CommuncateHow

What I meant to type into the title was Communicate .

Communication tools are not communication. I've seen many companies that spend a lot of time and moeny putting mechanisms in place and precious little for helping people get ideas across or interact in more productive or helpful ways.

This occured to me as I've been reading Edward DeBono's I Am Right You Are Wrong in which he suggests that the traditional way we have been taught to think doesn't encourage perceptive thinking. He thinks this needs to change if we are to be able to create new beliefs and systems and adapt to new situaitons. He relates perception to self-organizing patterning systems which are contrasted with logic and reasoning with static analysis.

He uses humor to illustrate perceptive reasoning. We don't know what's going on until we get to the end. Then our perception changes.

Two questions:

What could we do with tools to avoid worse communication, or to avoid a proliferation of tools that don't help a bad situation get better?
Have you seen perceptive reasoning used in your work?

- BeckyWinant 2002.06.26

I'm trying to make my company aware that over-reliance on Microsoft Project gives managers the illusion of control; they need face-to-face conversations with the people doing the work to get a more realistic idea of what is going on.

Scrum uses 15-minute standup meetings (called "scrums") for keeping everyone on a team focused on the project's progress. This has been scaled up to 500-person projects by having a heirarchy of "scrum of scrum" meetings to report from lowest level to higher levels. --KeithRay 2002.06.26

Keith, Your comment about Microsoft project elicited a grin. I hadn't thought about all of the tools that have really given us the illusion of "better". Yeah, I guess we've all seen project plans that are "filled in" rather than invested in.

I really like the idea of a stand up meeting. And hearing something first hand is way better than email or conference calls.

Have you done many video conferences? Does this work for you? - BeckyWinant 2002.06.26

Keith's comment made me smile as well. I can't tell you how many projects I've seen that looked great in Project (or any PM tool), and were in a major crisis. What if we placed a disclaimer on every PM tool output report that says "Project may be farther away than it appears". MarieBenesh 2002.06.26

When I worked for Kodak H.I.S. in Plano TX, I attended one or two video conferences with Kodak people in Rochester. There were many people on both sides of the conference, but I didn't speak. It seemed rather awkward -- maybe even worse than a voice-only conference call.

There's a guy who reported some of his project-log on the XP mailing list -- his team is not entirely co-located, and so his daily standup meeting involved conference calls and/or computer-chat.

Mine are very informal -- no one comes in at consistent times in the morning...

KeithRay 2002.06.26

I've been involved in several video conferences at clients sites. One was very informal and aside from being reminded of people being beamed in from a space capsule (jerky movements), it was okay. The meeting had a very specific focus and was short - about 15-20 minutes.

Another one was longer, about 1 hour. It was arranged in a very formal way with an agenda listing everyone and what they would be reporting on. People were arranged in sequence around the table with large name cards. A tech was dedicated to setting things up properly and in advance and using the camera to focus on speakers. There was information distributed before the meeting, so the reporting was relatively brief and questions were meaningful. I thought it also worked out alright. For that company the culture of seeing people face to face was important to them and they worked out a way to integrate the video reasonably well.

Another video conference was a disaster. People weren't prepared. A lot of time was wasted tweaking the equipment and talking about the transmission. Boooorrring and nothing useful came out of the meeting.

- BeckyWinant 2002.06.27

What's difficult in video conferencing is reading anyone that is out of the camera's view - reactions to what is being said by the on-camera speaker or listener. Most conference hardware is set to track speakers [all those nice loud 'E's listening to themselves think] and the quiet folks don't register at all. When I was with Aetna in the 80's they were experimenting with IBM and SBS in a pretty high-end video conference, and I believe that there was a roaming camera that could be remotely controlled by the other end for tracking side shots. Of course, our bandwidth was miserable in those days, so it was a succession of stills, but the idea was interesting.

Has anyone tried web conferencing with individual cameras and cameos on-screen? That would seem more promising than the "central camera" & conference table idea to me.

--BobLee 2002.06.27

Bob, I think you've nailed why video conferencing is not really face-to-face. True communication isn't just focusing on who is talking, you can't take up people's time by thinking or brainstorming if that is not the intent of the meeting and if it is you don't really get to see or hear everyone's reactions.

Probably this is why the organization that prepared and had a formal order and method of hearing people did a reasonable job of this.

The informal video conference I was part of was via cameras and web transmissions. that one expereicne seemed to work. When I talked to this client later they continued to use the technology and liked it's informal feel. Meetings weren't as regimented and took place whenever they wanted to chat about a specific idea or topic.

- BeckyWinant 2002.06.27

Interesting... an article about a programming language that has an illustration on how personal communication has both explicit and implicit components: go here and scroll down a ways.

KeithRay