Endless Knots

Frontier 6 gets kudos in Times editorial

Today's NY Times lead editorial, "The Way Out," lauds Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell,  here before as Frontier 6, for the job he's doing as head of security force training in Afghanistan:

General Caldwell has brought a new coherence and purpose to the mission by revamping the Afghan Army leadership program and standardizing police instruction, among other innovations. And he has managed to double his number of trainers from 1,300 when he started to roughly 2,700 today. But he — more to the point, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General McChrystal — is having a very hard time getting the rest of NATO to deliver on commitments.

Editorial also cites the big challenges - not enough NATO trainers and an Afghan military culture that doesn't value training,

More here on what Caldwell did when he headed education and training programs at Fort Leavenworth. Same time that he started blogging as Frontier 6 ("Let Soldiers Blog, Post to YouTube.")

Economist webcast on virtual teams

Remember the Economist Intelligence Unit's study where 1 in 3 virtual teams said they were poorly managed? Turns out Denis McCauley whose EIU's Global Technology Research also put together "Managing Virtual Teams," a webcast with three panelists - Jasmine Whitbread, CEO of Save the Children; Matt Rogers, founder of Aroxo.com, and Ghislaine Caulat, consultant at Ashridge Consulting (who observes that you can fill a room with books about virtual teams - sorry, I contributed to the glut). Impressive to hear how far along Save the Children is (they have "knowledge sharing teams," for instance, around child nutrition; their finance people around the world are in a community of practice) and how at ease with the idea Rogers is. If you're agitated about virtual teams, this webcast will calm you right down. Nicely done.

Clay Shirky: "Pay attention to young mothers"

Thanks to Santiago Bunce at Interaction Institute for Social Change for the pointer to Clay Shirky's talk at TED in 2005, which begins thusly:

How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just begin chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs.

One of best explanations I've heard of the "power law" whereby a small number of people are responsible for a great proportion of the output/productivity/input of the "group"...whatever...and a large number of people are responsible for a fraction of same. Let me go out on a limb here and call it the classic 80/20 rule (as Clay, and everyone else, does). Clay illustrates with pictures from Flickr and points to how a single person making one really good contribution is also critical to the "system"--as well as one stellar example of a Linux developer coming up with a single phenomenal security patch, not 3000 patches.

Provocative, lots to think about. Thanks, as always, Clay.

Oh, the title of this post? Clay points out that inventors rarely know how people will use their brilliant ideas. As of the time of his TED talk, Clay points out that stay-at-home moms, not classic Internet affinity groups per se, were the original power users of meetup.com. If you want to know "what technology is going to change the world," he says, "Don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys. Pay attention to young mothers because they don't have an ounce of support for technology that doesn't make their lives better." Touche!

Uptick in teleconferencing

Re: the volcano disrupting travel and thus promoting virtual working: One of many articles to come in the next few days, I'm certain, this, thanks to Amy Millman, "Stranded Travelers Turn to Teleconferencing," by Kevin O'Brien in the NY Times. My favorite anecdote:

In one case, a couple stranded in Dubai decided to televise their wedding vows over a Skype video conference to guests gathered for their wedding ceremony on Saturday in England, Ms. Milosevich said.

Saves on catering costs, never mind those costly centerpieces.

Iceland causes virtual teams to finally erupt

From Reuters/Ingolfur Juliusson, plasmastic

Quite a good post ("Eruptions") from Hugh Tonks at workshifting.com. Clever walk around his team looking at what the shutdown in air travel has meant to them. How many more volcanoes will it take before virtual teams gain some respect?

"I'm home with sick child"

This is the way it should be. I just responded to a group email from a close colleague, recognizing many of the names as people I've worked with in the past (thus the group response).

Withing minutes, I received these autoresponses:

"I'm home with a sick child."

"I'm on maternity leave."

"Thank you for your email. I'm currently on vacation."

Guess where all these people work?

"A DVR for meetings"

My friend Pernilla Arnell at Microsoft alerted me to this clever video on meetings with simple advice: keep them to the same 22 minutes that a 30-minute TV show actually takes. For reasons I can't understand, this video is no longer viewable on YouTube but this URL works and they have a Facebook page. My favorite line comes when presenter Nicole Steinbok asks the audience if they'd like to have a "DVR for meetings." Who among us has not wanted to fast forward through the dreary moments? (I agree with most of Nicole's "9 steps of the 22-minute meeting," save one: No laptops except for the presenter and note-taker. Makes no sense to me so long as people behave and don't spend the meeting doing, hmmm, what would that be? Email? Playing Lexulous on Facebook? Wouldn't know myself...And, this appears to be completely about face-to-face meetings. Otherwise, worth clicking through.)

Try this at home

Three times in the past day I've heard this from employers: people who work from home are more productive. This is not data (though there's plenty out there).

One of the times I heard it was at a face-to-face meeting this morning in Boston. The meeting was informational and we sat around a table looking at each other. No handouts even. Just talking. Useful but we agreed that we would have learned more if it had been virtual. On the phone, looking at the screen, we could have shown one another stuff...and probably accelerated our thinking.

Curtis Ogden on "Dimensions of Social Spaces"

Father of twins+1 and deep thinker about networks at Interaction Institute for Social Change, Curtis Ogden, has a thoughtful post on the IISC blog that draws some boundaries and installs some furniture in the invisible space between people, the relationships. Curtis draws on anthropology's "moral spaces"--Autonomy, Community, and Divinity (don't be put off by your preconceptions of this word)--and applies them here. I think they work--his "few thoughts" on what to do with the insight:

• Autonomy: Differentiation. Create the opportunity for people to individually speak/write about their own hopes, fears, skills, etc.  Don’t force agreement. Encourage differences of opinion. Create opportunities for individual thinking.

• Community: Integration. Direct people’s attention and conversation to what they share with others. Help facilitate agreement. Point out shared interests beyond differences of opinions. Create opportunities for a group to work together toward some common goal.

• Divinity: Elevation. Share stories of moral exemplars (virtue can trigger feelings of uplift). Have people think/speak about places and events that are “sacred” and expressive of their deepest values. Play inspiring music.  Read poetry. Meet/immerse people in the natural world.

Interesting notion: Spend 3/4 of your time with those not co-located

It's not just because "Selling a Global Business: Teamwork Working Like Clockwork Around the Clock" quotes us (thanks) that I'm pulling out its virtual team guidelines. Click-worthy for the whole list of nine, I'm pulling out four that are particularly good:

Have explicit meeting preparation and management

It is more difficult to follow standard meeting processes over distant locations, cultures and time zones. Take the time to state the meeting preparation expectations for the project. Find the best time zones for the team and alternate between them. For example, in a recent client engagement involving a US company expanding in an Asian market, we had meetings every Tuesday, but alternated between 7 am and 7 pm US CST. We were all equally inconvenienced, and that is the only fair way to do it.

Repeat names during the meeting. Since you cannot see body language, proactively monitor meeting reactions and performance, and address problems promptly.

Rotate meeting leadership and scribe roles

To promote inclusion and participation, rotate leadership and scribe roles. Wake up the team by raising your expectations of them. Whoever takes the minutes should be the next meeting’s leader, since one prepares you for the other.

Spend 70-80% of time with team members that are NOT co-located

It is easy to stay in the pattern you are already in: building relationships, sharing information and spending time with those already in your location. Global virtual team leadership requires you to go beyond your comfort zone and not just reach out but to focus on those that you cannot easily communicate with. Schedule one on one conversations for feedback and focused conversations.

Assess team and leader skills, and design training to close gaps.

With a team that is in your location, you may have a better understanding of what the team’s skills are. With a team in another location, special effort needs to be made to understand the team’s skills, and where and how to improve them.