Endless Knots

Always say yes to students: an interview about virtual teams

Every so often in the past gazillion years, a student comes along, one who's doing undergraduate or master's or doctorate work around virtual/remote/distributed/global organizations. Some ask for interviews; others want an answer to a specific question. I always say yes--and I hope that other authors do the same.

Here's the most recent with Valeriia Denisova. Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, she "moved to Finland three years ago to study towards my Bachelor Degree in International Business (BBA) at Tampere University of Applied Sciences." This interview was for her final dissertation, "The Challenges of Virtual Project Management," enabling her to graduate from Tampere, following her spending time as an exchange student at Portsmouth University in the UK.

I post this also as a bit of historiana as we wrote the first edition (cover below) of Virtual Teams nearly 20 years ago. This interview also reflects my biases about the current state-of-the-virtual-art. 

You are one of the first people who recognized the tendency of virtual team management. Could you tell more how and when it happened? Was there any particular reason why you decided to write a ‘’Virtual Teams’’ work on this issue?

Virtual Teams was the fifth book I’d written (with the late Jeffrey Stamps) on distributed, boundary-crossing organizations, the first written after the Web had begun to take hold and Internet penetration had reached most countries in the world. For the first time in history, people had the infrastructure needed to work seamlessly regardless of their physical location.

 What can you say about ‘now’ and ‘then’ ? What aspects have massively changed in virtual teams industry over the time?

Work has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Whereas once “knowledge workers” could do very little if they weren’t in the office, now they often wonder why they have to go to the office at all. It’s hard to picture what it was like: the “important” people spent most of their days in offices around the rim of buildings, while the people who reported to them were in vast barns in the middle.

By the 1970s, these rows of desks started to be separated into cubicles. People worked in their “stovepipes,” communicating principally with those in their “departments.” Then, with the rise of the Internet, it became obvious that greater communication, more collaboration, and cross-organizational cooperation could radically improve innovation, creativity, productivity, and implementation. Very quickly, the walls literally started to come down and, with them, cross-boundary work became the norm. Once that began, geography became less the definer of co-workers than purpose, which brought disparate people together regardless of who they were working for.

 Was it hard for traditional workers to switch to distant work and accept it?

As with any innovation, some people took quickly to the new way; others resisted. The common wisdom is the familiar one: about 20% of people will always cling to the old way, while 80% rapidly adapt. With a new generation coming along that never knew life without the global mesh, the percentage of resisters will shrink ever more rapidly and eventually become a negligible number.

How does the management of virtual teams differs from traditional ones?

Good managers are simply that: good. One has to pay very close attention to people on their virtual teams lest they feel they’re being ignored or not encouraged to do their very best work.

Some writers and researchers have gone to great lengths to prove that virtual team management is different from in-person management. I’m not one of them.

While there are some peculiar aspects to managing people from afar (being more intentional about contact, for example, since there is no cafeteria for bumping into people), the principles are not all that different from good management in general. Pay attention, be kind, be encouraging, continuously refer to purpose, use multiple forms of communication, reward people for good work, recognize excellent teamwork, lavish people with meaningful praise when they far exceed expectations, continuously examine your own behavior, freely admit mistakes, learn how to apologize in a genuine way, and continuously educate yourself on cultural differences.

What are the main difficulties and challenges of running virtual projects nowadays? How does NetAge help to manage them?

The biggest difficulties and challenges are the same that they’ve always been: lack of clear purpose; inadequate methods—or attention to—maintaining good communication; lack of familiarity and camaraderie among team members; and insensitivity to cultural differences. We have more than enough technology and still lack a good deal of humanity. NetAge developed methods and tools for applying these simple ideas.

Do virtual team principles ‘people, purpose, links’ still remain the same nowadays or, in your opinion, we can add anything more to this concept?

Nope. It’s the same model and we have the same problems. Each aspect of the model has great depth and the more we understand what it means to recognize and honor people in their fullness, the greater the connections among the people. The more we appreciate the purpose and explore its implications, the greater the work people do. The more we expand and nurture our links, the fuller the web of creativity and ingenuity becomes.

According to my survey results, virtual managers do not use intranets anymore. How are the communication sources (‘links’) changed in general? 

The technology has changed completely. Some companies and organizations still do have internal webs of communication but the elegance of the expansion of the Internet, the development of cloud computing, and the move to mobile have all radically impacted the openness of connectivity.

This has brought about a paradox: a greater emphasis on security and a loosening of fear that people will “go online” while at work. Who hasn’t? It used to be that companies—and some still do—ban going onto social networks via the corporate network. People just move to using their phones. It can’t be controlled—mainly for the better but we also have too many grisly examples of the new global connectivity being used for the-so-much-horrifically-worse. 

What are the main ways of virtual trust and motivation establishment?

We wrote extensively about this in our books. Trust is established by deepening social capital, which results from personal ties, dependability, and generosity. Motivation comes from recognition and challenge, i.e. set high goals for people and then reward them in ways that are meaningful to them, both publicly and privately.

May I use this document in my dissertation?

Yes, of course. Please send me a copy and best of luck! In return, may I use this as a blog post? If so, please send a short bio so that I can credit you with the questions. Where are you situated and at which university are you studying?

General Shinseki, a wargame, and the networks of hierarchy

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki is in the news and it's not the first time he's been center stage.

Students of the Iraq War may recall that at the start of the war, Shinseki, a four-star general, was the Chief of Staff of the Army who got into a public row with then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over troop strength. Shinseki said the US needed on the order of 250,000 troops in Iraq once the war wound down. In a clear rebuke, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz made it known that they disagreed and Shinseki was forced out of his post.

Ultimately, Shinseki's view was vindicated and supported across the aisle and in The White House.

It was precisely when this was happening in the spring of 2003 that Jeff Stamps and I came into contact with General Shinseki, something we neither planned nor ever imagined. We pulled that story together for an unpublished book, "Leading Networks," and, given Shinseki's prominence at the moment, I think it's worth retelling here.

 

General Shinseki, right, with Admiral Vern Clark, left, also mentioned below,
and Marine General Michael Hagee; photo from NY Times, 1/12/07

 

 

On February 10, 2003, I answered the phone and found an unlikely caller. "I'm calling on behalf of (then-) Major General Jim Dubik," he said. "He'd like you to come to a wargame."

Unified Quest 03, the aide explained, would be the first Joint Forces-US Army Wargame, a weeklong simulation that would take place at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. We would be among a small group of outsiders; the other 700 people would be from military forces both in the U.S. and among American allies and from defense contracting firms.

I said that I'd never heard of General Dubik. "Well, he’s heard of you", the aide replied, explaining that Dubik had read and been interested in The Age of the Network, a book we’d written ten years earlier.

Lt. Gen. Jim Dubik, now retired, photo from Penn State Dickinson School of Law site,
where he holds the Gen. Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership

Jeff was as flabbergasted as I when I went into his study to tell him.

We had met as anti-Vietnam War activists in 1968 while students at Oxford University.

In contrast to some of our friends in 2003 who argued with us, we strongly opposed the then-looming Iraq War.

We decided to attend.

And then we told our friends what we were planning to do. Invariably we got the same reply: “You’re going to be doing what?” Then quickly, nearly all followed with, “Thank God. I’m so glad you’re going.”

Thus began our involvement with the American military, particularly the Army, where we’ve discovered that some of its ideas, particularly in regard to leadership, are ahead of those we've encountered as consultants in the commercial and non-profit sectors.

To attend a wargame was beyond our ken. So it was with apprehension, curiosity, and a little discomfort that we went to the Carlisle Barracks, reflected in a summary I wrote after the event:

"My coming-in-picture of a 'wargame?' I thought it would be fought in a space the size of at least a basketball court, maybe even as large as the hangar I once toured at Douglas Aircraft where the MD-11 was being built.

"And, I wasn’t sure precisely what would transpire on this 'battlefield.' I thought it was unlikely that we'd find people playing laser tag or paintball, but I wasn’t even certain of that. I was unprepared for the wargame to be 'fought' in crowded conference rooms, where it was hard to hear what people were saying and where the commander’s back was usually turned toward most of those in the room."

The wargame that (now-retired Lieutenant General) Dubik invited us to—in this case, a thinly disguised confrontation with a country called “Nair” (unscramble the letters)—included our attending the daily debriefings for the “flag officer” (read highest-ranking officers) at the end of each day. There, the senior military strategists, many retired, would deconstruct the day’s wargame results.

Following the opening session at the War College’s Bliss Hall, which I remember as being very loud and filled with promotional videos for various weapons and tanks, Bill Rittenhouse, then a career staffer for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command and an organizer of the event, found us stumbling around, unsure of what to do next or where to go. He welcomed us, indicating that he wasn’t quite certain what we were supposed to be doing either, but immediately introduced us to Clint Ancker, a retired colonel doing research on the Army’s structure and director of the famed Center for Army Lessons Learned.

We knew who Ancker was because one of his aides had been corresponding with us over the prior few months on “echelonment.” The word, from the French, literally means rungs on a ladder, and is the term the military uses to describe its levels of hierarchy.

Ancker and his group had been tasked with responding to a “request” from the then-Secretary of Defense. Now that the forces were “joint,” meaning that they all had to play nice together, Rumsfeld wanted the Army to remove a level, an echelon, from its traditional command structure, a rung near the top. Over lunch, Ancker drew some pictures about options for the Army’s reorganization, which reassured us that our expertise in networks had some relevance to what they were working on.

From that informative lunch, Ancker moved us along to meet then-Brigadier General (later Lieutenant General) Mike Vane, a self-described California beach boy in his youth, and one of the conference co-chairs.

Lieutenant General Mike Vane, now retired, photo from US Army site

Vane, in turn, took us into a small room to wait for General Dubik. “Hi, I’m Jim Dubik,” said the informally dressed general, extending his hand as he walked in.

After the usual pleasantries, we asked the central questions: “Why are we here and what do you want us to do?” Dubik responded in a way that we’ve become accustomed to in working with senior executives.

“I don’t know precisely,” he said. “I read your book about networks. We’re fighting a networked enemy. We have a net-centric warfare strategy in place. And we’re responding to the SecDef’s request for material on echelonment.”

Dubik told us to “wander around” and to try to absorb as much as we could as quickly as possible, and to reflect back what we noticed. He asked that we pay attention to “jointness” (how the separate forces worked together) and “echelonment,” in particular, but cautioned us not to artificially limit our scope.

These intriguingly broad terms of reference allowed us to follow an unscripted flow. After a tour of the wargame premises by one of Vane’s aides, we were, for the most part, left on our own.

Over the following week, we talked with dozens of people both formally and informally. We sat in on sessions where specific maneuvers were debated in snatches and at length. We shared meals with generals and admirals, trading health tips and nutrition theories with a four-star. We exchanged references with analysts, media, and advisors.

And, we attended the highest-level meeting of our lives, an “out-brief,” military-speak for what business refers to as a post-mortem, with the Joint Chiefs.

On the last day of the wargame, General Shinseki arrived to hear the conclusions of the exercises. It was one of the rare events that we weren't invited to but when it was over, the ground crew involved with putting on the event—the schleppers, the logistics people, and the sponsoring senior military officers, including Dubik and Vane—stood in a line as Shinseki spoke to them, thanking each individually.

Everyone knew what was happening—indeed, Shinseki's disagreement with the Bush administration over troop strength required in Iraq, an estimate that later proved to be entirely accurate, had been broadcast on television—and sadness seeped across the floor just beneath the evident respect that seemed to pour from people's eyes. Shinseki then walked down the line, pressing a medal commemorating the wargame into the hand of each person who'd worked the event. After the meet-and-greet, Dubik pressed one into each of our hands.

The next day, we drove south from Carlisle to Fort McNair in Washington for the “Senior Leaders Seminar,” the last event of this historic wargame. There, the generals and admirals who orchestrated the wargame, along with a handful of participants from the Carlisle exercises, met with the military's top brass, including the Chief of Naval Operations, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the Supreme Allied Commander of Atlantic, along with their peers—as well as the then-Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz. Of the ninety guests, as best we could determine we were the only true civilians, and I was the only woman. We were seated just behind Wolfowitz and the Army Chief of Staff.

This gathering at the National Defense University took place the very day after then-President Bush landed on the USS Lincoln to proclaim “Mission Accomplished."

General Shinseki led the proceedings. Seated to his left was Wolfowitz, who arrived late and left barely ten minutes later, just moments after the briefing began. (An aide came in, handed him a note, and he said that he had to leave because "the Secretary needs me.")

Surely Wolfowitz could not have wanted to hear the words of one retired four-star Air Force general who said plainly, “Preemption does not work.” Preemption, the Bush administration policy employed in the Iraq War, the general said, violated the principles of war, left the enemy no choice but to respond with unconventional methods (meaning weapons of mass destruction), and placed the preempting forces without any of their conventional means of applying pressure incrementally.

This “After Action Review,” the systematic method the Army developed for reviewing its “actions,” included a ten-minute video positioning the history and chronology of this particular wargame, emerging issues identified by the wargame teams, and feedback from those participating.

We were told that this meeting was historic: It was the first time the highest levels of US military had convened as a network of peers for a wargame debriefing. Hot on the heels of the initial and what then appeared to have been the stunningly successful invasion of Iraq—reportedly the most "joint" operation in history—was “a not-to-be-missed opportunity,” which is how Admiral Vern Clark, then the Chief Naval Officer, described it to us as we were leaving.

The meeting lasted for a few hours; our involvement with the military lasted for another five years until the last of the crop of senior officers whom we knew retired.

What we took away was that while the “joint” approach to military affairs as practiced at this wargame is still being worked out, it is evident that the complexity of global relations in the 21st century demands it.

The immediate, mind-boggling dilemma of security in a pre-emptive, time-warped world with unpredictable enemies who have access to unthinkable weapons no longer allows individual and separate hierarchies to march forward.

 

Leading ourselves via "the lattice"

June Holley, whose insights and methods for establishing and growing networks are in a class of their own, points today to Phanish Puranam's post on the INSEAD blog, "What Bossless Firms Can Teach Us."

Puranam's round-up of companies that have eschewed traditional hierarchy and bureaucracy for more intelligent self-management points to some popular and successful examples: Valve, the Seattle software company where employees vote with their seats for projects they want to work on (no votes, no project); the California tomato processor, Morning Star, that, as Puranam writes "bases its organisation on a sort of mission statement that is negotiated peer-to-peer rather than imposed by a boss, laying out each employee’s tasks and organisational affiliations;" and, the grandparent of them all, W.L. Gore and Associates, which I mentioned here.

 

We (Jeff Stamps and I) stumbled upon W.L. Gore when we were doing research for The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book. Given all the hoopla about self-governance and jettisoning old authoritarian structures, I'm offering this excerpt which details how Gore has done it all these years. It's simple, sensible, and worth a try, C-Suiters. Good sense can prevail when the agreements, policies, and governance are in place throughout an organization, top-to-bottom. Gore's approach reflects both good organizational design, mutual respect, and a mature approach to how people come to work.

Take a look and see if this makes sense to you, noting Bill Gore's realistic caveats, typically overlooked in the idealistic vision of "leaderless" organizations espoused by people who haven't carefully considered what it takes to make people-working-together work.

From The TeamNet Factor, Chapter 4:

Meet the Lattice: The Free Form Organization That Makes Gore-Tex

Gore-Tex is" a miracle weave in the fabric of the world’s outdoor life." It evaporates sweat while protecting its wearer from the drench of rain. Gore-Tex is a visible, distinctive partner with producers of ski gloves, tents, and clothing of all descriptions. Like Dolby sound, Gore-Tex is known for the special contribution it makes to a wide range of products.

If ever there were a company whose product mirrored its culture, it is W L. Gore & Associates. This lattice textile is made by a lattice organization, a company designed for horizontal interactions where employees are known as “associates.”

In 1982, Inc. magazine runs a cover story on the Newark, Delaware, company best known for its popular product Gore-Tex. Headlined “The Un-manager: Without Ranks and Titles,” the story describes Bill Gore’s “not your average” almost-billion- dollar company. By 1991, the company is among the “400 largest private U.S. Companies.”2

The name “W. L. Gore & Associates” captures the essence of this remarkable enterprise. The design of the company is that of a network. Its core glue is the philosophy of its husband-and-wife founders, Wilbert (“Bill”), who died in 1986, and Genevieve, who remains involved in the company. Business Week features their son Robert in 1990 in an article titled “No Bosses. And Even Leaders Can’t Give Orders.”

The 1982 Inc. story so excites us that we call its author, Lucien Rhodes, who in turn forwards us a poorly typed document with a few handwritten notes on it that Bill Gore has sent him. “The Lattice Organization—A Philosophy of Enterprise” describes the Gore “bureaucracy”:

People group around projects undertaken on the basis of commitment.

The firm’s 5,600 associates (not employees)—now in 46 plants in six countries— have sponsors (not bosses), who serve as their mentors and advocates.

Gore’s projects are boundary crossing teams. “The mathematician, engineer, accountant, machinist, chemist and so on provide a combination of capabilities of a much broader scope than the mere sum of their number. This synergism . . . impels us to join together for mutual benefit.”

STUMP SPEECH TO THE TRIBES

Bill Gore’s paper, written in 1976, was the basis for many talks that he gave over the years to the company’s associates.4 (Which brings us back to the name: everyone who works at W. L. Gore & Associates is an associate.)

It’s not your typical corporate speech. With his ponderous, sometimes mystical tone, Gore sounds more like a 19th-century transcendentalist than the late-2Oth- century entrepreneur that he is. He begins with the “Nature of Man,” the starting point, usually unstated, of every corporate culture. One part of our heritage, he says, comes from hunters and predators with the urge to attack, destroy, loot, vanquish, and overcome competitors. Fortunately, humans evolved new social capabilities that carried the species far beyond this endowment. ‘A further great evolutionary invention is the cooperation of groups made possible by friendship and love.... The tribal group ... combines aggressive capability welded together by emotional interactions.” To Gore, the essence of human nature is co-opetition.

Besides being capable of friendship and love, he says, people are also dreamers. He asks what would happen if people doubled their brain capacity. “If the norm in our society is the utilization of say 10% of our inherent human capabilities, what would be the result if we were able to restructure . . . this to double to 20%?”

People participate in groups because together they can accomplish more than alone, he says. Gore believes accomplishment peaks with about 150 people in the same group. After that, results decline, and it’s time to form another group, a principle that the company puts into practice. Gore breaks plants apart when they exceed 150 to 200 people. This is, roughly, a tribal size, the upper-limit size of groups that people lived in after the invention of language but before the development of agriculture and cities.

When groups pass out of the realm in which everyone knows everyone else, Gore believes “we" quickly translates into “they.” This tiny language signal announces the beginning of turf wars, the identification of enemies, and win-lose maneuvers that eventually bring down even great companies.

THE LATTICE BEHIND THE FACADE

There’s another downside to groups of more than 150 to 200, Gore says. “Beyond some such level, it becomes necessary to impose rules, regulations, procedures and the like that dictate how the cooperation shall be done. Special teams evolve within the lattice structure usually led by someone particularly competent in the discipline or activity of the team. One individual may participate on several such teams and have a leadership role in them. These multi-participant people serve an important liaison function and are often involved ina number of different teams,” Gore says.

To avoid bureaucracy and to reach for that doubling of human capabilities, the company uses the lattice, which has these characteristics:

• No fixed or assigned authority;
• Sponsors, not bosses;
• Natural leadership defined by followership;
• Person-to-person communication;
• Objectives set by those who must make them happen; and
• Tasks and functions organized through commitments.

Leadership “evolves” at the company, according to Daniel D. Johnson, who eventually followed in his former co-worker’s footsteps, leaving Du Pont to join Gore. “You look behind you, and you’ve got people following you.”

In Gore’s view, “Every [successful] organization has a lattice organization that underlies the facade of authoritarian hierarchy. It is through these lattice organizations that things get done. Most of us delight in ‘going around’ the formal procedures and doing things the straightforward and easy way. The legendary subversion of official military procedures by the ‘non-coins’ is an example of this. All astute military leaders utilize this sub rosa lattice.”

For all his unusual ideas, Gore is not a romantic. He doesn’t propose replacing every aspect of hierarchy with lattices because of what he calls obvious difficulties:

• “Stability and long-term constancy require a firm hand at the helm;
• “Decisions must be made. Complete consensus is never achieved;
• “There seems to be some upper limit for which the lattice is effective; and
• “It’s unrealistic for people to set their own salaries."

VOW TO AVOID BUREAUCRACY

“The rest of Corporate America is only beginning to think about how to motivate employees now that there’s a shrinking hierarchy to slot people into,” Joseph Weber says in the 1990 Business Week article. “But Gore, a quirky, family-held plastics company, has never had much of one: It has been experimenting with an almost free-form management structure for 32 years.... Gore isn’t some little countercultural outfit, mind you. By turning a flexible form of DuPont’s Teflon into Gore-Tex, used in fabrics and assorted medical, electronic, and industrial products, the company has grown into a nearly $700 million a year outfit, whose return on assets and equity puts it in the top 5%, whose sales quintupled in 8 years.”

As irony would have it, of course, Gore started his own company because “as a DuPont chemist, he couldn’t get his innovation—Teflon coating for electrical wires—marketed by the big company. When he left, he vowed to avoid stifling bureaucracies, so he tossed out the traditional chain of command for a ‘lattice’ system. In it, any staffer may take an idea or complaint to any other: A machine operator can talk directly with plant leaders.”

In his lattice organization paper, Gore gives DuPont credit for inspiring his “ahead of the time” ideas. “The concept of the lattice originated from my consideration of the operation of ‘Task Forces’ created during the 1950s to carry out research and development within the Du Pont Company. The original ideas have been refined and extended over the past 18 years. The record supports the belief that a lattice organization releases and promotes the creativity of human beings.”

Task forces at DuPont and lattices at Gore are just two expressions of the worldwide, simultaneous, uncoordinated “experiment” with boundary crossing teamnets in the past few decades. 

 

 

The Rat cheated: Duke Riley restages the race for the Chinese Zodiac #elizastamps

It's a little hard to headline this one. Last year, Duke Riley, the Boston-born, Brooklyn-based artist, with degrees from RISD and Pratt, decided to right a 5000 (or so)-year-old wrong. According to legend, when the race was staged to determine the order of animals in the Chinese Zodiac, the rat cheated and thus secured its place at the head of the pack.

Named as one of the US State Department's visual-artists-as-cultural-ambassadors in 2011, Duke and a few artist-colleagues traveled to a small village outside Shanghai in 2012 to restage that race. "The Rematch" took place on April 15, with a gondola bearing each animal of the zodiac. 

The group was able to secure a real animal for each of the 12 signs (ok, the dragon was an iguana or a lizard or something reptilian) except for a tiger...which is how I know about this imaginative project.

Eliza Stamps, artist and tiger-impersonator, filled the gap. In addition to being a life-long tiger lover, she is my daughter. Eliza and Duke became friends when both were getting their master's in art from Pratt, which is also how I first became aware of Duke's work. At the very first Open Studios at Pratt, we went to Duke's studio where he had, among other things, a book that he had collaborated on with artists around the world. (A quick search is not producing its name but I do recall that artists each added to the book then sent it on. Talk about collaboration!) The cutline for this picture on Duke's site says, "For ethical reasons, instead of transporting a tiger from Guangxi we transported a performance artist."

Just a few minutes ago, I watched documentary filmmaker Kitty Joe Sainte-Marie's film about The Rematch ("Duke Riley // China // smARTpower"). Check out the tiger (Eliza) and you too can eagerly cheer on your favorite animal. 

 

"Collective Sensemaking:" Author Nancy Dixon looking for participants

My colleague, Nancy Dixon, author, knowledge expert, and insightful thinker, is writing a new book about "Collective Sensemaking," which happens, she posits, as part of the perpetual motion of teams -- sometimes together, sometimes apart -- and is looking for teams to interview. I asked her to send a few paragraphs re: what she's looking for. Sounds like an interesting book!

"If an organization wants to be agile, which requires employees to quickly change what they are doing, they will have to make employees a part of creating the change rather than trying to “sell” it, or implementing lengthy change management processes, to try to convince employees to change.  Making employees a part of creating the change has the great advantage of accessing their collective intelligence, thus increasing the likelihood that the change is both in the right direction and implementable.  Collective Sensemaking is the conversational process of employees thinking together about where they are and where they need to go. Depending on the size of the unit that needs to change, Collective Sensemaking conversations can take place in a team, department, or whole organization.  There is skill in creating the structure of Collective Sensemaking conversations, it is clearly not a series of presentations, typical of most quarterly or annual meetings.

A number of virtual teams, distributed project teams, as well as whole organizations, have found advantage in oscillating between distributed work and coming together for Collective Sensemaking.  I am writing a book about this pattern of oscillation and about how to make Collective Sensemaking work. I currently have cases written about three  organizations that use this pattern, a consulting company, software project team, and a government agency.  I am looking for positive examples from other industries.  The process I use to develop the cases is to interview 5-12  employees over Skype or Google Hangout, write the case based on the processes they describe and connect those processes to Collective Sensemaking concepts and research that helps to explain why it works.   I  return the case to the interviewees to review and correct. I give the organization and individuals the option of using real or fictitious names in the case. The benefit to the organization is a deeper understanding of their processes and the opportunity to review the cases from other organization which can provide them new ideas to support their own work.

If your organizations does this kind of oscillation, even if you don’t call it Collective Sensemaking, :) I’d be very interested in have an exploratory call with you. You can reach me at [email protected]"

 

Lindy Hess changed our lives and those of so many others

It was 3 AM and I woke, cold, which, given the heat of the past weeks, seemed impossible. None of my tricks for getting back to sleep were working so I engaged in the one activity that we now know is the worst, reading on a screen where, as usual, I went straight to the obits. There Katie Hafner's extremely sad one about Lindy Hess, who ran the Columbia Publishing Course.

Photo by Lilian Kemp swiped from NYT obit and how Lindy looked when we met her (thanks)

We met Lindy in 1981 on the very day Reagan was being sworn in as president and the hostages were released in Iran. About nine months earlier, Jeff Stamps and I had sold Networking, our first joint book to Methuen, the British publisher, which was starting up an American list (for the publishing historians, Fred Jordan, for many years of Grove Press, was the publisher of this effort). The sale was thanks to Ron Bernstein, our agent at the time. But not long after we'd signed the contract, Ron called to say that Methuen's parent company in the UK had decided to cancel its plans to publish an American list. He was reassuring that he could sell the book again, which he did in very short order at a bit more than twice the original advance to...

Lindy Hess at Doubleday. It was a good break for people bringing out their first book with a major publisher. Lindy knew what she was doing. At 31, she was such a pro that the venerated old house had given her control of an imprint (Doubleday Dolphin). Because she appeared to be so knowledgeable and clearly was very talented and because we'd done the deal on the phone without meeting face-to-face, I thought she'd be much older than I. Instead, when we went to the swanky building on, was it Park Avenue, we were greeted by a woman three years younger with shoulder-length hair held back by a, was it velvet, headband that she removed and reinserted every few minutes. We talked in her office for a while about what was ahead in the process, mentioned that "Jackie Onassis" was now an editor at Doubleday, described her as "very nice" and "hard-working," and shortly thereafter asked if I needed to use the ladies room.

We went together and, as we stood in front of the mirror fidgeting with our hair after peeing -- isn't that part of the ritual: pee, wash your hands, fuss with your hair? -- she said I looked "elegant." I was wearing a long-sleeved ivory silk blouse with a self-tie that I'd borrowed from my friend-neighbor Emily, a dark-blue, knee-length wool skirt with two unusual pleats and one pocket that was stitched not quite right (I'd gotten it at a designer-discount shop) causing me to fuss with *it* constantly, and the most expensive pair of tall boots I'd ever bought, then about five years old. It felt like quite a compliment standing with "my editor" in Manhattan.

Things went well. Lindy liked the book and, when we made a most unusual proposal, she was game, a story I told here about four years ago. We were, how do you say, computer-savvy early on and thus had the ability to write, edit, and create the files for typesetting the book electronically. Doubleday had never done this but Lindy's response was enthusiastic. She inquired around to make sure it would work; she got a positive response; and she gave us a second contract for the typesetting, which, by today's standards, was a GIANT KLUDGE. We wrote the book on a Wang 2200, whose files were then converted by Typesetting Service in Providence, RI, that had a Digital PDP-11 and which could then output and paste-up pages in the format and design that Doubleday specified. It was the first time Doubleday had ever done a book this way and it worked. (The only thing that went wrong was that the FedEx truck delivering the final paste-ups had an accident on the West Side Drive in NY!)

Shortly after the book was published (my memory is that it was only weeks), Lindy left Doubleday and, if I've got this right, moved to Boston, and not long thereafter married her husband Bill Appleton. I was happy for her and sad that our acquisition editor had orphaned our book. A very nice guy took over -- Gerry Helferich -- who later went on to work at Wiley (a later publisher of Jeff's and my books) and who now writes his own books.

We saw Lindy a few times after she moved to Boston, us visting her house, she visting ours, but as time went on, we lost touch. Then about five years ago, David Miller of Garamond Agency, a new agent whom we worked with for a while, told us he was going to teach at the Columbia Publishing Course, which led to a discussion of the program and, alas, that's where Lindy had ended up, spending 25 years making that program and many of its graduates extremely successful.

Once you've been published, you can never be unpublished. There have been other people who have come along in the years since Lindy published Networking, people whose work has made a very big difference in Jeff's and my writing careers but Lindy was the first book publisher and I'd give anything at this moment to see her take that headband out and put it back in.

 

 

 

Marissa Mayer, we need to talk: This genie is way out of the bottle

Dear Marissa,

Apparently, I'm not the only one who has a word or two to say to you. Tom Ashbrook (On Point, "Yahoos Ban on Working From Home") is holding forth with some savvy guests even as I type; Maureen Dowd has a biting op-ed in yesterday's NY Times ("Get Off Of Your Cloud"); and the bloggers have gone wild. Not to mention that I've received numerous emails including this one from a client: "Wish you could write a counter to this and have it published.  This does not help the cause..."*

I regret that I've had to make you a category here but with so much emotion swirling around the HR edict ordering all-hands on the Yahoo! deck, let's begin with some facts:

1. As a computer scientist, you might want to look at real data. There is little evidence to support the notion that people need to be face-to-face to collaborate OR innovate. Yes, there are moments to come together but not perpetually. Professor Tom Allen set the lie to this idea 35 years ago with his ground-breaking research for Digital Equipment Corporation. Simply, if people are more than 50 meters (150 feet) apart, the "probability that two people will communicate [at least once a week] as a function of distance separating them" plummets. Here's the chart:

2. "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?" With two business school professors, we researched 54 high-performing teams in 26 companies across 15 industries and the resounding conclusion from the data was "yes, indeed." Here's the quick summary from the Harvard Business Review where the study was published as "Best Practices:"

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually.

The conclusion for Yahoo!: unless you're doing very simplistic projects, i.e. routine processing chores, stocking shelves, and the like, you're staffing your teams incorrectly. If you're looking for innovation, you need diversity, the subject of many studies before and after ours.There is no way that you have that diversity in toto within driving distance of your Silicon Valley. It's 2013, not 1950, the year the number of manufacturing workers reached its peak in the US.

3. Which leads right into this point. As per the title of this post, the genie is waaaay out of the bottle. Do you actually believe that people today work in intact teams? When you force everyone to co-locate, you're most likely not bringing in the people who actually work together. Do you have contractors? Partners in other companies? Suppliers? Vendors? Developers in India/China/Philippines/Singapore? Do your sales people spend their time in the office? (If your answer to this one is yes, perhaps we've pinpointed a big part of your problem.)

Unless Yahoo! has completely turned its back on development trends that are, say, as old as the Internet itself, team members are scattered around the globe. Yahoo! should do a study of where its team members are situated. We can place a pretty confident bet that they're not all in proximity of Yahoo! HQ.

And that's just the start of what's wrong with this 20th century edict.

4. Let's talk about culture for a moment, one of the big points of the "YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION--DO NOT FORWARD" HR memo that All Things D's Kara Swisher had up within moments, it seems, and which has been published everywhere.

Forcing people into the office hardly builds loyalty. It's abundantly clear that Yahoo! is attempting a massive and quick turnaround of its culture. The insults about the workforce, as reflected in posts around the web, are legion. The parking lot is only half-full at 9:30 AM. Stopping right there, in some companies, this is regarded as a virtue, meaning that carpooling and the like are working, cutting down on carbon emissions. (For more on this, take a look at the pioneering climate initiative at Unilever, which has coupled aggressive carbon reduction gains with new ways of working initiatives, both increasing productivity and innovation and reducing travel miles.)

There are equally numerous reports on the new Google-esque perks at Yahoo! -- better food, dry cleaning services, nicer digs, for example. What builds culture is commitment, positive reinforcement, and challenging work. If you think people aren't coming into the office because they don't like the food, I strongly recommend that you commission a study on this.

Likewise, do you have evidence that people don't collaborate? That people truly are slacking off at home? Data in study after study indicates that people are more productive when they are able to get up, do whatever morning things they have to do at home (tend to kids/parents/animals/themselves) and then get right to work, saving needless hours on the highway. Hello? Aren't we talking about a bit of traffic on 101?

A most startling stat on this, "The hard truth about telecommuting," from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review last June by Mary Noonan and Jennifer Glass and excerpted in the Dec 26 Scientific American: telecommuters on average work 5-7 hours longer per week.

5. 24/7. After ordering people back to their cubbies, are you also prohibiting them from working at home? Consider what you're saying in the-now-much-quoted HR memo to Yahoos: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. Some of the best decisions and insights comes from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and important impromptu meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together." OK, Yahoos. Turn off your phones at home; don't check your mail first thing in the morning (or last at night); and absolutely do not call from your cars. That applies to you, too, Marissa. Are you referring to your "speed and quality" when communicating from, as reported, your 14-day maternity leave?

6. I nearly can't bring myself to comment on this last point for which the young mother-CEO has been excoriated from GMT-12 to GMT+12. A few of your quotes are enraging to other parents, as you've heard. Just this one will follow you for life: "The baby's been easy. The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be." I had "easy" babies too but I found it best to keep that under my hat. Most babies are not and it's quite hurtful to other women to rub it in, i.e. stuff a rag in that comment forevermore. And it's irking your coworkers that you have permission to build a nursery next to your office (even if you paid for it). When are you building sidecars for all the other new moms?

Meanwhile, Marissa, please invite in, say, 40 or 400 or 4000 of the mothers, not to mention the fathers, in your company and listen to what it's like to get through a day. I'm watching a software executive who's your age with major responsibilities, as she is juggling young kids, big corporate decisions, a lot of travel, and being a good family member while her husband, although he doesn't travel as much, is also running on fumes as he works very long hours, cooks, and tells endless stories to the kids. And they can afford help.

There is something profoundly unglued, unrealistic, and uncompassionate in your new approach. Virtual Teams work -- I know. I wrote the book. Maybe you should read it.

--Jessica Lipnack, CEO, consultant, writer, mother, grandmother, and unsolicited advice-giver

 

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpu

*For the record, I posted the news as soon as it reached me last Friday.

Face-to-face for the Oreo tweet

Being a three-screen watcher of the Stupor Bowl, which tells you a lot about my interest in football (see for example, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, introduced to me by my nevertheless-Patriots-loving Daughter #1), I had a great time tweeting during the famous Lights-out of 2013. (Further disclosure: When the Pats are winning, I can't resist regional pride.)

Thus the now-famous Oreo tweet came up right away in my feed, even though I don't follow the cookie (never mind, I can taste it just thinking of it, scraping my teeth across the icing, dissolving the cookie on my tongue -- you're welcome, Nabisco, for the commercial).

Which made me curious about how decisions were made such that the tweet was up nearly simultaneously with lights-out. Lacking the time to turn this into investigative journalism requiring my actually contacting the ad agency responsible for it (360i.com), I did the next best thing: I read the posts from others. 

According to Buzzfeed's "How Oreo Got that Twitter Ad Up So Fast" (thank you, Rachel Sanders), the answer is co-location:

"We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity," agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. "Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes."

...The key? Having Oreo executives in the room, ready to pull the trigger.

My questions: Could they have made the decision as quickly if everyone was not in the room? Who came up with the idea originally? Were they shouting to one another? Sharing one large screen? Several? Were the Oreo execs making the call on every tweet (they had a near constant flood of tweets, of which this was only one)? Had they set out operating agreements for what would go live and what needed approval beforehand? Were the most senior Oreo execs online and watching the quick-acting team that garnered so much buzz so quickly?

Someone will make this a case study in social media, for sure. And it will be interesting to see what lessons are drawn about collaboration and proximity from it.

 

 

 

 

 

Which organizations have the best virtual/flexible/agile work policies?

This is a request for information: I'm looking for examples of how companies, nonprofits, and NGOs (even government agencies) implement their flexible work policies. Also known as virtual/distributed/agile/collaborative work approaches, these guidelines can cover everything from carpooling to work-from-home to hoteling to who-knows-what.

I'm gathering this info for a talk I'm giving for a global company--virtually, of course--at the end of the month.

Which companies have the most innovative approaches? And what pitfalls have they encountered? As always, I will credit anyone who responds in my presentation, a practice I've adhered to since I began giving talks umpteen years ago--and write a post here also giving you credit.

Thanks so much!

Scaling online collaboration

It's a problem. If you're not in the field, what am I talking about?

The web makes it possible for, in effect, infinite numbers of people to collaborate. But how do you collaborate with infinite numbers?

You don't. You can't. Thus network thinkers are trying to solve this problem. INSITE, the European Union's program on innovation, sustainability, and information technology, is including this issue as a worktrack in its Masters of Network symposium later this month in Venice.

Thanks to my colleague, Milica Begovic (above), who works for the UN Development Programme in Montenegro, I've been alerted both to the conference where she's presenting and to this post by Alberto Cottica, which lays out the problem and points to data sources that can be used, and who has this fascinating TEDx video delivered in Bologna, "Designing Collective Intelligence." (If you don't speak Italian, wait a minute. Cottica speaks in English.)