Online Collaboration Isn’t Just About Meetings

COVID-19 has forced many of us to reckon with a working world where we can’t be face-to-face. I’ve been heartened to see how collaboration practitioners have been responding overall. I love seeing folks tapping the wisdom of their own groups before looking outward and sharing their knowledge freely and broadly.

I am especially happy to see people reminding others and themselves to pause and revisit their underlying goals rather than make hasty decisions. There is a lot of amazing digital technology out there, and it’s easy to dive head-first into these tools without considering other, technology-free interventions that might have an even greater impact in these difficult times. It’s been interesting, for example, to see so many people emphasize the importance of checkins and working agreements. When this is all over, I hope people realize that these techniques are relevant when we’re face-to-face as well.

After all, online collaboration is just collaboration. The same principles apply. It just takes practice to get them right in different contexts.

One adjustment I’d like to see more people make is to focus less on meetings. (This was a problem in our pre-COVID-19 world as well.) Meetings are indeed important, and understanding how to design and facilitate them effectively, whether face-to-face or online, is a craft that not enough people do well. However, meetings are just a tool, and a limited one at that. I’d like to offer two frameworks that help us think beyond meetings.

First, try not to think in terms of “online” or “virtual.” Instead, think in terms of work that happens at the same time (synchronous) or at different times (asynchronous), and collaboration that happens in the same or different places (remote).

Many collaboration practitioners tend to focus on synchronous collaboration — stuff that happens at the same time (which often ends up translating to meetings). I think some of the best opportunities for improving collaboration lie with asynchronous collaboration. Many of us assume that we can’t replicate the delightful experiences that are possible when people are in the same place at the same time. I think that’s narrow thinking.

Many years ago, I asked Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki (the collaborative technology that powers Wikipedia), how he would describe the essence of a wiki. He responded, “It’s when I work on something, put it out into the world, walk away, and come back later, only to find that someone else has taken it and made it better.” To me, that beautifully describes what’s possible when asynchronous collaboration is working well, and it resonates with my own experiences. It also offers a North Star for what we’re trying to achieve when we’re designing for asynchronous collaboration.

Second, it’s important to remember that collaboration consists of three different kinds of work: task, relationship, and sensemaking. Breaking collaboration into these three categories can offer greater guidance into how to design and facilitate asynchronous work more effectively.

For example, a common type of task work for knowledge workers is creating documents. Agreeing on a single place for finding and editing documents hugely simplifies people’s abilities to collaborate asynchronously. It also better facilitates the kind of experience that Ward described than, say, emailing documents back-and-forth.

A common sensemaking exercise is the stand-up meeting, where everyone on a team announces what they’re working on and where they need help. (People are asked to stand up during these meetings to encourage people to keep their updates brief.) You could easily do a stand-up meeting online, but aggregating and re-sharing status updates over email is potentially more efficient and effective.

One interesting side effect of so many people meeting over video while sheltering in place is that we literally get a window into each other’s homes and even our families and pets, an emergent form of relationship-building. Pamela Hinds , who has long studied distributed work, calls this “contextual knowledge” and has often cited it as a key factor for successful remote, asynchronous collaboration. (It’s why, when we were designing the Delta Dialogues, a high-conflict project focused on water issues in the Sacramento Delta, we chose to rotate the meetings at people’s offices rather than at a neutral location. We wanted people to experience each other’s workplaces to enhance their sense of connection with each other.)

Once we recognize this form of relationship-building as useful, we can start to think about how to do it asynchronously. In my Colearning community of practice, which consists of ten collaboration practitioners across the U.S. and Canada, each of us posts a weekly personal checkin over Slack, often sharing photos and videos of our loved ones. We post and browse at our own convenience, and the ritual and the artifacts forge bonds that run deeper than what would be possible with, say, a monthly video call, which would be incredibly hard to schedule and would almost certainly prevent some of us from participating.

Similarly, we don’t need video to see each other’s faces. A trick I stole from Marcia Conner many years ago — well before video was ubiquitous — was to get silly photos of everyone on the team, combine them in a document, and have everybody print and post it on their office wall. This not only enhanced our conversations when we were talking over the phone, it created a constant sense of connection and fun even when we weren’t in a room together.

While I hope these examples dispel the notion that synchronous collaboration is inherently more delightful and impactful than asynchronous, I also want to acknowledge that designing for asynchronous collaboration is more challenging. I think there are two reasons for this.

First, you have to compensate for lack of attention. When everyone is in a room together, it’s easier to get and keep people’s attention. When people are on their own, you have no control over their environment. You have to leverage other tools and techniques for success, and you’re unlikely to get 100 percent follow-through.

The two most common tools for compensating for lack of attention are the artifact and the ritual. An artifact is something tangible, something that you can examine on your own time, whether it’s a written document, a picture, or Proust’s Madeleine. A ritual is an action — often with some cultural significance — that’s repeated. It could be a rule (with enforcement) or a norm that people just do. It’s effective, because it becomes habitual, which means people are able to do it without thought.

The trick is finding the right balance of artifacts and rituals. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously requires people to write a six-page memo before meetings, but they designate shared time at the beginning of each meeting to read the memo together. On the one hand, writing the memo requires discipline and attention in-between meetings, or asynchronously. On the other hand, rather than save meeting time by having people read the memos beforehand, they devote synchronous time to reading the memos together. I can guess the reasons for this, but the truth is that I don’t know what they are. Different practices work in different contexts. Everybody has to figure out what works for themselves. Certain kinds of cultures — especially transparent, iterative, developmental ones — will be more conducive to these kinds of practices.

Finally, our relationship to technology matters, but maybe not in the way you think. On the one hand, if you are going to use a tool for collaboration, then it’s important to learn how to use it fluently and wield it skillfully. On the other hand, technology has this way of making you forget what you already know. It may be that the tools that will be most helpful for you have nothing to do with the latest and greatest digital technology.

This has always been easy for me to understand, because I have always had an uncomplicated relationship with technology. I love technology, but its role is to serve me, not the other way around. When I design structures and processes for collaboration, I always start with people, not tools, and I try to help others do the same.

What I’ve come to realize over the years is that this is often hard for others, because they’re worried about what they don’t know and they have a block when it comes to learning about technology. I get this. I have blocks about learning many things, and I know that advice that amounts to “get over it” is not helpful. Please recognize that these feelings are not only real, they’re okay. While I’d encourage everyone to find peers and resources that help them learn about digital tools in a way that feels safe, I also want to remind you that collaboration is ultimately about people. Keeping your humanity front and center will not only help you with your transitions to remote work, it will help you through this crisis.

Actually, Documenting Is Learning!

Boardthing Screenshot: Learning Via Artifacts

Last week, I published the second of my three-part series of “gentle rants” on facilitating learning in groups. The title was, “Documenting Is Not Learning.”

That piece was widely shared on various social media channels, and it also stirred up some controversy. A few of my close colleagues raised their eyebrows when they saw my title. One of those colleagues was Dave Gray.

On my personal blog, I described how I know Dave, why I respect him so much, and what I’ve learned from him over the years. His credentials — founder of XPLANE, author of Gamestorming and The Connected Company, creator of Boardthing — are impressive, but they don’t do him justice. Dave is a great thinker, practitioner, learner, and teacher. He has a deep understanding of collaboration and innovation, and he is a brilliant visual thinker. These are what his notes look like:

Dave Gray: What Ignites Creative Energy?

He might claim that this is a polished version, but I have seen his “rough” notes, and they look essentially the same.

Dave read my post, and he understood and agreed with my overall message. But he rightfully had a beef with my title, and he called me out on it. I felt like I needed to write a followup post to clarify what I meant, but I thought it would be much more fun to have a conversation with Dave on this and related topics, and to let the content of that conversation essentially become the post.

Yesterday, we spent about an hour talking on a public Google Hangout. (The video of our conversation is below.) To my delight, we had about six people listening in (including my wonderful and wise colleagues Nancy White, Seb Paquet, Beth Kanter, and Natalie Dejarlais), and we all took collective notes using Boardthing. I want to highlight a few points here.

Documenting Is Learning!

In my quest to make my title punchy and provocative, it lost importance nuance. The process of documenting is absolutely a great way to learn for the person doing the documenting. I tried to make that point in my post:

Externalizing our knowledge can be a valuable way for individuals to reflect and internalize, but it’s only valuable for peers and colleagues if they take the time to absorb it.

It’s even more powerful when the act of documenting becomes a collective process, which is what was happening during our conversation on Boardthing.

My rant was essentially about people’s assumptions about why or how artifacts that result from documentation can be valuable for learning. In my conversation with Dave, I shared the three dimensions in which I think about artifacts:

  • Transcriptive. A detailed, chronological capture of a discussion or thought process. The video below is an example of a transcriptive artifact.
  • Interpretive. A synthesis of a discussion or thought process. This blog post is more interpretive than transcriptive, but it’s still somewhat transcriptive. The same goes for the resulting Boardthing from our conversation. (That also gets special status, because it was collectively as opposed to individually created.) Dave’s image, on the other hand, is highly interpretive and not very transcriptive.
  • Evocative. Something emotional that triggers a memory. I told a story about how my photographs from various projects often serve a more useful role in triggering learning than my writing, because they elicit an emotional response. I probably pay more attention to Dave’s idea stream than to other colleague’s because his notes are so evocative.

Focusing too much on the transcriptive and interpretive dimensions of documentation prevents you from designing effective learning processes.

(As an aside, understanding and experimenting with the role that artifacts play in high-performance collaboration is a foundational question for me. I’ll write more about it in future posts.)

Getting Real

Dave and I talked a lot about the nature of learning and knowledge. The truth is that learning is wonderfully messy and contextual, and it’s often done best with others. Attempting to abstract learning into a series of information transactions is not only wrong, it’s harmful.

Dave described how Visual Thinking School (one of the inspirations for Changemaker Bootcamp) came about at his previous company, XPLANE. As an experiment in encouraging more cross-organizational and enjoyable learning, they had decided to designate two-hours a week for people to learn from each other. They wanted to make it optional, but they also wanted to demonstrate a real, organizational commitment to the experiment.

They decided to schedule it on Thursdays from 4pm to 6pm, which meant half of it was during work hours, but the other half was on people’s personal time. They also told managers not to schedule meetings during this time, so that people’s calendars would be clear to attend if they so choose.

Listening to Dave describe the thinking behind Visual Thinking School felt like a case study in how to design effective learning processes. It wasn’t about trying to get people to write down what was in their heads. It was all about creating a delightful space in which learning could happen, facilitating stronger relationships within the company, and focusing on the true nature of craft.

We ended our conversation the way we started — exploring the realities of how we learn. I told Dave about how my parents would always say to me when I was growing up, “We don’t want you to make the mistakes that we did.” Later in my adult life, I decided that I disagreed with this. Sometimes, you absolutely do want people to make the same mistakes, because that can be the best way to learn. You just want to minimize the negative effects of making them.

In response, Dave shared a story about the four kinds of horses that he used to tell to his students who were failing his class:

  • The first kind learns to run effortlessly.
  • The second kind learns when it sees the shadow of the whip.
  • The third kind learns when it first feels the sting of the whip.
  • The fourth kind only learns when the sting of the whip sinks into the very marrow of its bones.

Everyone envies the first kind of horse, but only the fourth kind truly understands what it means to run in the very marrow of its bones. There is something deep and wonderful about that kind of learning, painful though it may be.

Many thanks to Dave for provoking this wonderful conversation and to all of my friends and colleagues who engaged with us on our call and on social media!

Documenting Is Not Learning

Emergence

Part two of a three-part essay on facilitating group learning. See also part one, “Getting real about experiments and learning.”

A few years ago, my friend and colleague, Rebecca Petzel, wrote about a participatory art exhibit where the artist asked, “What is transformation?” One of the replies was, “Moving beyond documentation.”

I laugh every time I read this, but I also shake my head. How and why did documentation become so synonymous with learning (or worse, transformation)?

My mentor, Doug Engelbart, always said that the distinguishing characteristic of a high-performance group was its ability to learn and improve. One sign that a group was good at learning was its ongoing care and maintenance of what Doug described as a “dynamic knowledge repository.”

When people asked Doug what a “dynamic knowledge repository” looked like, he always described something digital. That made sense. Among the many things that made Doug a visionary was his recognition that digital technology had the ability to transform the speed at which we act and the quality of those actions. It’s something I still believe wholeheartedly.

But there was always something that seemed inconsistent and incomplete about how Doug described these knowledge repositories. For one thing, he used the word, “knowledge,” not “data” or “information” — both de rigueur terms of the time. For another, as much as he talked about the potential of tool systems, he also stressed the importance of human systems.

Knowledge can manifest itself as external artifacts, but those artifacts themselves are not knowledge. The essence of knowledge is that it’s actionable, and humans can’t act on knowledge unless it’s in their heads. I can have a whole library of books on nuclear physics, but it doesn’t become knowledge until I figure out a way to internalize what those books represent. I can read all the books I want on how to ride a bicycle, but it’s not knowledge until I actually demonstrate the physical ability to ride a bike.

I know that Doug understood this. I had many deep, wonderful conversations with him about this. Doug focused on the digital, because he was always looking at what was possible, which was way beyond what everyone else could see. That was one of his many gifts to the world.

Today, too many of us are fixated on digitally capturing our knowledge. That is the wrong place to start. We shouldn’t be so focused on externalizing what’s in our head in digital form. We should be looking at the problem the other way around — figuring out how best to get knowledge into our heads. That is the much more challenging and important problem.

How do we do that?

The number one thing we can do to help groups learn is to create space and time for reflection. How many of you take the time to do that with your groups?

Externalizing our knowledge can be a valuable way for individuals to reflect and internalize, but it’s only valuable for peers and colleagues if they take the time to absorb it. In theory, having access to written forms of knowledge — digital or otherwise — gives people flexibility as to when they can sit down and read it, which is one way to create time. However, that time is easily outweighed by the possibility that reading someone’s writings may be the worst way to learn something.

Last week, I wrote about my eight-year-old nephew’s physics experiment. He was learning by doing (i.e. experiential learning) and through mentorship and feedback. Would it have been better if I had written down everything I knew about physics and emailed it to him?

What if, instead of spending so much time, energy, and money on trying to get people to share more information digitally, we assigned people learning buddies? What if we incentivized time spent in reflection and with each other? What if we created systems for shadowing each other and for practicing the skills we need to be effective? Wouldn’t those be better first steps toward facilitating effective group learning?

See also part three, “The Key to Effective Learning? Soap Bubbles!”