Patterns

How many times have you been on a conference call when the moderator comes on the line and asks the question: "Who do we have on the line?" This is just about the most ineffective question to ask for several reasons but yet it is asked over and over again. With no visual queues, the attendees come off mute and announce themselves stepping on each-other, stopping, starting, awkward pauses, and it is just a mess. The only question worse that could be asked is "Who is not on the line?"

The right thing to do is for the host or moderator of the call to perform a quick role call of the attendees. Each attendee is called by name and when everyone has been called, the call can begin.

When we are in the same room or have the same visual queues, the most common practice is for the moderator to ask: "Lets go around the room and introduce ourselves.". Obviously, we can't do this on conference calls because there no notion of a room to "go around'" . It would be great if there was a shared protocol or etiquette where everyone got a list of the attendees and knew that if there was a broadcast message put out there like "Who do we have on the line?", the way to answer is to honor the order of that list and you would follow the person before you on this list. In the end, it is just simpler to not ask the problematic question in the first place.

At an extreme, this same pattern is like testing for a gas leak with a match: there is no way to predict the size or order of the subsequent responses. It is a pattern that has a useful place in the universe, just not on conference calls. :-)

--tk