wiki – Faster Than 20

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.

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Bring Groups Alive by Establishing a Rhythm

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named…. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

—Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Life is about rhythm. We vibrate, our hearts are pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine, that’s what we are.

—Mickey Hart, Grateful Dead drummer, 1998 CNN interview

I strive to be a minimalist when it comes to designing and facilitating meetings, especially large ones. I get people into small groups as much and as quickly as possible, and I get out of their way. If I am thoughtful about the space I create, the questions I pose, and the tools I provide, then I can recede into the background, and the meeting runs itself.

When it’s working, I can feel the room vibrate. When people are engaged, when they’re leaning in, when they’re listening closely to each other, when they’re working, laughing, creating, converging, the group becomes alive. I can hear the group’s heartbeat, and I simply move along with it.

What makes groups come alive? I love Brooking Gatewood’s deceptively simple observation that what matters is that we feel like we matter.

How do we create conditions for people to feel like they matter? How do we support this, reinforce it, amplify it? There are no stock answers to these questions, and putting whatever answers you might have into practice is even harder.

If I had to focus on one thing, I’d start with rhythm.

In their book, Scaling Up Excellence, Stanford Business School professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao write:

Recent studies show that when people share rhythms with others they develop stronger emotional bonds and are more likely to pitch in for the common good. One study showed that even when a pair of strangers had never met before and didn’t talk, they still liked each other more if both simply walked in the same direction together, rather than in different directions.

…

When people share the same daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal rhythms, connections among them form faster and stay stronger. The people trust each other more deeply, and coordination becomes easier because they see and experience the world in the same way. (pp212-213)

In our drive to focus on issues of “substance,” we tend to forget about issues of biology. The notion that simply moving together physically might improve performance can be hard to believe, even in light of the research, but we ignore this reality to our detriment.

When we work together face-to-face, it’s easier to establish rhythms without being conscious of it. People have natural habits, reinforced by physical space, and rhythms sometimes emerge on their own. Still, skillful practitioners are sensitive to these emergent rhythms, but also don’t leave it entirely to chance. It’s why we see things like standing meetings and checkins in so many successful processes. What happens during these rituals may actually be far less important than the fact that they are simply happening.

When we’re not physically in the same space, establishing what Lisa Kimball describes as a “visible pulse” is even more important. Lisa (who has the best company name in the business) writes, “Human systems that thrive have a pulse… a rhythm… that connects and aligns them with the source of life. The essence of relationship is being in rhythm with others. To co-conspire, to breathe together with a group is a big challenge for collaborative groups in the same room together. It’s even harder for groups that are not in each others’ physical presence.”

Many years ago, I met a Disney IT manager, who shared an unexpected solution to a very common problem they were having. His whole team was based in Burbank, California, with the exception of one person, who worked in the Orlando, Florida office. This person predictably felt out-of-touch with the rest of the team. They tried a number of tools and process tricks to shift this, but none of them worked.

Finally, they decided to set up a video camera and monitor in the hallway of the Burbank office, and they left it on at all times. They put a similar setup in the Orlando office. That did the trick. Being able to experience the hustle and bustle of his California colleagues in an ambient way helped give this person a greater sense of connection to his team and to his work.

This strategy of starting with something natural and amplifying it is generally smart, but it can also surface new challenges. At my previous company of seven people, we used a wiki as a central repository for all of our notes. This gave us full transparency into what everybody was doing and thinking, and it also gave us the ability to work effectively at our own pace.

Most people followed the wiki by subscribing to email notifications, which would get sent whenever somebody made a change. The problem was that I had a propensity to think and write early in the morning or late at night, which meant that people would often wake up to a slew of emails. Even though I didn’t expect anyone to follow my schedule, I was unintentionally establishing a rhythm that others rightfully found stressful.

I didn’t want to change my habits, which worked well for me, and I also didn’t want us to lose the benefit of the notifications as an amplification of a natural rhythm. Our solution was to create a piece of software that would collect the notifications and publish a whole set once an hour and only during business hours. As an added bonus, we named the tool after a colleague’s dog and had it bark and grunt encouraging commentary along with the notifications.

By taking behavior that was already happening and making it visible (and fun), we were able to establish a rhythm without any additional work. However, we needed to slow it down and curate it (both of which we were able to do automatically) in order for that rhythm to feel comfortable.

Understanding what rhythm will work best for everyone is part experimentation, part conversation. My friends at Forward Together, a pioneering reproductive justice organization, have a wonderful physical movement-building practice called, Forward Stance, which is a spiritual cousin to my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program. It includes one exercise that not only highlights the importance of rhythm, but enables people to have a concrete conversation about how to move in alignment at different paces.

It starts by someone establishing a physical rhythm — some combination of sound and movement. The rest of the group is asked to follow the rhythm in their own way and at their own pace to demonstrate the relationship they want to have with the rest of the group.

This exercise gives people concrete language to discuss an issue that can feel somewhat abstract. We used it as part of our Future Forward project — which consisted of a dozen stakeholders across multiple organizations — to establish a sense of how we wanted to work together over the summer, when many of us would be traveling. The entire exercise took a grand total of seven minutes, and it helped us get specific in a way that simply talking about it would not have.

When we are collaborating at our best, everyone feels alive, and the group itself takes on a life of its own. By definition, groups that are alive have a heartbeat, a rhythm that everyone can follow.

What is the rhythm of your group?

Is everyone listening and moving to it?

If not, what might you do to establish a stronger pulse or to make it more visible?

Investing in and Designing for Trust

I spent the first half of 2008 helping a network of reproductive health leaders across several developing countries find ways to collaborate more effectively with each other. As part of this work, I spent a week working with leaders in Kano, Nigeria. When I first arrived there, I asked my host to show me where the local bank was so that I could exchange some currency. He explained that people in Kano don’t go to banks. Thieves knew to hang out there, and even if you managed to avoid getting robbed, you couldn’t trust the banks to give you real currency.

Instead, he introduced me to a guy in a red truck parked outside of a Chinese restaurant, and he negotiated an exchange. When I asked him how he knew where to go and whom to trust, he explained that it was largely word of mouth — family, friends of friends, etc. But he also made it clear that word of mouth wasn’t consistently trustworthy either, and that you had to remain constantly vigilant. Constant vigilance meant constant stress, which is what I felt throughout my trip knowing that I couldn’t trust the institutions that I generally depended on here in the U.S. However, relationships still mattered. Knowing and trusting a few core locals enabled me to acclimate quickly and even learn to thrive.

The Problem with Structure

Trust is an essential part of effective collaboration. Without it, most groups fall apart. However, we are often naive in how we design for trust.

Consider decision-making. One of the easiest ways to gauge how much a group trusts each other is to look at its governance structure. In high-trust groups, people assume that everyone will do what it takes to make the best decisions. Sometimes, this means reaching out to others for discussion and pushback. Other times, it means being proactive about making decisions, understanding that it’s impossible to know everything in advance and that mistakes will happen. These groups often get away with minimal, mostly informal governance structures.

In low-trust groups, people fear that they won’t be properly represented and that others won’t make good decisions on their own, so they insist on being part of every decision. Decision-making is often time-consuming and ineffective as a result. These groups often try to compensate by adding more rigid, formal governance structures.

High-trust groups are about forgiveness. Low-trust groups are about permission.

Even though rigid, overly formal structures are often a symptom of low-trust groups, we often try to compensate for this by creating additional — you guessed it — rigid, overly formal structures. The problem isn’t that new structures can’t help. It’s that the structures we choose don’t necessarily increase trust and may even serve to impede it.

For example, many international aid organizations require some sort of government involvement in order to ensure that money goes to the right places and is used in the right ways. Their assumption is that government is the most trustworthy way for this to happen. As I saw firsthand in Nigeria, this assumption is sometimes wrong, and the work suffers as a result.

There are two ways to navigate around this. The first is to remember that there are other ways to invest in trust beyond building new structures — specifically, investing in relationships. The second is to think more intentionally and creatively about the structures you build.

Investing in Relationships

In 2012, I co-led a multistakeholder process called the Delta Dialogues focused on California water issues. California has been embroiled in a complex and expensive debate over water policy for several years. Rather than propose an alternative policy process, we chose to augment the existing processes by focusing on trust-building between key players.

We mostly focused on building shared understanding using sophisticated mapping tools, but we also placed a huge emphasis on getting to know each other as people. For example:

Whenever someone joined the Dialogues, we asked them to share their favorite place in the Delta.
Rather than seek a “neutral” location for our meetings, we rotated locations among the participants, so that everyone could see and experience each other’s workplace.
We assigned each participant a buddy, and we asked that they talk to each other before and after each meeting.

Journalist, Joe Mathews, who covered the Dialogues, later wrote:

Participants would say the field trips in general were the most valuable part of the Dialogues. All of the participants had lived or done work on the Delta. But even those who had spent their whole lives living in the Delta had seen only parts of the massive estuary. To get a guided tour from another participant and see a piece of the Delta through that person’s eyes proved to be invaluable.

Campbell Ingram [director of the Delta Conservancy, and our client] expressed some embarrassment that the experience of this field trip was so new. “I was pretty amazed that I spent so many years at the BDCP table [the water policy discussion] without that gut level understanding of what it means to be a pear farmer in the Delta. I always thought pear farming was in decline, and then got to see and hear reality, and their issues with their inability to plan. To me, that had a huge impact. It made me feel really uncomfortable. I think a lot of us had the realization that the degree to which we had overlooked the Delta in these processes.”

…

Outside the meetings and field trips, the Dialogues were deepening and taking root in ways that the facilitators couldn’t see. The participants found they liked each other. And they began to talk and meet outside the Dialogues.

These personal relationships and conversations would be among the most treasured products of the Dialogues. Many of these connections were of the strange bedfellows variety.”

Assuming Trust

Most structures — from governance to physical structures — are designed with low-trust in mind. Consider the humble traffic light. The fundamental assumption underlying its design is that we cannot trust people to negotiate intersections with each other in a safe, efficient manner. But what if we could? What might intersections look like then?

Traffic engineer Hans Monderman’s answer to this question was a traffic circle. As it turns out, traffic circles are safer and more efficient than traffic lights. Giving control back to the drivers forces them to be more present and more diligent, which results in better outcomes.

Similarly, most websites have login credentials and access permissions. They assume that without gatekeepers, people will just go around breaking things. While these websites are decent at keeping bad guys out, they are also surprisingly bad at allowing good guys to get in. Most of us believe that this is an unfortunate, but necessary tradeoff.

Wikis flip this assumption around. They assume that most people are intelligent and want to do good, that if you trust people by default, good things will happen. Wikis not only allow anyone to edit them, they do not impose any kind of editorial workflow. They assume that good, smart people will figure out for themselves how to create the highest quality content. Wikipedia — the most prominent of all wikis — is a devastating example of this principle operating at massive scale.

Wikis still have structure, only their structures are designed to reinforce, rather than replace, trustworthy behaviors. For example, wikis maintain a copy of all prior revisions. This encourages people to try things, knowing that their mistakes can be easily reverted. People’s contribution histories also serve as a kind of currency that helps reinforce their trustworthiness.

When you design for trust, the results are often simpler and more elegant (and sometimes counter-intuitive). These designs give up control rather than assert it, resulting in greater agility and higher quality.

However, designing for trust doesn’t work so well if you don’t have trust in the first place. Organizational forms without explicit hierarchy have existed for decades, but recent instantiations like Holocracy have recently become popular, especially in the technology sector. What people are starting to realize is that trust is a critical ingredient to make this work, lack of trust is often a cultural problem, and eliminating structure does not solve anything if your problem is with culture.

Structure and trust have a tumultuous relationship, but if we start with some basic principles, we can harness both to create higher-quality collaboration. Invest in relationships, then design structures that reinforce, rather than replace, trust.

Special thanks goes to Jerry Michalski, who — when we first met 12 years ago — first provoked me with the question, “What if we trusted people?” I’ve been pondering that question ever since.