Michael Sampson

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (September 19, 2008)

Regularly posting snippets about yourself helps foster ambient awareness in virtual teams. 

Meetings have different purposes, and depending on the type of meeting, do things in person, over video, or some other way. I wrote a similar piece in May.

James wonders whether SharePoint My Sites will work in "normal organizations", eg, not in professional services and technology segment firms.

Debbie is asking for examples of firms implementing social networking tools.

In assessing organizational readiness for collaboration, make sure you ask the right questions.

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (September 10, 2008)

7 Skills for Effective Collaboration
Shawn lists seven personal skills for effective collaboration: "How to apologise; How to advocate your point of view without harming your collaborator's feelings; How to spot when a conversation gets emotional and then make it safe again to continue meaningful dialogue; How to listen and get into the shoes of your collaborator; How to define a mutual intent that will inspire action; How to tell and elicit stories; and How to get things done so you have something to show for your collaboration."

Challenges of Enterprise Collaboration
Oliver Marks on enterprise collaboration strategy and Web 2.0: "Web 2.0 technologies are not a magic wand that will force people to collaborate. Tools can make it easier and make people want to collaborate, but often people are fearful of how long it will take and will it change their work/home life."

Focus in Distributed Collaboration
Leadership in distributed teams is about maintaining focus. "At the scale of a distributed startup, leadership amounts to establishing a focus. If you attempt to manage at the task level instead of providing a framework for team members to decide if something is within or without the focus of the team, the team isn't moving fast enough. Management does provide the process discipline and measurements to sustainably keep the smaller decisions in check with focus, but it underperforms in abscence of leadership. And there is another word for too much management, overhead."

Quick Links
- Stuart wonders whether public companies are less interested in social media tools as a way of doing business, compared to a stakeholder positioning strategy.
- Three ideas on improving leadership of virtual teams: consider motivation, practice being a leader, and get support.
- How do you facilitate knowledge hand-offs from experienced people to less experienced people? BusinessWeek catalogues 10 ideas.

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (September 9, 2008)

Trust in Virtual Teams
Chris shares strategies for building trust in virtual teams: (a) meet the other people on your team, (b) share ownership in the outcomes, (c) have predictable patterns, and do what you say you will do, and (d) develop consistent processes, among others. "Why is trust so vital to a successful, productive team? In the simplest terms, a team works together to be productive. And in order to work together, rather than work simultaneously, team members need a level of comfort with the abilities, competencies, and intentions of their teammates. Trust enables a team to focus on tasks at hand rather than protecting each member’s own interests. The interests of the group become the interest of each individual."

Social Network Analysis
The power of social network analysis is in revealing where you need to build additional connections. " ... it allows to you find where these weaknesses are in your network and strengthen those areas. For example, if John is the key connection between the HR and Finance functions and no other strong relationships exist, it’s quite obvious that relationships should also be built by with several other people. This is a simple and obvious example, but extrapolated to the macro-network, one easily sees the benefits this type of analysis presents. Were John to leave, and the organization had successfully build multiple other relationship points, critical communications would still have communication avenues, and breakdown of relationships would not occur."

Quick Links
- Collaboration tools support professional immortality.

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (September 8, 2008)

Face-to-Face Meetings: 5x to 35x More Expensive than Virtual Ones
Verizon calculated that face-to-face meetings cost 5 to 35 times more than virtual meetings. The company is encouraging its employees to plan more virtual meetings. "The chief financial officer of Verizon Business—who owns the budget—sent a message addressing budgetary challenges and the benefits of going green and using the company's conferencing services. Travelers also are reminded of remote conferencing options when booking trips. The company's intranet travel page has windows that pop up when an employee logs in to remind them to use Verizon's conferencing and collaboration services and the benefits of going green. The window also pops up each time a decision is made on the page and is included in the notes section."

More on GE SupportCentral
The manager of SupportCentral at GE spoke at the recent Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco; SupportCentral is GE's internal Web-based knowledge base. Key ideas: anonymity in enterprises doesn't work, knowledge and people exist within the context of processes, the groups on SupportCentral generate the most value, and make sure you remove dead content. The benefit of SupportCentral: productivity gains of up to 70% in some cases.

Collaboration and Leadership
Michael from Cisco writes about the need for leadership to make collaboration succeed. "Collaboration is easy, isn’t it? Many executives must think so, judging by the way they presumptively mandate collaboration in their organizations. But you’ll get a different view if you speak to the people who are trying to collaborate. They often tell of failed collaborations that waste resources and even create resentment and a determination to “go it alone.” They cite lack of common goals, miscommunication, perceived inequities, distrust, insufficient resources, and a lack of incentives as the reasons for the failures. In short, when a collaboration effort fails, the finger of fault often points at the organization’s leaders. Without the right leadership, collaboration is syncategorematic—like a predicate without a subject, an action with no one acting." He then lists seven ingredients of successful collaborations.

Quick Links
- About to be involved in a new team? Use For the Birds as an ice-breaker to stimulate conversation about important teaming concepts.
- Eight ways to build collaborative teams.

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (September 5, 2008)

Collaboration as Strategy
Les addresses CEOs and calls out the business value of collaboration technology and approaches. "When a business works out how to use collaboration tools properly, it can open up an entirely new way of improving resource allocation, driving innovation, getting closer to customers and partners, taking costs out of the business and reducing time-to-market. Collaboration, based on the network as the platform, is even able to help reduce the impact of business on the environment." Note that Les is from Cisco, so there's a strong message around TelePresence in the article.

Virtual Team Moves
The Institute for Corporate Productivity recently completed a survey on virtual teams, finding that companies are expecting an increased use of this organizational form. Key challenges: "Indeed, the major challenges posed by the use of teams are led by the idea that virtual teams are too difficult to manage, with 35% of respondents overall ranking it first on a high/very high scale. Thirty-one percent of respondents feel that coordinating schedules is problematic, and a like percentage noted that they feel their company’s technology tools are inadequate for team meetings. The element considered most critical for team performance – cited by 96% of companies as being critical to a high or very high extent – was listening skills. Trust was ranked as high or very high by 92% of respondents, followed by the ability to establish actionable items at 87% and group facilitation skills at 78%. Consensus-seeking skills, cultural awareness and a sense of humor all have more than two-thirds of respondents saying they are critical to a high or very high extent."

Collaboration and Leadership
Distributed collaboration makes leadership challenges more acute. "Collaboration is hard today because of conflicting priorities and blurred boundaries. Consider distributed software development with developers working in different countries and sometimes for different organizations. How do you mobilize people to focus on what’s most important? Whom do they listen to? How can you hold people accountable when there are so many factors in play?" Kristin outlines two types of problems: technical and adaptive. "Tackling adaptive challenges is daunting. Rather than relying on problem solving by people in senior authority positions, solutions to adaptive challenges are developed by key stakeholders across multiple organizations, and require experimentation. New business models, interoperability and increasingly complex technology all place new demands to get work done. The appropriate leadership behavior, which can be exercised by anyone in the organization, involves finding ways to break through the status quo that are built on the success patterns of the past and become rooted in the organization’s culture, preventing progress in the new context. With adaptive challenges, just asking for collaboration will not be enough to force systemic trade-offs. The key is to mobilize people and influence them to face facts they don’t want to face. You are challenging values, beliefs and behaviors that were essential to past success but must be discarded in order to move forward."

Quick Links
- One tip to improving the performance of virtual teams: address uncertainty.

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (September 1, 2008)

Open Work Strategy
Mindy wonders whether more could be made of the "open work" strategy, where people work remotely from an office. "It is clear to all of us that we are now living in a world different from one that any other generation has worked in: a world where I panic if I leave the house without my BlackBerry and see my laptop as an extension of myself. Yet the silver lining to being connected 24/7 is that it not only enables me to get my work done from anywhere--it allows me to avoid buying $4-a-gallon gasoline or taking another flight to the U.K., benefiting both the environment and my wallet. And it makes me wonder--are we really maximizing the impact of open work as a strategy to combat rising energy use, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and the greater climate change crisis?"

Wiki Adoption Strategy
Seth suggests a new technology adoption strategy of the extreme demonstration of the brokenness of current approaches. Eg, he outlines a way of showing someone how bad email and Word are for co-authoring a document. "All humor aside, sometimes the only way to change people's ingrained behavior is to offer an alternative that is substantially easier. It has to be a big improvement because old habits are hard to break. Starting to use a wiki can be hard for people accustomed to Microsoft Word. They will initially get frustrated and resort to what they know. If you can't eliminate the learning curve of a wiki, you can expose the inefficiency of collaborating without one. The next time they launch Word, they will remember their painful experience and think twice."

Collaboration Tensions
Bruce examines the tensions in collaboration, and discusses what makes collaboration successful. "As we have already seen, processes are by definition an oxymoron when it comes to collaboration. On the one hand, processes imply consistency, repeatability and reliability, Six Sigma being an excellent example of this. On the other hand, collaboration excels when there are few, if any constraints in place, there is a place to develop informal working, innovation and spontaneity can thrive." He concludes by talking about the 4G process that his firm offers.

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (August 26, 2008)

Collaboration in Teaching
Kim is thinking about the possibilities of collaboration in teaching, and offers a graphic to summarize her thoughts. "I still couldn’t think of different terms to define the continuum, although I don’t like the fact that “dependence” could have a negative connotation even though “full collaboration” is a good thing - we want to have more collaboration, more teaming, and more sharing of strengths. Any ideas?"

I was actually thinking of the same word this morning ... and had problems with "dependence". Perhaps "interdependence" is the one that Kim needs.

Quick Links
- An article on managing virtual teams, that Jessica says "hits the high points".

WWPYCBW: Strategy and People (August 22, 2008)

Collaboration the New Competitiveness?
Adam considers the range of examples of growing collaboration around the world (governments, businesses, society) and sees three main drivers: (a) greater ability to collaborate, (b) greater need to collaborate given 'wicked problems', and (c) an essential need to collaborate. "Don’t get me wrong, friendly competition is still a powerful motivating force to improve efficiencies, spur innovation, and generally make life interesting. But in a world with no borders, finite resources and global problems, the survival of the fittest isn’t a measure of individual success - it requires a team effort."

Twitter Changes Social Dynamics
A Penn State user of Twitter argues that Twitter is a huge multiplier of effectiveness. " ... I honestly believe that if I weren’t on twitter and connected to the people that I’m connected to in my local community I would not be as effective at my job. I would not have the same knowledge, I would not be involved in the same collaborative projects and I would not have the same personal connections to people that work at other campuses and in other departments. Twitter has changed *everything*. I also strongly feel that people not involved in these local twitter discussions are missing out on great conversations, personal relationships, and problem-solving discussions that are taking place *only* in this venue."

Four Things for the Virtual Office
Expresso says that people need four key capabilites for virtual offices: (1) a simple and familiar interface, (2) presence and chat, (3) file control, sharing and real-time collaboration, and (4) conferencing.

Finally ...
And finally, congratulations to Step Two Designs on its new web site, and (gulp!) comments on James's blog!

A-Z of Virtual Teams: R is Responsiveness

The heart of effective collaboration both in-person and when mitigated by technology is responsiveness, as measured in (a) time and (b) engagement.

In terms of time, a face-to-face conversation "works" when the people in the meeting answer the questions they have been asked during the meeting, or take a next action to respond at a later time. Meetings where one person talks, and everyone else is an unreadable object -- not engaging in the conversation and not giving any feedback -- are really difficult meetings for the people who are asking questions. "That meeting was a waste of time" is a good summary -- the others didn't embrace the opportunity afforded by in-person time to converse in rapid / interactive time.

The same applies to conversations run through technology. Regardless of the technology being used, a timely response is a great facilitator of collaboration. In some cases, email can be a very effective collaboration tool where two people are having a conversation by email, and where each person takes the responsibility to reply in short order. Conversations left hanging for days and weeks -- where someone ignores the request for conversation with another as embodied in an email -- are hung / dead conversations. The other will have to move on, will have to find another way of making it happen.

In terms of engagement, responsiveness can be measured. You send out an invitation for collaboration, and the others come back quickly but with only a brief "okay" or "looks good" ... They have been responsive in time but not in terms of engagement. What does "okay" really mean? Is that all they can say to your masterpiece, or is the "okay" a signal of indifference, a sign that they really don't care.

On the other hand, a detailed response that shows care and thought in understanding what you were saying, and in giving concrete ideas on how to improve it ... well, it's more messy, but it's an invitation for collaboration. You will have to re-evaluate your positions, and re-evaluate how you will proceed with the project or the idea, but that's the point.

So the R is ... responsiveness, as measured both in time and in engagement.

What Do I Need To Do?

How are you going with being responsive in your virtual team work? Are others waiting (... and waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting) for you to come back? Do others describe you as "responsive", or do they frequently say "Oh you are still alive" when they happen to bump into you virtually or in-person? (If yes, that's *really* bad).

What do you need to do differently, to be more responsive?

See A-Z of Virtual Teams: Summary for the complete list.

Reflections on Video Conferencing Facilitation

I attended a meeting in the city earlier in the week, with about 20-25 people in attendance. There were four others with me in the city here, 15 or so people in another major city, one joining from a third city, and another one (or two?) from a fourth city. The first three cities were linked by video conference (using LifeSize video conferencing gear), and the last by phone. In our location, we had two 60" Flat Panel Sony displays -- they were big. I was an attendee, I only knew one other person at the meeting (who was sitting next to me in Christchurch), and I hadn't read the document we were going to discuss. So I was really observing the process, as well as getting up to speed on the issues.

The meeting was okay, and I think there was some consensus about the issues, but I left with three main reflections.

Shared Visual Artifacts
First, there was no attempt to create a shared artifact as the different people in the various locations gave their feedback on the document that we had gathered to discuss. If we'd all been in the same room, surely someone would have jumped up to the white board and started noting down the concerns and reflections. I think the lack of this hindered the effectiveness of the meeting later on, because while most people had spoken, we had no co-created visual artifact to ground the discussion in the latter parts of the meeting. And so it seemed to me -- and others expressed some frustration too -- that all of that discussion had been lost / ignored / unheard.

So how do you do this in a video conference? One idea ... and it would have worked at our end because one of the 60" displays sat unused, would be to have a camera focused on a white board, and ask someone to take notes as the various people spoke. Another option would be to use the second display linked up to a Tablet PC and OneNote, or MindManager. But something as a visual reference would have made the meeting more effective.

Independent Meeting Facilitation
Secondly, the facilitator of the meeting was from the organization that would have the responsibility to implement the ideas of the session, and although she did a good job of getting feedback, I can't help but wondering whether her own thoughts about the document and the best next actions overshadowed what the others were saying. In other words, I wonder whether her frame of reference and her expectations filtered what she was able to hear from the other people. I entirely accept that she has to go back to her organization and they have to decide what to do, but combining the role of meeting facilitator and invested party appeared to me to be too much of a conflict.

Having an independent, impartial meeting facilitator there who had no vested interest in the outcome would have made for a better meeting experience.

Effective Use of the Technology
No one at our location knew how to use the video conferencing gear, so we couldn't use it as well as it could have been used. For example, for the entire 2 hour meeting, all three locations that were on video showed on one of our 60" monitors. Thus each location was small. And the city with 15 or so people around the room ... well each person in that window appeared very small. Also, we had ourselves on the screen for the entire time too, something we didn't need to see, but we didn't know how to get rid of ourselves.

I played with the remote a fair bit during the second half of the meeting, zooming in on the others in the room with 15 or so people, and that worked reasonably okay. There was a bit of a delay from pushing a button on the remote and seeing the impact on the camera at the other end, which made for some interesting moments ("oh, what nice wallpaper they have there"). It may have been possible to do, but one of the features that I would really have liked is the ability to preset a number of camera positions, so that when Person A started talking again, I could click one button and have the camera focus in on them without me having to drive it (right-right-right-up-up-left-up-up-right). I'm sure it could be done via a slick interface and a table-top command unit. And maybe LifeSize already offer such things, but it wasn't apparent in the meeting.

And You?
What's your experience of video conferencing at the moment? How do you handle the issues above in your world?