Willingness to work together?

Shiv Singh recently posted some Reflections on the Nature of Collaboration over at the app gap. He says:

An often forgotten fact about collaboration is that the people who typically want to collaborate are also the ones who trust each other the most. They are also the people who recognize that they can benefit in some manner by collaborating. Those benefits usually extend beyond just learning from one another to also recognizing that their reputations get enhanced as more peers observe their ongoing collaborations. But these people aren’t always in the majority.

Shiv concentrates on the implications of this for "Enterprise 2.0 software" but it reminded me of the often unspoken political problems when "intercultural communication problems" are identified in a business. Every now and then, two offices are not co-operating well on a project, but the problem is not at the level of the cultural differences in ways of working and communicating, or generating trust across two groups who perceive strong differences between them.

Instead, the problem comes out of a company's structure, which may place parts of those two offices in competition for certain customers, or particular bits of work. Or the director of one of the offices doesn't want the project to succeed because the director of the other office would get all the credit (and the coming promotion!)

Business problems can have many roots and it may not be the one you expect. This is why it is so important to begin with an analysis of the business and the context of the perceived problem. When you're holding a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. That's why I feel my experience in other fields has helped in cross-cultural consulting. It helps me be open about what the root causes may be and allows me to step back and say "This problem is really about the way you force these offices to compete against each other over business. If you don't address that, co-operation between them will not improve, no matter how many "cultural awareness" workshops are put on.

Technorati Tags: collaboration,intercultural communications,internal communications,office politics

Virtual Communications

Over at IABC Cafe, Julie Freeman asks about people's experiences with teleconferencing, which reminds me of a recent conversation with a lawyer. He asked me my general opinion of video conferencing and other technologies. I was moved to enthuse about a recent demonstration I'd seen of Cisco's TelePresence. I think that the approach of representing people in high definition at life size is the way of the future for virtual business communication. For now the cost, both for equipment and bandwidth, is beyond most organisations but (other than holography) it's the first setup I have seen that begins to offer an experience that offers some of the affordances* of face-to-face meetings.

However, I ended the conversation by touching on my reservations. The lawyer heads up a branch office and was wondering about the use of technology to reduce travelling to meetings at the central office. That sounds very promising, it could save time, money and help save the planet. Unfortunately, I was of the opinion that for him, it was a bad idea. Why?

The firm is run as a partnership and these meetings at the central office are where the partners gather to decide how the business will be run. My experience is that every such partnership has it's share of low-level politics. And if you move to "virtual meetings" you will amplify any communications gap between the people at central office and those from various branches. That gap no doubt already exists, politically, with those who work in each location tending to discuss matter with each other before the overall gathering takes place. Low-tech teleconferencing however raises the danger that those in central office can have a "back conversation" throughout a virtual meeting, which puts those on the other end of a video link in a position where they have much less awareness of what is going on and thus less ability to influence proceedings.

Is there then no hope for a greener teleconferencing future? I think there is hope, but it relies in understanding that meetings are often not the best forum for discussion or decision-making. If other methods are taken up, they can proceed using "virtualisation technologies" and a smaller number of meetings be made face to face.

 

*Affordances is a word which means "action possibilities" and I first encountered it in the book "The Myth of the Paperless Office" which I highly recommend if you like thinking about the way various media delimit the way we work and communicate.

 

Technorati Tags: improving communication,office politics,technology,teleconferencing