 You've
seen it a million times: At a meeting with a dozen people, some of them
take notes and others don't, and if you have a chance to see the notes
afterwards you wonder if the people were actually at the same meeting.
The people connected in by phone or online were even more clued out,
somehow missing everything important that came out of the meeting. And
a month later, the minutes of the meeting come out, and you read them
and ask yourself: When during the meeting did we agree to do that?
One
of the purposes of the new flood of social networking tools is to try
to organize, facilitate and improve the effectiveness of conversations
and collaborative activities. The power and promise of these tools was
and is considerable, and a year ago Steve Barth
even predicted the demise of group e-mails (in favour of next-gen wikis
and other more dynamic tools). But most of these tools remain
underused, or hardly used at all. The following table is my rough take
on current usage of these tools:
| Used by Most People | Used by Those on the Right Side of the Digital Divide Only (say, 20%) | Used by Power Internet Users Only
(say, 2%) | - telephone
- group e-mail
- face-to-face meetings without any personal documentation of learnings or decisions
| - skype and other free global enhanced VOIP telephony tools
- discussion forums/groups
- weblogs
- face-to-face meetings with personal notes or mindmap documentation
| - wikis
- google writely and other online document sharing tools
- sophisticated collaboration & coordination tools and 'spaces'
- face-to-face meetings using Open Space or other advanced highly-effective conversation and collaboration techniques
|
What's happening here? I think there are seven main reasons for this underutilization:
- Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns.
- Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use.
- The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they're awkward.
- Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don't solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
- The training materials for these tools don't match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
- Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren't online.
- Often we don't even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with,
so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are
first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once
we've discovered who the right people are, we're likely already talking
with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
In
many cases the cost of limiting our conversations and collaborations to
the 20% or 2% of people who can effectively use these tools is just too
high, so we revert to the lowest-common-denominator tools in the left
column above.
But the consequence of this is suboptimal
conversations and collaborations: A lot of wasted time, high travel
cost, a great deal of miscommunication and non-communication,
misunderstandings about what has been learned and decided, great ideas
and important information not heard or not used, learnings and
information lost or forgotten, and collaborations dominated by the
loudest or most powerful instead of drawing on the best from all
participants.
Many people seem to believe the answer is to
make the tools better and wait for the rest of the world (or the next
generation) to catch up with the 2% or 20%. But I'm not so sure. The
digital divide seems to grow ever wider, not narrower, and if a tool as
simple, free and intuitive as Skype can't replace the telephone even
for tech-savvy users, what hope is there for more complicated,
sophisticated tools?
And while better education and training
in conversational and collaboration skills, and in the use of enabling
tools, would certainly help, my guess is that we're too busy, or don't
consider it urgent or important enough, to make acquiring these skills
and tool familiarity a priority, so it just ain't going to happen. A
generation from now someone will write an article very much like this
one, and nothing will have changed.
So let's try an experiment
in online collaboration, using Google Writely, one of the right-column
tools, and see if we can come up, through conversation and
collaboration, with some better answers, or at least an understanding
of why social networking tools aren't going to change the world. You
can find a copy of this article on Google Writely here. If you want to participate in this conversation and collaboration, here's what to do:
- Send me an e-mail so that I can give you editing rights to the Writely document.
- On
the editable Writely version, help create a conversation around the
five questions I've asked below by answering them right in the
document, any way that makes sense to you, and let's see whether, by
using this tool and putting our heads together, in a self-organizing
way, we can turn this post into something powerful that will guide
social networking tool designers and teach us all how to be more
effective communicators and collaborators.
As long as it isn't
a dog's breakfast, once everyone has had their say, I will replace this
version with the collaborative Writely version here on the blog. If it
turns out really well, I may make this standard procedure on many of my
blog posts.
Time for your say:
- Why are
conversation and collaboration tools so underused? Is my list of 7
reasons missing anything? Are any of the reasons predominant?
- Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?
- Given
time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools,
despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be
the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and
collaboration, and why?
- What one
simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to
become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?
- What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better collaborators, and how would we do this?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
