate,” maybe with a couple of small things off. It’s one of those shows that wasn’t made bingeable — a new episode came out every week, all fifteen or sixteen are out now so you could binge it — but it was one of those shows where, when an episode was over, I was actually angry I had to wait another week. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way about a television show. If you’ve watched The Pit, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, I feel sorry for you, Jenni.

Jenni: As you were describing it, it made me think I might have seen an advert, or seen it come up on one of the many streaming services we have. I’ll go check, and if it’s there, I’ll watch an episode before next week’s Frequency episode.

Chuck: And what’s really cool is the actor Noah Wyle, who was in ER, plays the lead in this — you see him fifteen, twenty years older, but still in the same world. Truly remarkable television. It’s great to see the concept of must-see TV come back.

Jenni: Nice.

Chuck: With that, we’re going to wrap up the show. We want to thank you all for joining us this week. As we’ve mentioned, all the articles and resources that inspired this conversation will be in the show notes — please don’t forget to rate and review after you’ve listened, subscribe so you don’t miss another episode, and pass this along to someone you think would enjoy listening or watching, because Frequency is now on YouTube for people who like to consume podcasts there. Thank you to our friend Poet Ali for contributing the music to the show. We’ll be back next week with more news, insights, and opinions about everything comms and leadership in workplaces today. Keep tuning in and turning up.

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