Endless Knots

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...at Enterprise 2.0

Coming to Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston in a few weeks? If so, please let me know and please come to our sessions. I'm involved with three, including this one, which I'm sharing with, guess who, Jeff Stamps, and is about, guess what, virtual teams current and future:

Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4...

Virtual teams have always been in the 2.0 world, adding content to their shared online spaces, carrying on conversations after the lights have gone out, trying out new media. But the explosion of 2.0 technologies - and the advent of a generation that knows more about how to work online than their bosses - has altered (and will continue) to alter the virtual team landscape. What are the simple ideas that can slice through the complexity facing virtual teams? How can they easily form networks? How can they navigate among the multiple organizations that they serve? Hear the latest from the people who coined the term "virtual teams."

Date: 6/12/2008
Time: 10:45 AM
Room: Carlton

Email: friend or foe?

Just spent the past couple of days with a group of dedicated public servants giving a "teamnet" workshop - teamnet* meaning "network of teams" as there were five teams in this session together comprising a major governmental initiative to increase knowledge sharing. I know there are readers thinking "government" and "knowledge sharing" must surely be an oxymoron. But once again, I come away from a few days with government folks revering their commitment to a life that is not glamorous, that doesn't pay much, that is often frustrating, that perforce means working in a system that is unbearably slow but which offers rewards of a different kind. Service. Thanks to all involved.

We talked about email a lot. The complaints are familiar, the sheer volume, the endless cc:'s, the wonton use of attachments...but there was one voice, one strong voice for the power of email as an information sharing vehicle - rather than as a communication device. This fellow has been on listservs for a very long time; people in his network depend on them for conveying truly useful information. I agree. There are good uses for email. We just need good operating agreements that people need to do their best to adhere to.

What about you? Are you tapped out on email, wish it had never come into existence? Has your organization come up with some good guidelines regarding attachments, cc'ing, subject lines, and the like? Has anyone out there tried what Intel has, "Zero email Friday", which I mentioned here once before?

*We coined the word "teamnet" in our 1993 book, The TeamNet Factor (Wiley).

Sitescape goes to Novell

For those who follow the business of the collaboration/communities of practice/virtual teaming business, Novell has acquired Sitescape as per the Feb 13, 2008, press release. And for those with a long memory, Sitescape got its start in the mid-90s and came to wider attention when it acquired AltaVista (now owned by Overture Services), the first truly powerful search engine and my fave for many years, from Compaq, which had acquired it when Compaq swallowed Digital Equipment Corporation, home to the engineers who invented AltaVista.

Jeff Stamps on Teams of Practice

Jeff Stamps has taken the time to reply at length and in depth to Mike Gotta's response to my post on Teams of Practice. Here's Jeff's thinking:

Mike, this is a terrific post on "Teams of Practice". I'll take a crack at it in the knowledge management context in which we coined the term.

At a high level, we see KM in three phases of collaboration. 

Phase 1 is the capturing, storing, and making accessible knowledge objects generated elsewhere in the organization, the Knowledge Base, for shared use.

Phase 2 added Communities of Practice to source knowledge directly from people. CoP systems of conversation follow Etienne Wenger's observation that people pass practices, their "how-tos," along informal pathways of tacit knowledge exchange, propelled along by questions and answers and held together by social relationships of community. Here, the conversation itself is the knowledge base.

Phase 3 adds Teams of Practice to source knowledge directly from teams. We mean to capture both what "a team of practice" is, and how they inevitably connect as "teams of practice," a network of ToPs.

Teams are the working units of the organization, both strategic (executive) and tactical (line) teams at all levels. The team context allows people to collaboratively pursue concrete goals, test ideas, make decisions, develop and execute tasks, and produce output. As teams go online, they create and capture knowledge objects, generate focused conversations, and produce a wealth of contextual "how-tos" in agendas, task lists, time lines, etc. Hence, knowledge captured in the context of an online team room is the actual tacit practice of the organization.

Organizations are inherently networks of teams, starting with the hierarchy, which is a network of interlocked management teams of direct reporting relationships. Today, many more types of teams are added to that basic set of groups to get the work of the organization done. All these teams are producing output used by other teams in the organization in a sequence of upstream-to-downstream and supplier-customer relationships feeding teams delivering to the organization's ultimate customer(s). The horizontal connections among working teams are the ones that produce large-scale organizational results. This network of teams exists whether recognized or not, and is not a stage on the way to a CoP of individuals.

What's historically new to us as a species long familiar with the complexities of small groups, as with the first two phase of KM, is the online part, the externalization of memory and learning in the global cloud of virtual spacetime. As more of a team's daily life occurs in or passes through online places, more concrete practice is captured in its natural, role-based, context. This is increasingly happening whether the team is collocated or not.

However, teams are jumping online in all manner of KM containers, most groups happily isolated from one another. The challenge is to network them in the meaningful pattern of their work, not just randomly (i.e., search across team spaces). Teams of practice would not only share across teams, but enable learning and problem-solving at the teamnet (network of teams) level of producing organizational results.

Will "teams of practice" catch on?

And while we're extolling Bill Ives's blog, Portals and KM, here comes the self-referential rant: Bill has a post today, Introducing Teams of Practice (and then he includes Jeff's and my names) about mine below called Teams of practice, wherein I throw out the idea that we're moving beyond vague communities of like-minded practitioners to teams acquiring and sharing their knowledge. Heresy? Who knows...but I sure have gotten a lot of hits on that post. Thanks, Bill, a prodigious and generous blogger.

Dorothy, it's knowledgement management

The Leavenworth (Kansas and, yes, I wore my red shoes) Times carried Conference focuses on knowledge management last Friday, an article on the event where we spoke in early November:

Speakers included the husband and wife team of Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps, co-founders of a company called NetAge.

Part of their presentation focused on virtual teams, which Lipnack said are small groups of people working independently across boundaries.

Stamps and Lipnack provided tips for operating what they called “far-flung teams” or groups with people working at different locations.

Thanks to writer John Richmeier for including us in the piece. You can see our full presentation to the conference by clicking here: The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams.

Teams of practice

We've been hanging out at the collaboration bar for a bit of time now, which means that we've seen a few different customers take stools, saying *theirs* is the only drink to order. They down a few and poof! they're gone.

Some have stuck. For at least a decade and a half, communities of practice have held their seat. Ever since Etienne Wenger (hello, old friend) coined the phrase in his and Jean Lave's 1991 book, Situated Learning, savvy organizations have been promoting their use. Among the first was Bob Buckman, then CEO of Buckman Labs, the specialty chemical company, who turned his entire organization into one gigantic global community of practice years before most reading here even had email accounts. We documented Bob's story in Virtual Teams--and, perhaps more importantly, he documented it himself in Building the Knowledge-Driven Organization.

Not long after people in the collaboration community (which will have to be a subject of another post someday) started to use the term "communities of practice" came its partner-in-crime, knowledge management, whose history Karl-Erik Sveiby, the Swedish writer and consultant, has been tracking for years.

Comes then a whole sector of the tech industry focused on making it easier for people to "manage" their knowledge, a concept that bears reflecting upon elsewhere (is knowledge manageable as, say, people are? - I'll let that one go for now). Also comes then all manner of upstart efforts within organizations to swap learning as fast as possible, often without their employers' imprimaturs.

Among these were two majors in the US Army, Nate Allen and Tony Burgess, who, without sanction or budget or business plan, started Companycommand.com. There soldiers could exchange, well, war stories. A good summary of their experience is documented in the Government Executive article, "Managing Technology Linked in the Fight," which was laid out in detail in the 2005 book, CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Professional, which the two majors along with two others co-authored with Professor Nancy Dixon.

All of which is a windy introduction to the fact that the US Army has a long, rich history in communities of practice with now probably tens of thousands of online forums where soldiers of every rank can exchange information in a timely way.

So it was that the Army held its 3rd Annual Knowledge Management Conference last week, where we, along with Dr. Dixon and others, gave talks, ours titled The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams. Lots of discussion about communities of practice, knowledge sharing, semantic webs, and all the other topics that IT professionals, learning experts, and the top brass, whether those with stars on their shoulders or big paychecks, worry about.

OK. What's next? Jeff and I came away thinking about this: perhaps the era of the community of practice needs to morph a bit. Aren't we now in the time when teams, not just amorphous communities or lone-ranger individuals, need to share practices? And isn't the technology up to the task, what with virtual (or, if you prefer, global) teams exploding everywhere and wikis for teams going up on the web faster than their IT departments can track them? Teams, we think, are the way to work (without diminishing the genius and creativity of the individual), the hope for solving the seemingly intractable problems that sometimes make it hard to get up in the morning.

Thus, we invite a new customer to the collaboration bar: Teams of Practice, the title of this post.