In my office, it seems that projects are more and more communicated in monotones, without the richness of true interpersonal contact. A task comes down with the informative value of someone saying, "here is what i want now you do it."
Once upon a time, in a different place and with different people, a task was typically placed into context. Is this an experimental thrust, subject to evaluation, regrouping, and change of direction? Is this a suggested approach to meeting some larger goal? Who really cares about the result? Who cares about the method?
One thing which is different from those other times and places is the sheer size of the corporation within which we find ourselves. Often the identity of the true champion of an idea is lost in a series of requests from unit to unit long before we are involved. Besides, the form of the requests in a large organization is stilted to fit within standard formats mandated by other corporate units which are not involved in any way with the current project.
Another difference is the physical distance from the deciders, which results in most communication being technologically filtered through telephone (audio only) or email (text only) and filtered also into discreet and temporally separated snippets, losing continuity.
Of course, the appearence of difference may be partly due to my status as a part-time employee. It seems that the more one is able to remove oneself from the day-to-day routines of the office the less those routines seem to be normal. But I think this is less significant for me than it might me, inasmuch as I remember classifying much that went on in my first jobs as being delusional in quite the same sense as what I am describing here.
What I beleive to be different is the level of engagement between the staff where I work and the people they are trying to serve. In the actual reality game engagement is always in play. Do you engage the other person, and how deeply? (My inclination is always against engaging and toward being engaged. But that's a dichotomy for another essay.) For a highly skilled player the level of engagement is strategic; for any skillful player engagement is played tactically.
Many of us engage others ad hoc and based mostly on personal relationships. (I like to talk to so-and-so, and so I do, even though she doesn't have any real stake in this particular project.) To play this way, however is to build up a virtual reality and move into it.