The Institute for Corporate Leadership surveyed 500+ organizations and pulled together the results in Taking the Pulse: Virtual Leadership, a free, downloadable report, worth taking a look at. What jumps out? The finding that leadership development fails to properly address the new challenges introduced by virtual working. Only 3% of those responding said that leading at a distance is covered to "a very high extent" in their development courses.
The New York Times wisely runs a full page of op-eds today on the impact of high gas prices, "Is Your Tank Half Empty or Half Full?", but none deals with the biggest problem introduced by telecommuting: How to really work effectively at a distance. The Times is not alone in headlining telecommuting (well, in truth, only one piece in today's paper, "Pajama Life" by Nicole Benson Goluboff, actually even touches on this). I've seen dozens of articles about the sudden move to telecommuting in the past few weeks, dozens. Having covered this topic in rather excruciating detail over many years, let me leave it at this for now: Our old slogan, "90% people, 10% technology," remains true. It's not about bandwidth, whiz-bang software, or mobile devices. The magic is in the sociology. Keep four things in mind, correct as necessary, and your telecommuting will work just fine: People, Purpose, Links, and Time.
Team cooking, a photo essay
My team
Our captain
Minestrone
TEAM IR
Chef Scott Gambone (his idea)
Artful starter
Judges at work
Teams' work
At our places
Ted Samson has an instructive and fact-filled report in InfoWorld on Sun's success in sending workers home, "Sun, employees find big savings from Open Work telecommuting program." This is the emblem of the article I want to just steal and post here but alas, you must click. You MUST, it's that worth reading if you're in the ranks of those who make such decisions or in the ranks of those who'd like to see such decisions made. Thanks to Stella for seeing this one first:
Sun found that its U.S. employees worked at home an average of 2.1 days per week in 2007. In doing so, they saved an average of $870 per year in gasoline (back when it was just $3.26 a gallon) and around $1,770 dollars in wear and tear on their car (by driving 3,700 fewer commute miles). They were also spared -- get this -- 104 hours of commute time, which translates to around two and half weeks. This is based on the finding that Sun U.S. employees have an average commute of 40 miles round-trip per day.
Presumably those savings make up for the fact that employees do need to pay a negligible amount -- less than $20 per year, according to Sun -- for the energy required to work from home, including heat.
Sun also found that employees used less energy at home than they do at the office. "Office equipment energy consumption rate at a Sun office was two times that of home office equipment energy consumption, from approximately 64 watts per hour at home to 130 watts per hour at a Sun office." Contributing to the difference: Office employees tend to use workstations and monitors while more home employees use laptops as well as Sun Ray thin clients, both of which require less power than traditional desktop PC/monitor combos.
10:45 this morning at Enterprise 2.0 - Virtual Teams 2.0, 3.0, 4... - where we talk about what virtual teams mean to the fully collaborative enterprise now and in the future.
And at noon, I, along with other members of the Enterprise 2.0 Advisory Board, will lead the Town Hall wrap-up session. If it's half as lively as last year's Town Hall, which I facilitated with Stowe Boyd, it will be a lot of fun. One off-limits topic: wireless problems at the hotel. This is a topic for discussion long-term around conference facilities but meanwhile if we piled up all the complaints lodged with the hotel and the faultless conference organizers, we'd be able to climb out to the space station. Got it? :)))) Constructive comments, learning, insight, and suggestions for next year, welcome!
Next up at Enterprise 2.0, an early morning (yawn) session, Work Green, Work Virtually. Rise and shine, attendees. 8 AM, Wed. See you there.
And, careful readers, here's the last session we're involved with at Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston, week of June 9-12. Should be a lot of fun. Stick your most green stories in your Web 2.0 backpack and share them with the early birds (8 am, Westin Waterfront):
Work Green, Work Virtually
Suddenly, in the past year or so, companies around the world are turning the mirror on themselves and trying to calculate the true cost of their doing business, including their environmental impact. For the first time, Enterprise 2.0 has published a green policy regarding conference materials. Collaboration, when extended to all aspects of the enterprise, can have a dramatic impact on reducing carbon footprint. Come share your stories and learn about what other organizations are doing to amp up their collaborative activities while tamping down their effect on the environment.
Date: 6/11/2008
Time: 8:00 AM
Room: Griffin
I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks ago when someone made the most powerful argument I've ever heard for virtual working: having to travel through armed conflict to get to a meeting. For those of us lucky enough not to be in war zones (I've lost track of how many wars are going on around the world - last I checked it was something like 50), we don't have to consider taking our lives in our hands when we go to a meeting. It got me thinking and I ended up writing "When face time is a matter of life and death" for The Industry Standard. I linked it back to the discussion we've had here on green teams. Here are the opening paragraphs:
"Many people have been killed going to meetings in Iraq.” It was an offhand remark made by a US military advisor in a casual conversation about virtual work -- its benefits, its pitfalls, its resisters, its committed participants. Until that moment, it had never before crossed my mind that traveling to a face-to-face meeting could be lethal.
Turns out Army commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken measures to reduce travel. “One of the first things I did here was set up a collaborative network to offset the fact that we couldn't travel easily or safely," Lieutenant General Jim Dubik explained in an email to me. "Needless to say, doing so contributed hugely to the coordination of our work.” Dubik is Commanding General of Multinational Security Transition-Iraq. Dubik’s work follows a decade-long history of Web 2.0 and other media experimentation in the US Army (see The Social General)...
Continue reading my Industry Standard article here.
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 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
Tagged by Ellen Offner (thanks): Elizabath Garone has a good one on managing virtual teams in WSJOnline, "Managers learn to bond with remote workers." Since, as we learned in the previous post, most organizations are bound to work this way soon (and many already do) worth reading in full. Here's what got me:
Chartered Management Institute, a long-standing British research and membership organization (er, organisation), says that three-quarters of executives surveyed believe their workforce will conduct itself via virtual teams within a decade. The Guardian has a nice summary ("Wave goodbye to the nine to five, and say hello to the virtual enterprise") of Management Futures - The World in 2018 (March 2008) that you can download. Thanks, Chartered Management. Rich source of future thinking.
A report on the nature of employment in 2018 predicts an exodus from the traditional workplace caused partly by environmental pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of commuting and partly by the demographic pressure of an ageing population, with fewer employees able to avoid looking after older relatives, leading to a blurring of boundaries between family and care.
Ken Thompson of Bioteams has a wonderful piece, "Why penguins have no commanding officer," that builds on his long exploration of teams in nature. In this one, he talks about the collective smarts of animal groups. There's no single leader; collectively, the group leads as each member knows some bit of the whole. Makes great sense to me - and jibes with our line about virtual teams and networks: "Leadership shifts depending on the task at hand," called "polycephalous leadership" by anthropologists Gerlach and Hine. See also Ken's post today, "Did ants invent the perfect mobile communications system?"
Ants interact using a system known as pheromones, involving sending 'chemical messages' to their community through smell and taste. It is also one of the oldest and most sophisticated forms of group communication on the planet with many features today's mobile and virtual teams would die for!
Writing's rewards are protracted - a draft, 800 more drafts, waiting, acceptance, corrections, pdfs (used to be page proofs that took weeks to arrive), publication, waiting, hard copy in hand.
Two waiting last night:
The Handbook of High-Performance Virtual Teams, all 764 pages of it. Big cheers to editors Jill Nemiro, Michael Beyerlein, Lori Bradley, Susan Beyerlein - and to my fifty authors who never met. Not even a mega conference call. Virtualteamspedia. And you can download tools, frameworks and even a spreadsheet with a taxonomy for all the significant studies on virtual team leadership. Our bit is last, The Virtual, Networked Organization.
"Feeling Numb," my essay on MS in Ars Medica, the medicine, arts, and humanities journal from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Will post once scanned. Have read several stunning pieces so far - "Two Minutes with Zack: A Found Poem" by Zachary Faceman and Ben McGren, and Myra Sklarew's "Lie Perfectly Still."
Had the privilege of sitting in, er, standing up at a client's daily meeting. Three times a week, weather permitting, everyone in the organization gathers on the porch at 8:30 AM for a "stand-up." They go around in a circle, anyone with something to say saying it. Brief little reports, lots of chiding, and one frustrated person who couldn't get on the network arguing with the IT folks (I'm sure this never happens in your organization). On the days when they don't do the stand-ups, they do a conference call at the same time. Keeps the group in synch. Nice way to start the day. Try it (providing you work with people face-to-face).
Mike Gotta has an informative post about the long history, beginning in 1853, of social network analysis, the scientific field that studies phenomena like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all their social networking cousins (originally, believe it or not, not online).
Reminded me of this quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, Chapter 5, Democracy in America, 1835:
The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.
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).
I've carried on before about off-the-top of the head lists of how to make virtual teams work. The one I'm about to refer to is not that.
Thanks to Leading Virtually, I came across Making cross-border teams work, an excellent article by Anik K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang in The Times of India, that provides some general principles about what the authors call "global business teams." The article doesn't cover the entire laundry list of concerns but it articulates three very well: team charter, team composition, and team process. If you're troubling over how to make these complex distributed entities more effective, satisfying, and creative, take a look.
My profile of John Halamka, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and its affiliates (plus a ratttthhher famous medical school), is up at TheStandard.com as "A geek doctor takes a 2.0 approach to healthcare technology." Thanks, John, for the easy interview and help with fact-checking.
Mr. Sampson has taken the next step with the "Do we need face time?" checklist. Blogged "green teams" first here near Boston, which was picked up and expanded via blog in Sweden, and now has up-leveled again in the countryside outside Christchurch in New Zealand.
Michael's drawn a decision tree that logically steps through the 11 questions in the current checklist. If this, then that, good for the cognitive type that functions this way for sure - and excellent for stimulating a group discussion.
Take a look and send suggestions. My first: maybe add a "benefits" branch if you make the choice to travel? I sometimes write a lot while traveling, which is an incentive.
The entire "When to Travel Flow Chart" is at this link; here's a snippet:
It's out. David Coleman and Stewart Levine's new book, Collaboration 2.0. We were delighted to write the Foreword to this book. Here it is in its entirety (for those who fail to buy the book - oh, no!):
Collaboration 2.0
Foreword by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps
At the Seventh International Conference on Complex Systems in 2007, Barbara Jasny, Senior Editor at Science, cited a statistic that provoked a collective “wow” from the audience of complexity scientists. The current record for the largest number of collaborators submitting a paper to her prestigious journal? 350 [corrected update, 445].
Jasny pointed to the truth that reigns in all domains these days: once the province of isolated geniuses, good work and breakthrough ideas congregate on the playground of those who can play well together. In our highly interconnected world, everything interacts with everything else and in order to understand—or accomplish—anything, we need to work together better. And, typically today, that means making use of innovative technologies and becoming adept at the human side of collaboration.
Not long ago, the word collaborator had a bad connotation in Europe, implying working with the forces of evil during World War II. But in a relatively short amount of time, collaboration has reclaimed its original meaning—“co-labor,” to work together—and has become a popular term even in countries where it was anathema as recently as a few decades ago.
Now in North America and South, in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the exquisite nations of Australia and New Zealand, to collaborate means that you know what you’re doing. The trick is to do that supremely well.
When we were interviewing executives for our book Virtual Teams, nearly every conversation ended with a variation on the same idea: “You know, it’s 90% people and 10% technology.” This phrase has become something of a slogan for us and when a technologist has the capacity to speak from the people side, we always take notice.
We first met David Coleman a number of years ago at a conference on—take a guess—collaboration. He impressed us with his knowledge and his sense of humor, both vital to collaboration, and we’ve followed his work since, depending on him to be up on whatever was happening in that world. Invariably, he stresses that people are the ones using technology and that how and for what purposes they use it are far more important than the technology itself.
When we learned that David had teamed up with Stewart Levine to write the “next rev” of collaboration, we were intrigued and it took us approximately one second to agree to write this Foreword.
Stewart’s grasp of the people side of the equation is comprehensive and practical. Good psychology, good people skills, and good common sense combine in his many ideas for how to make collaboration work.
The offerings in collaboration technology can appear like items in a supermarket, all the little cans bearing only tiny variations in ingredients to distinguish them. What David helps us see are the signs marking the aisles, pointing out the categories that we need to consider before making our choices, then applying expert stars to the ones he regards as best picks.
On the people side, Stewart enables us to zero in on the essence of collaboraton. At the beginning, during the middle, and in the final analysis, collaboration is about communication. Prone to wanting to make our views known, we fail to listen. And listening across boundaries is the most difficult behavior of all. The borders that separate us stand in the way of our humanity and we need to dissolve them. The ability to truly hear what others have to say is the most powerful form of communication, Stewart writes. We agree.
And though the word business appears in this book some 117 times, it is far more than a manual for business. As our scientist friends indicate, our world and indeed our future depend upon collaboration, which the authors make clear in their final pages. From global warming to alleviation of poverty to stemming the population explosion to reducing the threat of “weapons of mass effects,” the human family needs to learn how to work together better very quickly and to become adept at using the best tools for doing so.
This book is your GPS for collaboration now and in the years to come. Open it anywhere and you’ll learn something. Apply what you’ve learned and your work will become easier—and our hopes for the generations to come will soar.
—Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, CEO and Chief Scientist respectively of NetAge, a consultancy that helps organizations work together better, and co-authors of many books, including The Age of the Network and Virtual Teams.
Back in December, I began a series of posts on "green teams," the idea being that it's not only us as individuals or them as companies who/that can do something about CO2 emissions. Teams can too by making wiser choices about whether they need to meet in person or not. Very soon thereafter, The Content Economy, a blog written by a handful of good thinkers in Sweden, picked up on the idea, posted to their blog that there might be something to this. Soon they held a meeting (face-to-face, causing one wag to criticize them for that but they had a good excuse - there was also a client meeting at the same time) and came up with a basic checklist for making teams greener. I posted that list back here.
Thanks to a client, who's looking to promote virtual teaming more broadly in her organization, I had reason to noodle on The Content Economy's list some more, adding to it. Some but not all of The Content Economy's list is included (reworded in some cases). I'm posting the expanded list here with the hope that you, my darling readers, will give this some thought, add some ideas, and we'll all end up with something useful. If anything belongs to all of us, it's a list like this one. (Thanks again, Oscar and company. If you'd like me to specifically annotate those considerations that you all first came up with, let me know.)
Before your next face-to-face meeting, consider these questions:
1. Do you need to have a difficult conversation?
2. Do you need to make decisions that depend on interpretation of subtle cues in body language?
3. Do you need 8 or 16 hours of continuous work together?
4. Do you have to share “things” that would be difficult to experience at a distance, like touring a facility or using a piece of equipment?
5. Have you calculated the true cost of the meeting in terms of direct expenses and personal wear-and-tear?
6. Have you done a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the meeting’s contribution to CO2 emissions?
7. Do you sometimes travel because you like it or get the feeling that you are important for doing so? Is the meeting you’re planning one of those?
8. If you do absolutely need face-to-face, could you:
A. Organize a high-end video conference if people have never seen one another?
B. Or, conduct a series of highly organized conference calls over a week’s time?
9. If you absolutely need face-to-face, are you traveling to the most convenient location for everyone?
10. Is everyone attending the meeting essential? Could some call in for part of the meeting?
11. If you choose not to travel, can you explain your decision clearly to others?
Jonathan Follett has a second excellent post about life in the "post-geographic" age on A List Apart. This sage article includes ideas like embracing a "profound lack of embarrassment" when working across language and cultural boundaries and employing training from the martial arts: "'Let me get back to you on that' is perhaps the greatest piece of verbal self-defense. Just as in martial arts, if you’re not there when a punch lands, you can’t be hurt by it. Deliberately inserting a pause into a tense conversation gives people the opportunity to cool off."
Much of what he's saying applies not only to the virtual/digital environment but in good old face-to-face life as well. Mature thinking, here, in the best sense of the word. Thanks, Jonathan (and Jennifer Sutton for alerting me to this great publication).
Jennifer Sutton, a "virtual friend," as in we've known each other online for 15 years but have never met in-person, alerted me to a couple of very good posts from A List Apart, an online publication for website designers. This article, "The Long Hallway" by Jonathan Follett, draws an interesting distinction under the section head (which I love and am impelled to edit), "This isn’t your father’s [or mother's, ahem] telecommute:"
On the surface, the long hallway of the virtual company shares characteristics with the well-established practice of telecommuting [as they use similar tools and processes].
However, there is a fundamental difference between telecommuting and the long hallway. To be a remote worker means that the core function of a company lies elsewhere. Telecommuters work remotely for businesses that already possess an established culture and physical buildings. They are satellites orbiting a larger concern. For virtual companies with long hallways, the company exists wherever its people are—and nowhere else.
I concur that this is a vital difference and one that creates different cultures in both types of concerns. Those working in "the long hallway" are culture-creators from the get-go, while telecommuters, no matter how sensitive their home enterprises, are adapting to norms and mores (more-ayz) that already exist. Good distinction, Jonathan. The whole piece is worth a look.
I've drawn from CIO.com's Esther Schindler's work before ("If you died, would your online friends know?") and I'm certain I will again as she's paying attention to the right stuff (at least so far as my concerns go).
She's done it once more, this time with "Running an Effective Teleconference or Virtual Meeting." Now, I've been railing against the endless lists of pointers about virtual teams, some of which are true contributions to the fields, others that are just passing thoughts, but this one from Schindler's article strikes me as quite insightful:
Log on 15 minutes before the start of the meeting, since some online products require downloads and installation.
Be aware of background noise.
State your name when you speak.
If you catch yourself multitasking, be responsible for your full participation.
Turn off cell phones and PDAs.
Stay out of your e-mail.
These pointers come from page one of the article. All four pages are reading-worthy. There is but one point that I take issue with, based on the research I keep hauling out from the best-practice study we reported with Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Malhotra, "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?", Harvard Business Review, May, 2004. That research states unequivocally that two of the very best uses for virtual team meetings are brainstorming and decision-making. Schindler's article quotes DePaul University associate professor Daniel Mittleman:
"When you are brainstorming everyone gets to contribute ideas," Mittleman explains. "When you are consolidating ideas, some ideas get swept off the table. People don't like to give up their favorite ideas. They like it even less virtually." That's because people have no sense that everyone else understands their pet idea, and no perception that their own interests were accommodated. Mittleman advises. "This is why many virtual decision making meetings fail. It is not enough to lead a group through a vote; it is vital to lead them through buy-in to the results of that vote. Buy-in requires a sense of being heard and a sense that one's interests have been accommodated—or at least understood."
Sorry, Prof. Schindler. I agree that intuition might suggest otherwise but then there's the data...Our best-practice teams used such meetings precisely for these purposes and excelled.
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.
I know I'll come back to this one but just to capture a few thoughts before the next ten incredibly interesting meetings come to pass...
Last week, we had the chance to meet with Dr. Daniel Gray Wilson, Research Director at Harvard's Project Zero who leads the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Learning Innovations Laboratory (LILA). Daniel, articulate, funny, and generous with his ideas, is researching Extreme Adventure Teams, which I, for one, had never heard of before.
These people are nuts: "Co-ed teams of four athletes that race together across 400-600 miles of unfamiliar terrain in a nonstop, multidisciplinary format (hiking, biking, climbing, rafting, etc)." They don't know the course they'll have to "run" until hours before the race, thus there's none of this running the Boston Marathon course in advance that elite runners do...or anything like it. These races take place in obscure places - like from East to West on the Southern Island of New Zealand, with the competitors having to traverse The Remarkables, the steep range (and only one of two mountain ranges in the world that runs plumb north and south - the other, The Rockies).
Daniel is studying how these teams perform, collaborate, make decisions, and prevail. Very interesting stuff and I look forward to reading more about what he's doing - and spending more time in conversations like the exciting one we had last week.
For more, Forbes magazine featured Daniel's work in a 2006 article, "Leadership in the Wild."
I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say that about a dozen times a week I see another list of how to be a better virtual team. Mainly these lists--in my opinion only--are off the top of someone's head, a mishmash of good ideas and sort of unthoughtful ones. Every now and then a very good one comes around and I try to remember to post it.
Today, thanks to New Zealand's collaboration treasure, Michael Sampson, I was alerted to this list from HRZone, a site for the UK human resource community, on which are a set of good pointers on how to run a good virtual meeting (or conference call) with my commentary:
- Constantly re-engage by calling on each person once every 10 minutes
- Set boundaries by which the authors mean "highlight expectations and desired outputs but also to set guidelines for interaction." Yes, yes.
- Stay in touch, meaning between meetings as well as during them. Critical.
- "Don't 'wing it': Sometimes it is assumed that because a meeting isn't being held at a physical location it requires less preparation. The opposite is true. Have a back-up plan if technology fails." I've quoted this one in full because it is absolutely true.
- Set the pace, which is directed at the leader. You know when you've got the right rhythm going in a face-to-face meeting. Same is true in virtual meetings - only more so.
NB: HRZone credits Right Management as the source for this list but I can't find it on their site.
The folks over at The Content Economy led by Oscar Berg's efforts (sparked by my post, "Carbon neutral teams") are working on a checklist for "green teams." Do you really need to meet face-to-face or will virtual meeting via conference call or videoconference work? When you do travel, what small gestures can you make that also reduce CO2 emissions? What can you do right this minute, today, to contribute to wiser use of our precious natural resources (ah-hem, always turns off your computer, perhaps)?
After brainstorming with his colleagues (they met face-to-face in Stockholm, he took the train from Lund in the south of Sweden), Oscar has posted their first list on their blog in the hopes that others will comment. Let's call this the begining of a collaborative process of creating a checklist that we all can use to make wiser decisions about how we meet. Check it out and add your thoughts there. Great work, you guys! (For the record, I don't "know" Oscar at all; we've never even exchanged emails but our mutual interest in this topic has sparked this creative undertaking via our blogs.)
And in the interest of getting as many people to think about this as possible, I'm poaching their list right here as well. Please think about what Oscar and his colleagues have come up with and make some comments, which we can share back and forth among blogs:
The folks over at Leading Virtually continue to post interesting items about this frontier topic. "Overcoming Virtual Team Challenges: After Action Reviews" is one such. Apparently, the virtual team responsible for posting this blog (and perhaps some other project responsibilities) have been a bit disappointed in their performance. To their credit, they used their dissatisfaction as a prompt to reflect on what they're doing right and where they have room for improvement:
Upon noticing that our team was losing focus on our project when we moved to a virtual platform, Surinder [Kahai] thought it would be useful for us to conduct an “After Action Review” (AAR) to provide some insight on our team’s problems and help provide some structure to our activities. An After Action Review is essentially a tool that explores what has happened with the team, why it has happened, and what we can do in the future to move forward and fix problems. (Click here to read more about an After Action Review.)
Interestingly, when Shell developed its virtual teaming initiative in the late 1990s, they made After Action Reviews (AAR) a recognized part of the team self-evaluation process. AAR was a methodology developed by the US Army in the 1970s as part of its deep examination of the Vietnam War. Many organizations that we've worked with, including Shell, have used a variant on this approach to debrief project status and help set the course straight.
From time to time, we receive nice notes from our clients. A recent one from the senior executive of a very large global organization made us feel especially good. So I'm crowing a little. Indulge me, please:
Dear Jessica and Jeff --
Thank you for taking the time to lead a stimulating discussion about the transformational power of teams and networks at the [organization's name] Knowledge Management conference.
The insights you presented added tremendous value to our efforts to be the intellectual hub of [organization's name] Knowledge Management proponent. You made a credible, persuasive case for reinforcing hierarchy through networks of teams.
I appreciate the extensive work you're done with [organization's name] over the years and look forward to continuing our relationship.
Sincerely...
And back to work. Made our day.
Thoughtful piece by Francesca Di Meglio in Business Week on business schools using online simulations with students: "Virtual Workplaces in the Classroom." With students who've grown up gaming - and clever technology available, the B-schools are introducing simulations for hands-on learning. (Click for "Business Education, Enhanced with Technology," a slide show showing how simulations, complete with photos of students using them - kudos to folks who put this together).
Mindful that this could lead to isolation with students sitting at their computers instead of getting together to discuss the classic B-school icon, the case study, the schools are addressing that too:
Simulations aren't capable of replacing case studies just yet, though. Critics point out that having students work on a computer isolates them and does not provide enough interaction with other people, something a manager has to be able to do successfully. Case studies are also easier and cheaper to develop...
So developers are starting to create case studies and simulations to be used in combination. Harvard Business School Publishing, known for its case studies, recently launched its first online simulation on pricing, and this spring is planning to unveil an online simulation on service and operation management designed to go hand in hand with one of its best-selling case studies.
Both and. Together and apart. Virtual and face-to-face. Always makes me happy when organizations pay attention to the two. Our old saw on this:
Isolate to concentrate, congregate to collaborate.
OK, so I literally never thought of this when I signed the contract. Happily asked to consult to a prestigious educational institution on the design of its new course on virtual teams. My role on the team of eight is "subject matter expert," which basically means I'm supplying the content (in point of fact, NetAge signed the contract and I'm the NetAge person working on supplying NetAge content, just to be absolutely clear).
There's a short window for pulling all this together, which means they want fast turnaround when the "developer" or the "instructional designer" or the "portfolio manager" or the "graphic designer" or the "project manager" (you get the idea, team of 8) needs help. No problem, I thought. I'm quick, am generally accessible online (ask my family or my addiction counselor - jussst kidding), and what could happen that would take me out of a 48-hour response time?
However, just to be safe, I specified in the contract that there were certain periods when this provision would not apply, times when I know I'm traveling in the months to come.
Then yesterday morning, Sunday that is, I got my first request for info, which is the majority of the material I have to submit. Pages and pages, way too much for even Ms. Speedy Fingers to return in 48 hours even if I didn't already have a full plate and several other deadlines looming.
Got me thinking about what I hadn't considered before signing the contract: When does the 48-hour clock start ticking in the virtual world? When the email is sent to me? When I open it? When I respond? Do weekends count? Holidays? Emails sent at 11 at night or 3 in the morning (yes, I've received such from other clients, especially those on different clocks altogether)? What if it's sent from tomorrow (someone in New Zealand, for example)?
Anyone else had to think about this? I've suggested that we include this dilemma in the course itself. And just for the record, the developer understands completely and is not expecting anything unreasonable from me.
Further to our new friend Oscar Berg in Sweden, who's thinking about green teams. Go, Oscar! He's "taking the challenge to write a checklist for situations when I need to get together
face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might
be just as suitable or at least possible."
A post by Jessica Lipnack about “carbon-neutral teams” gave me the idea and being quoted on her blog provided some extra motivation. I am involving my fellow bloggers Henrik and Anders (Anders wrote a peace called “Are we finally ready for eco-meetings?” a while ago). Anyway, we are compiling a list of candidate items for the checklist and I hope to present it in some time.
By the way, do you know that you can calculate how much emission of carbon dioxide you cause by flying? The CarbonNeutral Company offers calculators and the airline SAS actually allows you to compensate for the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) that you cause when you travel with them. Good initiative. But what we need is to do is also to compary flying to other transportation alternatives.
Let’s take my flight next week from Malmö to Stockholm and back again as an example. By taking the plane, I would have caused an emission of 0.1644 tonnes of CO2. By taking the train instead, I will cause an emission of only 0.00012 tonnes of CO2. Do I need to say more? I guess not. I will take the train from now on.
And I posted this back to Oscar's blog (nothing like self-quoting): "I played with the numbers a little to make them more understandable to those of limited intelligence like myself: if a ton is 2000 pounds, then your flight would release the equivalent of a sumo-wrestler worth of CO2 (328 pounds), while the train ride would release something like a cup of coffee, four ounces."
So on The Content Economy, Oscar Berg blogs today about "What others predict for 2008," mentioning Bill Ives's post about my "carbon neutral teams" post. I like the example Oscar gives of choosing the train over flying from Malmo to Stockholm, Sweden, and asked him if I could post here, to which he said, "Hi Jessica, please do. I'd be happy to serve as an example of what you're thinking ;)." And, Oscar, I hope you can publish the checklist for green teams you come up with -- so I can publish it here too (as might Bill) and we can really get things rolling quickly on this idea. And soon every team on earth will have to fill out a "green team checklist" as part of its travel request...or something like that. Thanks, Oscar:
As a comment to that [referring to Bill's post, I actually (encouraged by my wife) decided to go by train instead of flying from Malmö to Stockholm next week (600 kilometers). Not only am I saving the environment by not going by air, but I also save money for my company (or actually, the customer) since it will be cheaper than flying - despite the fact that I have to pay for one extra hotel night. The only thing I won't be saving is time. But that depends on how I look at it. On the train, I will be able to work for almost four hours and access the Internet via the wireless network on the train. Maybe I will take some time to sketch on a checklist for situations when I need to get together face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might be just as suitable or at least possible. In addition to that, I also need a checklist for deciding what means of transportation I should be using in situations when a face-to-face meeting is absolutely necessary – should I go by train, air, car or bike? Then I will publish these as post on my team’s internal blog so they can read it via RSS – wherever they happen to be. Well, as long as they are inside the corporate firewalls.
Read this. Robin blogged me a month or so ago and thus we "met" (he's in Rome, I'm in Boston). His reply to my blog survey below led to his sending me this link. He makes his living blogging and ... I'll ruin it unless I do a long piece here. Check out why he's called Robin Good.
Bill Ives, again, captures the heart of what I tried to say in Carbon neutral teams (below) in his New Year's post, Will Green Teams Become Prominent in 2008? This phrase, "green teams," has been running through my mind since I first posted. Think we should write a book about it? (Googling reveals that lots of folks are using the expression.)
For years, we've been singing the praises of virtual teams for their ability to bring together differing perspectives, amass greater intelligence, and gain the benefit of more human diversity--then wrap it all together in a world where the sun never sets. Nice stuff.
Along the way, people have also been pointing out that working at a distance is less expensive, less stressful, and more environmentally friendly.
Now comes the news that HarperCollins UK, a Rupert Murdoch company,"has claimed it is the first major trade publisher in the UK to become carbon neutral, after reducing its carbon footprint by 8% over the past year and investing in carbon offsetting." According to The Bookseller.com, "After focusing on reducing its electricity and gas consumption, cutting business air travel and curbing fleet mileage, its carbon footprint dropped..."
Thus, let me introduce the idea of "carbon neutral" or perhaps better, "green teams." When we talk about "individual" efforts to reduce emissions, perhaps we can also consider "team" efforts. OK, we already have such teams--in our beloved city of Newton, Massachusetts, anyway--that "team up" every spring to remove detritus from the banks of the storied Charles River. Thousands of other communities are doing the same.
But what about making our at-work teams carbon neutral? Instead of that next in-person meeting, whether a few miles away or a few thousand, how about meeting online? How about developing a checklist for why you need to get together face-to-face, then rating each upcoming event? Unless you exceed a certain threshold, you stay put.
I'm not saying we should never have conferences or team get-togethers or anything like that. But consider this: tomorrow morning, we will have an important meeting where we go over some fundamental ideas with a client, or I should say, a client and a potential client. We will be here in West Newton; another will be in Boston; and the third? Bangalore, India. Carbon neutral, all the way.
PS: There's a great roundup on UK and US publishers' efforts to reduce emissions at Publishing News. And need I say that a simple Google search turns up the world's first carbon neutral soccer team?
Techie alert: Sun has announced something very interesting in the virtual reality space.
Non-techie alert: A computer company has come up with a truly innovative way for people to meet online.
Our friends at Leading Virtually, the new blog out of SUNY Binghamton, are directing us to a great little movie from Sun that shows their new collaborative work environment called MPK20. Apart from the name reminding us of 3PKO, THIS IS REALLY COOL!
As Rebecca Jestice points out on her post, most online "virtual environments" duplicate the real world. Same old, same old, as usual with technology innovations--the horseless carriage, i.e., whereby the next thing mimics (or is named for) the one that preceded it.
Thus, most of the efforts to create online collaborative environments begin with building replicas of existing real-world spaces. A few months ago, we saw a Second Life facsimile of the building, floor, and room we were standing in to watch that company's virtual collaboration space demo.
Sun has broken the mold with MPK20 (OK, it's named for their canny building-naming system: they have 19 buildings on their Menlo ParK campus, which makes this the 20th). It doesn't look like a Sun building (at least not the ones I've been in); it integrates real-world collaboration with its virtual offspring; and it even has a playroom (well, it's a music library, but still...).
Sounds nutty, especially if you're new to this stuff. Take a look and tell me if you don't think this is a breakthrough. What got me was that avatars (keen readers, remember Cracking the code on virtual DNA a couple of days ago) can enter virtual team rooms that include screens where real meetings are proj
