Technology and Organizations

As I promised in my “how-to” on using Google Sites for team projects, this post is a response to Dylan Salisbury’s  request for discussion around the roles for a project team.  While he suggested two roles, I’m going to extend to four.  He suggested:

Team leader: Responsible for making sure work is fairly divided, meetings happen, members are aware of what’s expected of them, and any executive decisions that need to be made.  (Of course it’s still great when decisions are made by consensus.)

Document editor (one per major document): This person is responsible for assembling everybody’s work and for high and low-level consistency of the document.  This person needs to be very quick on communication and editing near the document due date.  In a time crunch, this person has authority to make editing decisions or rewrite someone else’s work.

 As a professor, I’m thrilled to see a goal of ensuring consistency to a project that has piecemeal characteristics. If this particular task is left out it shows – in class projects or any other group task.  My contribution here is to push for a broader consideration of the team roles – one more focused on the overall behaviors needed for effective performance. 

Ketrow (1991) notes that effective teams cover three types of roles.  People who can do the task itself (e.g., ship builder, computer programmer, statistical analyst).  These people are the reason the project is being done.  Then, given it’s a group project, you also need to organize the process (procedural facilitation), and to make sure the knowledge of the team is made available (socioemotional facilitation).  The best person/people at the task are not necessarily the best facilitators.  In fact, you may not want them facilitating if you really need them focused on the task.  The team leader role above seems to be a combination of the two facilitation roles.  That’s fine if you have one person on the team who can do both (both be organized and be effective drawing out all the needed knowledge from the other team members), or you may have co-leaders.  I’d put the document editor role down as a critical task role.  You may also have critical roles assigned to the accounting expert, marketing guru, etc. depending on the nature of the project.  A strong suggestion: If you are trying to learn from this work (be it in class or on the job), yes, have the expert in accounting in charge of the accounting portion of the work – but also have the weakest person in accounting in a support role to that expert.   

What about the technology? As noted in the prior post, an early discussion about the role technology will play in the project is key.  Ketrow’s work was before the age of wikis, blikis, and blogs.  You may find value in extending the three role format (procedural, socioemotional, task) to include a fourth: technical facilitator (sometimes call a “chauffeur.”  You may also find value in seeing how you can off-load some of the procedural and socioemotional tasks to technology tools.  Anonymous brainstorming may overcome the need to have a socioemotional facilitator in the mix for some tasks.  To-do lists with “tickler” may take-on the reminder role often played by the procedural facilitator.

Overall, think carefully about:

• How you meet (face to face or electronically)
• How you store your work product and manage versioning
• What are the response time expectations – are their family or work obligations that block certain days for certain people  – calendar these. 
• Individual responsibilities
• Team expectations and timeline for feedback and adjustments.  No team is built perfectly from the start — you don’t know your resources or needs well enough.  Set aside time to renegotiate after the first few weeks.

Please feel free to add additional questions, suggestions for tools or processes, or roles that you think make a critical difference.  I’m especially interested in how you have best managed the discussions around team expectations and feedback. 

I developed the term “Immersive Performance” while working with a Fortune 100 Tech company. They have over 3000 employees focused on combining personal expertise with information from the company business units in order to design better products and services for their clients. These employees use their organization’s world-class intranet, third-party applications, and electronic access to their peers to do this work. Their world is one of constant information search, knowledge development, and continuing education. Done well, it is like watching a conductor pull the best from musicians and their instruments.

Many organizations are beginning to work with “Embedded Learning” where learning is part of doing the work. With embedded learning, tools are easily at hand during performance to support learning when needed. (IBM calls this “On Demand Learning”- pdf link.) Embedded learning can combine formal learning (e.g., formally designed e-learning) or access to sources for informal learning (e.g., video-on-demand, intra or internet knowledge bases).

I think we can go steps beyond embedded learning by integrating learning with the rest of performance. In an ideal world, which I believe is technically possible today, knowledge workers can seamlessly (while staying immersed in their work) access the information they need from within their established workflow. This is a sociotechnical process (see earlier post on intertwining technology & organizational practices) in that people need to know what technologies are available to support their workflow, need to know what they do and don’t know about the task at hand; and they need to know how to react when they don’t know: learn formally (e.g., attend training), learn informally (e.g., find it on the Internet), or find someone else to help. Performance becomes a process conducted by the knowledge worker with their own knowledge, tools, and services available within and outside the firm.

Immersive performance is a different form of performance where the focus is on understanding what you know, what you need to learn, as well as “doing.” The required knowledge, skills, and abilities for immersive performance include:

• ability to judge what you do and don’t know
• knowledge of the tools and services available
• ability to make judgments about the best course of action for the situation
• access to a solid social network of experts

What’s left out in the above approach is an initial assessment of self-knowledge (do you really need to learn this, or do you already have an approach that will work?), an assessment of the available tools and processes (do you really need to learn this, or is there a system that will already do the job if you just turn in on), and an assessment of who is either better for the job or would be a perfect mentor to learning about the task (I do raise the issue in class of better team formation through figuring out who in the class knows what – but we generally still are focused on “do your own work”). I let myself off the hook in that my job at the university is to teach the individual, not to get the work of a particular organization done. However, within organizations, the focus should be on the above “Immersive Performance” approach. Organizational performance is not done within the boundaries of a single employee’s head. We need to move to supporting employees to be more effective within the open and evolving systems of their organizations and communities of practice.

In earlier posts I’ve discussed my colleagues’ and my work on designing social and technical systems for better performance (there we described it as weaving a fabric versus conducting a symphony). Think about your own organizations training, support, and/or on-boarding processes. I would appreciate examples of how firms are helping employees be better conductors, rather than soloists. Is it training about what tools and resources are available in the firm, who’s available in the firm with what skill set, performance appraisal that’s focused on building teams and processes rather than individual work, or something more creative?

A few months ago I wrote a post called “Group Mind and Memory with Duct Tape and Twine.” My goal there was to highlight some easy actions and tools for supporting teams. In that post I was focused on helping virtual teams overcome some of their weaknesses in terms of having common ground across the members, as well as some other meeting basics. Here I’d like to hit on the flip side, how can we do better by integrating technology into our face to face meetings?

John Sawyer, Maggie Neale, and I have written about hybrid teams: teams that meet face to face but also make use technology support. I have a hard time imagining a setting where some form of technology wouldn’t provide value in a face to face meeting – even if the technology is just a piece of paper (a weak option as it’s hard for everyone to see) or a white board (better). Seems pretty easy to take team notes on a big piece of paper or a white board, but I’ve attended a number of face to face meetings recently where no notes were taken that were visible to the participants. “Poof” went many of the ideas – for those of you on Macs, think about the animation and sound when you drag an icon off the taskbar – “poof,” it’s gone.

Sure, some individuals were taking notes, but in these instances none of those notes are available to the meeting participants. The leader in each case was clearly taking some notes, but in all the instances I’m thinking about they were also the main meeting facilitator, meaning their main focus wasn’t on note taking.

Frankly I don’t like my ideas going “poof,” so I emailed the leaders with the ideas I thought best. This made the best of the situation from my perspective, but isn’t the best group outcome as I know I filter my notes as I go.

I’ll quote from my earlier post about the benefits of notes that are visible to the meeting participants: “If the team rotated who took notes (perhaps using the agenda as the base for the notes) – and more importantly, took notes in a way that all could see them as they were being taken, they would gain at least four benefits. First, the real time nature of the notes provides a visualization of what one member thinks is being said. The rest of the team can then chime in with corrections, elaborations, agreement to action items and the like. There is stronger engagement as the team is going to be held to their immediate agreement about the outcomes of the meeting. Second, once the meeting is over, value added work can begin, rather than spending time typing up notes from work that has now past. Third, since the team lead isn’t trying to take notes and run the meeting, both activities should be of higher quality. Fourth, the minutes are a living document versus an attachment that seems to just get archived and not looked at again.”

As I watched our process over these meetings, another benefit to “group” notes came to mind – progress can be dynamically tracked. If we get bogged down or aren’t addressing the goals of the meeting it will be more apparent through the artifact of the notes. The notes begin to serve as a way to hold the meeting participants to their goals. Without the group notes, the conversation can digress without evidence to the contrary.

The benefits of agendas, having materials available in advance, and note taking are as old as meetings (what do you think those cave drawing are?). Let’s move into the 21st Century and make use of the technologies that are available to us. In each of my example meetings we had access to projection systems and could easily have used a projected agenda as a template for our notes. Yes, as noted by an astute colleague of mine, agendas and notes could provide so much structure that they hamper creativity, but in each of these cases I would have been willing to take that risk over the ideas going “poof” and us having to cover the same ground again in the future. Let’s help our meeting leaders by offering to set up the computer and take the notes.

This post is more to stimulate comment and examples than to tell you something you don’t already know: It’s easier to ask for help if you’ve had a beer/lunch/glass of wine with someone. Likewise, you’re more likely to provide help if you’ve had that food or beverage experience. (Photo by statico)

The example I generally provide in class comes from a combination of experiences with world-class technology companies. These firms do a wonderful job of supporting their engineers, especially through communities of practice. In all my example cases, these communities have some face to face interaction – even though travel budgets are tight. In the latest “heydays” of the Silicon Valley these face to face events would also include on-site dinners… yes, with beer. The engineers would mingle, drink beer, and share stories about how they had resolved problems. All the participants were experts and these discussions were far ranging. Knowledge was shared from around the firms’ global settings.

Perhaps more important than the knowledge shared at the moment were the relationships that developed. Everyone left the session knowing more people than when they arrived. In some cases they might have known of the people they were talking to, but they weren’t always acquainted with them. When everyone went home is when the “beer effect” took place. An engineer would need help. All these organizations have ample technical tools for linking engineers that need help with those who are most likely to have the answer (portals, mailing lists, expert knowledge bases) – but often it’s an issue of getting the expert to respond. What the participants discovered is that it was a lot easier to get a response from someone they had met (i.e., had a beer with). The benefits were huge and the time-savings immense. The beer costs were relatively low.

Times changed. The communities of practice still meet, but at two of the firms the dinners are now informal events where the participants just link up with a few others and go out to dinner. The costs of the meals are still borne by the firms, but the firms are not controlling or supporting mingling among people who do not already know one another. The reports I get are that people go out to dinner with people who are similar to themselves (come from the same location, are in another group together). (This “birds of a feather flock together” effect is so prevalent it has its own term in academic- speak “homophily.”) As a result, people leave the sessions knowing a few more people than they did before, but not as many as they might have and apparently not with the same level of relationship. No beer effect, less ability to call and receive help when needed.

This result highlights a common theme in this blog – for technology systems to provide value in organizations they must be intertwined with human systems. The high-quality portals and knowledge management systems that these organizations provide have greater value the greater the human relationships. The formal communities of practice are a foundation to this process, but may not be enough given human nature. Broader human relationships will amplify the value of the technology and organizational practices. When the dinners were part of the larger group there was a greater likelihood that people would develop relationships with different colleagues – rather than solidifying those they already had — there might have been an empty place at a table, people might meet in the dinner line.

Organizers don’t need to have the big dinner with a flowing keg. Small, off-site dinners can work, but the groupings need to be proactively managed (another recurring theme in this blog (e.g., here and here).

What specific examples have you seen work well? This seems to be a situation for explicitly expanding social networks. Rob Cross describes a large meeting where the participants wore RFID name tags that glowed when people who the technology system thought should meet came close to one another. Sounds great, and I’d love to try it, but are there other approaches that are easier to implement?

I had the pleasure of working with folks from SRI, the US Army, PARC, and other interesting places yesterday. Our topic was Social Information Production. Much of the discussion focused on Communities of Practice (CoPs) & After Action Reviews (AAR).

CoPs are a set of people bound together through common interest and language with the goals of open communication, and exchange and retention of pertinent knowledge. They don’t have to have technology support, but John Sawyer and I have found that CoP technology tools can especially support the development of explicit knowledge related to the CoPs’ area. As I’ve discussed before, it’s the combination of technology and organizational practices that is often most powerful.

AARs have a simple set of questions to guide the review:
1. What did we set out to do?
2. What happened?
3. Why did it happen?
4. What are we going to do about it?

LTC Nate Allen, one of the two founders of the Army’s well-received CompanyCommander and PlatoonLeader CoPs (see his and LTC Tony Bugess’ book here), gave me some updates on their AAR process:

They are finding good value in looking at “close calls” versus bad outcomes. Close calls don’t get people as defensive as they would with a disaster — better learning environment.

They also now include another agenda item: What did we get away with? For example, the outcome was ok, but in hindsight it could have been a problem and should be considered in the review. I’m going to add this one to my class presentation on AARs. Overall, I like the idea of doing AARs as a matter of course – as part of a milestone process. Emotions may be less likely to cloud the process if it’s a standard tool and the approach is familiar.

I came away from our discussion with a lot to think about.

1. Key to the ideas of CoPs and AARs was that AARs have to be seen as a process, not an outcome. You don’t do an AAR to generate content (e.g., lessons learned) – though that can be a great outcome – you do an AAR to carefully reflect on what could be done better to help you plan for the future.

2. To the extent that part of the CoPs’ approach for learning is to integrate with AARs, the CoP can only be more powerful. The CoP can be a platform for the process and the outcomes. Facebook’s recent amazing valuation may as much about its growth as a platform, rather than its current capabilities as a “social watering hole.”
3. To the extent that we can use technology to support the AAR, it is more likely to be a living process (e.g., by tracking the workflow in the first place so the AAR can be evidence-based or by capturing the outcomes of the AAR so that the determined changes can be tracked and themselves evaluated).

Both CoPs and AARs are powerful in organizations and well worth the effort. The added power of one supporting the other is also well worth the effort of integration.