Tools for Catalyzing Collaboration

One of our engagement guidelines is the Gift of Time. It’s a guideline I use in all of my synchronous (same time) gatherings, and it basically means that all of us are gifting the rest of us our time and attention for the duration of this workshop, and that we should respect that.

Respecting the Gift of Time entails many things: listening and respecting other people’s contributions, not monologuing, and so forth. From the facilitators perpsective, it means starting and ending on time.

Applying the Gift of Time is much harder when the interaction is asynchronous (different time). While each of us may be committing the same amount of time overall to the process, the rhythm of that contribution affects the overall process.

How do we design for this? Chunking the process with regular, often synchronous interaction is one way. We’ve done this by having weekly calls, and you can see how this has affected our process. But you don’t have to feel limited to the telephone. On many of my projects, we schedule Wiki sprints as a way to create a safe learning environment for participants as well as to increase the collaborative energy. These are periods of time (anywhere from 3-5 hours) where people are encouraged to “be on the Wiki.”

Another design guideline is to schedule realistically for the time you have. I was once asked to help design a three-hour, face-to-face session for a group of upset community members that would “get them on the same page and get them inspired” and that would result in a comprehensive action plan. Not going to happen. You have to make a choice.

I’m faced with this all the time when scheduling breaks for face-to-face events. I understand the importance and value of scheduling enough time for breaks, and yet, I’m often fighting my instinct to cut out the breaks in order to leave more time for “work.”

Similarly, with phone gatherings, I often have to fight the instinct to schedule sessions longer than one hour. There is a lot of good research that says that people’s productivity on teleconferences drop dramatically after one hour, regardless of how well the call is being facilitated. This is why our calls are only one hour, even though I wish I had three!

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For those of you who need a little reminder, I’ve posted this week’s exercise to the Wiki. I’d encourage you to start posting ideas there or here on this blog or on chatter if you feel more comfortable with that as a starting point. Less than a week to finish the exercise, so get cracking!

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Having worked for a virtual organization for the past 4 years, and having experimented with  variety of ways to try to get people collaborating efficiently and creatively, I am surprised that I don’t have a lot of insight into how to maximize those interactions and collaborative experiences.  A few things I’ve been able to glean over the years, however, are the following (only applicable to small groups):

1. When working toward a specific, structured end-product (as opposed to a free-flowing generation of ideas type project), it helps to have a lot of offline contact and to gain buy-in and begin creating community among the group that will be working together.

2. Clear expecations, roles, a timeline and leadership that comes from the community itself are critical to success.

3. Flexibility, and the knowledge that the process is sometimes messy and will go off track, is important, as is the abillity to refocus the group/goals.

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One of the elements I give thought to when designing a meeting is the physical layout of the room and the visuals. Focusing on the structure aspect, when I’ve conducted meetings via telecon I frequently email ahead a powerpoint that is filled with the images and colors that are familiar to the group and have them follow along with me as we move through the agenda. In many cases I have not met any of the people face-to-face, but the connection is immediately established with the common objective/outcome of the meeting. Just as Eugene established the “engagement guidelines,” I assist the group in creating their guidelines prior to the meeting and make sure they are distributed. This is key to both a feeling of connection and safety.  If structure is viewed in energetic terms, and we give credence to the nature of fields of energy, then distance becomes less of an issue and more about the metaphor that is used to invoke the sense of structure and the supporting materials.

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I’m no Seth Godin, but there is a definite human need to belong, and identify with like-minded people.  We gather around beliefs and ideas that inspire us, and join together to take action, make a difference, live meaningful lives.

Online interaction is a limited yet useful way to organize, communicate, and structure ourselves: translating goodwill into genuine results.  It misses the value of face to face communication and it’s undercurrent of “unspoken” communication - body language, eye-contact, tonality - that allows us to know each other more deeply.  My theory is that without engaging our body and emotions in knowing a person, we limit our relationship to the left brain.  Jill Bolte Taylor, brain scientist, gives an amazing TED talk about the stroke she had in her right brain, which has changed my perception on how our brain and body interact, and how we as humans see ourselves in relationship to the world.

Jill illustrates clearly how our left and right brain perceive and interact - completely oversimplified - the left being logic and the right being fully present in our body and in the moment.  And since we have such an intuitive emotional relationship with our bodies, the success of online worlds like Second Life are somewhat baffling.  Pseudo selves, Avatars, roam lands having interactions with people across countries, but what actual value does this bring to people, does this enrich their lives? Or are they escaping them?

But I digress.  From my experience, online communication falls short of fulfilling the human prerogative to connect, be in community and be known, because it is in essence an extension of the left brain, where intellect, reason and rationality rule.

Now I’m thinking of several arguments that could make a case for the opposite, but I do think there is some fundamental truth in my argument, and why we have seen such a decline in happiness in our country since we’ve become siloed in our cubicles for the majority of our waking hours.

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Hi all. I’m out of town later this week, so I’m going to dive into these unknown waters more quickly than I might have. I’ve been involved in, even in charge of collaborations, but I’m certainly no specialist. So, my comments are purely based on my experience, which tells me that the structure and group size of any interaction in a collaboration depends on that interaction’s goal.

There are so many stages and facets to organizing a collaboration: clarifying goals, roles, process, and expectations; buy-in and bonding; information sharing; feedback; brainstorming; outlining options; decision making; implementation planning; execution management; evaluation and mid-course corrections, etc. Each one may require slightly different leadership, structure, or group size.

For instance, you may not want the same kind of meeting for an interaction aimed at information sharing as you would for one aimed at brainstorming or decision making. Some interactions require a greater amount of feedback, so you want to structure those in ways that people feel encouraged to share their views—maybe that means a smaller number of participants, and more trust among them. For some stages of collaboration you may need every member at the table, for others only member subsets, for others special invited guests. You may want a facilitator sometimes, but other times may want the group to own the meeting process.There may be times that polling is involved, to make sure every voice is heard.

I think the same may be true for the variety of online collaboration tools. The choice is based on which one can help advance the specific goals of the interaction. Blogs are great because people can comment on other’s posts and that feedback can actually become quite a rich conversation. Microblogs are good for quickly sharing informational links or short observations/opinions/news. Wikis and Ning sites could be good for implementation planning and execution, where you’re actually co-creating content. GotoMeeting and webinars–where there’s an active leader/presenter–are great for more personal, real- time learning, engagement, and maybe bonding.  Each tool has its strengths, just like each meeting type has strengths.

All of these tools help create “ambient intimacy”—participants get to know each other on a superficial but meaningful basis. But I’m not sure ambient intimacy/online tools alone can carry a successful collaboration. The collaborations I’ve been part of would probably not have been successful without at least an initial period of face-to-face meetings where familiarity and trust are built and common expectations are forged. There’s something about being in the same room and seeing people’s faces and eyes and the subtleties of body language that’s difficult to replicate online. Seems like the collaboration ideal might be a marriage of face-to-face and online tools. Like Eugene said, online tools allow you to extend an exchange beyond the confines of physical meeting time and space.

I’m hopeful (but not entirely certain) that an answer to Eugene’s question is embedded in what’s above! Mostly, I’m eager to hear what all of you have to say.

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Welcome Vance, Amanda, Amalie, Grady, Elissa, Gayle, Catherine, and anyone else who may be eavesdropping! This is the group blog for the June 2009 Tools for Catalyzing Collaboration online workshop. We’ll be sharing our thoughts and learnings here and in other places.

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