Nancy White on the necessity (or not) of face-to-face

The great comments on the "Is face-to-face necessary?" post continue to roll in. This one from Nancy White is so telling that I thought you'd want to see it.

Hey Jessica

I share your experience of people wanting to have F2F trainings for online facilitation, etc. If it is not AT LEAST a blend of F2F and online, I won't do it anymore.

I think the comments above surface the complexity of the question. Context matters - and contexts are diverse.

I love working with people who simply CAN'T be together, and with that motivation, amazing things are possible, including functioning, trust-ful teams. I've had situations where we had plenty of F2F, process support, etc and the teams failed. I bet they would have failed if they were all F2F because they were missing the bits that any team needs to succeed, including enough shared purpose, intention, attention and in most cases, enough slack from their "vertical" responsibilities to attend to the "horizontal" responsibilities of cross organizational teams.

Anyway, I'm wandering.

My data points? If a team is to primarily function at a distance and there are no extenuating situations (i.e. ZERO tech skills, language or whatever) that starting online FIRST is actually a success strategy.

People "test" their "online antennae" around relationship and trust building. They do small interrelated tasks to understand working styles. Then, IF THEY CAN, come together F2F to validate their online experience. They go "yeah this works, and no, we need to tweak that." They consider their online skills not as theory, but as practice.

These groups go online again faster and stay together easier than groups who start F2F, reaffirm all they KNOW about F2F then flounder online.

Hey, I'm jet lagged. Enough rambling but sufficient to say, I'm with ya, sistah!