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CSC and Collaboration 2.0
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Category Archives: Collaboration
Concept of the Day: Cultural Plasticity
I’m not sure whether this counts as a real fully fledged concept, or just an idea, or actually even whether there is a difference.
The idea comes from Jonah Lehrer over on The Frontal Cortext blog where he reflects on the diversity of music that we enjoy (his pretext is the events at the MTV awards with Kanye West and Taylor Swift).
It got me thinking, in what other ways are we culturally plastic:
- Food: The range of food available in the UK is incredible. Foods from every country in the world and even fusions of different food types. We skip between them without really thinking about it, something that my grandparents would never have done.
- Video/Television/Films: I know a few people who will only go to the movies to see a certain type of film, but there aren’t many of them. And the range of film genre is increasing all of the time.
- Reading: Looking at the book shelf beside me there is a huge variety of material. There’s no Mills and Boon, but apart from that there is practically every other type of writing.
So what impact does this plasticity have on the world of work?
Teams that accept diversity work better and produce stronger results. As people become more tolerant of, and learn to enjoy cultural differences hopefully this will be reflected in teams. This will be especially true for international teams which will become more prevalent as technology enables it.
I suspect, to, that people we start to choose the places where they work on the basis of the diversity of the culture. Places with a monolithic culture we be regarded as stale and dull. Skilful business managers will be able to create diverse cultures that are highly productive.
What would you like me to write about?
Some of you who read this blog know my quite well, others of you who only read about me here are starting to know me.
So I thought I’d ask the question.
What would you like me to write about?
Not sure why I’ve never though to ask before.
I’m writing this post sitting on a full train using a Blackberry while reading an article that states "within the next few years as many as 20 million people will be choosing to work one or more days a week in third-place facilities – that is, public or private spaces built specifically for the temporary or semi-temporary business purposes of companies and individuals".
And I’ve spent most of today in a meeting in a hotel lobby…it’s a changing world of work.
Negotiations
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks getting my head around some prices, some costs and there influence on some negotiations.
Sometime the negotiations can feel a bit like this:
Once I get out of the other side of this work I am hoping to be writing a little more often – but you never can know for sure.
The Communication Mystery
I have to admit that communication is a complete mystery to me. I like to think things through logically, but I’ve never been able to fathom communication.
I’m constantly amazed by the things that people regard as exciting because they understand it, even if it’s not really very exciting at all. I’m even more amazed by the things people regard as exciting even though they don’t understand it.
I’m sure that the answer is in communication, but that is still a mystery to me.
A little while I started out on a mission to have more meaningful conversations. My aim was to have one every day, well that has proved impractical, but I have still managed a significant number.
What I am starting to conclude is that communication is more of an art than a science. What I mean by this is that communication involves far more emotion and heart than logic. Engage with people’s feelings and they are open to communication, engage with their logic and most people aren’t. Be passionate about something and they will engage, give them the facts and they probably won’t.
Why don’t people engage with emails? Because it’s just communicating facts.
Why do people engage with video conferencing? Because it engages their feelings.
The challenge and the mystery is born out of the subjectivity of any art which means that people engage with it in completely different ways.
How you engage with the picture at the start of this blog depends on so many different things. I was there so I know what it felt like, but how the picture makes you feel depends upon your history, your upbringing, your experiences, your preferences. Each one of these will influence your emotional reaction to it.
I’d like there to be a formula for communication, but there isn’t one, I’ll just have to learn to be a better artist.
Please make me one of these: Universal profile
I have identities all over the Internet, and internally; blog, flickr, linkedin, facebook, etc. each one of them have some form of a personal profile where I get to talk about who I am and what I do.
There are lots of very clever people working on the problem of how I get to these things without having to authenticate everywhere. But I want more than that, I want to be able to have a single place where I have my profile information.
Why should I need to tell each of these systems the same information? If I change my job it should be updated within the relevant systems.
The emerging identity federation model probably has a lot to tell us in this area. People started from the premise that identities should be stored in one place and every other system should trust that one place. This didn’t work, because there wasn’t trust between all of the systems. The same will be true for profiles. I don’t want everyone to see all of the profile, I only want the people to see the parts of my profile that are relevant to the access that they have and the system that they are using.
Technologies like Facebook Connect go someway towards resolving this problem, but I’m not sure that they have really learnt the lessons from the identity people.
I want to be in control of what goes where, but I don’t want to have to maintain the same stuff everywhere.
I’m sure that I’m not alone in thinking that this is a problem, and as the famous quote goes: “"The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed." – William Gibson. So I’m also sure that I have missed some form of amazing development in this area that has the potential to make my winging sound like the ramblings of an idiot.
Anyone else think that this is a problem we need to get resolved?
Meaningful Conversations Day 1: Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, etc..
Last night I decided that I needed to have more meaningful conversations to hone my communications skills.
I have, at least, managed it for one day.
Today’s conversation was on Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, etc. with a colleague who has been asked to write some short opinion type papers for a customer on the subjects and is only just learning themselves.
It was a good conversation because it turned out to be a real communication challenge. How do you communicate this stuff in a couple of pages and give some value. it’s easy to write a lot and still not give any value. How do you even talk about it without using buzz-words and meaningless acronyms?
It made me realise that I need to invest more time in making this stuff simpler so that any communication can be of real value. The conversation felt a bit like I was putting someone under a waterfall and asking them to drink it all in which is never very effective.
One day own, discovered some challenges, now I need to turn them into lessons.
Technorati Tags: communication
The Cost and the Value of Virtual Meetings
According to Verizon there is a saving of between 5 and 35 times to be made when a meeting is run virtually:
Telecommunications company Verizon has wielded the power of senior-level buy-in to further increase its remote conferencing use in an effort to reduce meetings spending and unnecessary travel and support green initiatives.
“Let’s face it, we have to be cost-conscious and environmentally smart, so that needs to be mirrored in the way we travel,” said Debra Goldmann, senior specialist for Verizon Travel Services. “We took a look at how much people actually spend for a certain type of meeting versus how much they would spend for a virtual meeting. We found that a face-to-face meeting is between five and 35 times more expensive than a virtual meeting.”
When it comes to virtual meetings I have to admit to being something of a cynic. My issue isn’t with the cost savings of moving meetings virtual – my issue is with the diminished value of these meetings.
I don’t think that anyone would argue with me that any virtual platform – video or audio – detracts from the value of the meeting. This results in meetings that are protracted in length and tend to communicate at a very high level. Any discussion that has required a deep understanding or close collaboration has been, in my experience, a failure.
With all of these limitations I wonder whether the value of many virtual meetings is so low as to make them more expensive than face-to-face meetings. I have participated in many teleconference meetings which have been massively protracted by the limitations of the medium. These meetings have then used far more time than a physical meeting would have, but they have also added massively to the lead-time for resolution. In one particular occasion we were working on a technical problem for over three weeks before a face-to-face meeting resolved the problem in under 2 hours.
Having said that, I spend hours of my working week on teleconference calls – and they work very well when they are about transmitting information and not about collaboration.
I also have to admit here that my experience on HD telepresence systems is very limited and it may be the game-changing technology that some people tell me it is.
Perhaps I’m just a Luddite.
Concept of the day: Deindividuation
Anyone who has used email or any other form of electronic communication has seen (and probably sent) written content that shocked you. You were amazed that the person, that you know, could say such a thing in such an aggressive way. The New Scientist has an interesting article that suggests that some of the reason for this is deindividuation:
Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called “suicide baiting” – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.
Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are “distant” from the person we’re talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we’re more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says.
The most recent place where I have seen this personally has been in the occasional reply-to-all storms that we have in our email system. Someone will send out an email to whole set of people. Someone else will reply-to-all that they don’t know why they received the first email, or similar. This will then set of a storm of activity from people replying to the reply-to-all. Each of these replies will get more and more aggressive in their language.
If only these people sat back and analysed what they were doing they would stop doing it. It’s unlikely any of them have read though the recipient list to see who is on it, in their minds they are just replying to some random person. What they are actually doing is replying to all sorts of senior people who could have a great influence on their career, what’s more they are abusing a fellow colleague. If they only thought about how they would feel to receive such an email they wouldn’t do it.
A wise person once said: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
via TechCrunch
Facebook and me
It’s been a few weeks since I started using Facebook.
I’m mostly enjoying the experience. I have a few friends, some from work, some from my personal life. I’ve even had a couple of surprise people contact me from my dim and distant past.
I’ve added a few applications and there are a few active groups that I have joined.
It’s not changed my life but it has got me thinking: If Facebook were my corporate portal would it do a better job? I’ve not concluded that one yet, but I am struck by the amount of effort corporate organisations have to put in to get people to use their specially built portal when Facebook gets thousands of new subscribers and active participants every day.