The end of the year is a time to reflect and look back on joint successes. In many companies it is also the time to have an office party. Some organizations call it a holiday party and some a year end party, and it can be a small get together in the office or a big company event at a fancy venue or anything between these.
What if you are not in the same location and do not have travel budget for entertainment? Can festivities and entertainment take place virtually, without meeting in the same room? Could holiday spirit be created in a dispersed setting over countries or even continents?
Virtual parties are possible and fun!
Below we are sharing our secret recipe for a virtual party. Just as with any other holiday party some preparation is needed, but if you follow our tips, great experiences will be created and people will talk about the party a long time after.
1. Appoint an organizing group: 3 or 4 people from your distributed organization or team, who are given the task to think about atmosphere, music, games and maybe even a raffle. Organizing group needs to think outside of the box and enjoy the planning process.
2. Choose an appropriate platform for a bigger group: a web-conference system offers many possibilities. Participants can connect via telephone or VoIP and can see the same screen, and even write or draw on a whiteboard.
3. Get your participants into party mood before the event. Some ideas: Organize a physical surprise party bag that participants will have with them. Ask participants to bring their favorite drinks and food, real or virtual, and upload photos of them into the web conference for the others to see.
4. Pay attention to intercultural specifics: The question “What color undies will you wear for New Year’s?” will not be understood outside of Brazil. Similarly, offering alcoholic beverages (albeit virtual ones) will not be universally acceptable.You might ask yourself, how much information about private or personal matters is adequate within your team or organization.
5. Activities and games: The core of a virtual holiday party is the joint experience. There are many possibilities to create one. You can simply post links to websites that hosts a game, provide info for an activity or some music, images or videos everyone watches. Below this post you will find some additional links to inspire you. But also small things can be fun, like building a snowman together on a whiteboard and everyone has to draw a part in their personal color. A team quiz (you might need to collect information for this beforehand): Laughing is guaranteed. Exchanging small virtual gifts, sent as a link with a personal message to a colleague or we can give awards, for the best costume (presented to everyone over web cam) are other options. Also, you can ask everybody to bring a game with them, or prepare a virtual gift for a gift exchange.And think about surprises. Perhaps the local pizza delivery rings in the various offices to bring some food (the manager organizes that before the party), or team members find the same drink at their desk (planned secretly with another local colleague) and the group can toast together.
Try it out! More important than perfection is the intention: we think about each other, we are a team, even though we are located in different parts of the world.
Also this year, we, at Radical Inclusion, will definitely have our virtual holiday party. We still talk about what happened during last year’s truth or dare. 
Some links to inspire you:
- Karaoke always creates a good mood: http://www.thekaraokechannel.com/online#
- What does the new year bring: http://www.angelcardsonline.com/free-angel-card-readings/
- Virtual dice: http://www.random.org/dice/
- What counts is the thought: http://www.virtualgifts4u.com/mainlobby.htm
- Quiz: Which drink type are you?: http://www.quizrocket.com/what-drink-quiz
Outdoor Workshop in San Francisco
Place and date:
San Francisco Ferry Building
Friday October 28th, 2011 from 9AM to 2PM. This workshop is full.
For additional times contact sari@radical-inclusion.com
Purpose of the workshop:
How could your work be more effective and at the same time more motivating? How could you feel more energized by what you are doing while getting more done? Is spending time in your e-mail box dragging you down? Are your conference calls not inspiring?
Work spaces affect the way we work much more than what we are usually aware. The main idea behind this workshop is to raise the awareness of the environments we work in. Practical take-aways are ideas on how small changes in a work space or a work situation can make work more effective and motivating. What do the spaces do to us? How can we take advantage of different types of spaces? When to use a public (virtual and/or physical) space and when is a private space necessary? How can we transfer these opportunities to our everyday work that is often happening on our computer screen?
Join us for a four hour workshop (followed by a lunch) where we discover the importance of virtual and physical spaces and processes for the quality of collaboration. Participants will walk around and experience the impact different spaces like parks, churches, coffee shops, subway stations etc. have on the way they interact with each other. We will then transfer the learnings from our field exercise to the virtual world. Radical Inclusion facilitators will share insight on how our physical experiences apply to the design of engaging spaces for virtual collaboration. We will discuss how to enhance your work environment to take advantage of the virtual and physical spaces available. The tools and settings are there, you just need to take initiative to create change in the work space.
Who will benefit from this workshop?
Are you a project team leader? Do you set up collaborative spaces? Are you a virtual tool designer? Do you work with Human Resources? Are you overwhelmed by information overload and your email inbox? If the answer is yes to any of those questions, you can benefit from this workshop. We will be looking into solutions to create more engaging work spaces.
Agenda:
09:00 – Meeting in front of the Ferry Building. Getting to know each other. Introduction of the concept of engaging work spaces.
09.30 – The group will test 3 different public spaces for their impact on collaboration. While doing so, the participants will work on a team assignment. We will break into smaller groups for this assignment.
11:00 – Participants will compare notes and draw lessons learned.
11:30 – Our facilitators will give an introduction to the concept of different virtual spaces (chat rooms, wikis, web conferences, etc.). The group will explore how those spaces can be designed in a way to motivate people for creative, effective and joyful virtual collaboration.
12.30 – Joint lunch.
14.00 – Closing of the workshop
Workshop Fees:
Please be ready to pay an upfront contribution of US$ 30, which will be used towards the expenses of the joint lunch and a small administration fee for our outsourced registration service. The number of participants is limited to 12.
The workshop is full now and registration is closed. If you would have wanted to participate but missed out this time, or if you have any other questions about the workshop, please contact sari@radical-inclusion.com
What to take with you:
Sensible shoes and rain gear. We will be outside walking and it is a good idea to be prepared for a little drizzle. Bring your iPad, smart phone, photo or video camera along!
Photos: Wally Gobetz, Dmitry Yakimenko
Part II of a series on What if we worked differently?
(Read Part I: Why do we work in offices?)
When I hear the word “office” a picture of many busy people working at desks inside an ascetic looking building appears in front of my eyes. The word “office” in my vocabulary has meant “the place where work gets done” , “controlled environment where more work hours spent at the location create achievements towards organization’s goals and larger remuneration”, and “place to separate work and leisure time”. However, just writing these definitions here, and thinking about some episodes of the TV series Office (1), makes me realize that my concepts of an office are at best naïve. In addition to general jokes about life in the office there seems to be abundance of hard evidence against the definitions I gave above and re-evaluation is needed. Just the thought of 80 000 hours of my life spent in a Spartan style office is motivation enough to take a fresh look at the concept of “office” space and the relation of it to modern work processes.
Old concept: Office is the place where work gets done.
New concept: Work itself is in the center – not the office. Different types of spaces are needed to effectively support different work phases.
More and more people are finding that much of their work is actually done outside of their office. Most people check their e-mails at home or on the road, and a growing number of people have become full time or sporadic telecommuters. According to the US Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2011 24% of all employed workers did some work from home (2). Accounts like this are becoming commonplace: “I’ve been telecommuting for several months now after DECADES of fighting terrible rush hour traffic which robbed me of time with my family. I have been feeling so guilty lately, simply because I am comfortable in my yoga pants and the temp in my home is perfect and because I can feel a breeze and hear my wind chimes while I work. Yes, I throw a load of laundry in during my break. Yes, I have the TV on as background noise when I am doing data entry only. Yes, I drive my daughter to school twice a week before I clock in. But I put in 8 hrs or more per day, I clean and organize my office off the clock, I haven’t take a single sick day, and I am productive because I am happy and not distracted by lame office conversation.” (3) You may think that telecommuters are a special breed, but those people who still are full time office workers do not think that work gets done efficiently in an office (for more information See Jason Fried’s comprehensive summary of why efficient work is not taking place:
Even people who work at the production line or in the service business are less attached to the location where the service of product is created. Advancements in Mobile and Internet Technology have changed all types of work. Just think of the last time you contacted a tech support center and ask yourself “where did the service take place?” or how robots, automatic control systems and cameras have removed workers from direct production lines. Work is not about a certain building anymore, but about different types of virtual and physical spaces that allow possibilities to have peace and quiet, be connected, or access information – all depending on the needs that our work creates at different work phases.
Old concept: Office is a controlled environment where more work hours spent at the location create achievements towards organization’s goals and larger remuneration.
New concept: Goals, values, motivation and responsibility make work happen, not a set number of hours in an office.
Offices were set up 150 years ago with the idea of harnessing people to work towards common goals. While our lives have evolved much since, the idea of organizations having common goals still holds. What has changed though is the cost of computing power and the cost of information transaction costs. Before World Wide Web and mobile Cloud computing people needed to be gathered in one place in order to keep those two types of costs low, but computers have changed that and it seems like the only reason for collecting people into offices now is for the purposes of control.
Do people work better towards common goals in an office setting? The assumption, which has persistently survived from the old office culture until now, is that people need to be kept in a certain place and controlled from short distance to work efficiently towards a common goal. Let’s examine that reasoning a bit and also look how that assumption is related to spaces and locations. In the days of slavery, slaves were traditionally kept in shackles to control their whereabouts and their work was closely monitored at all times. There is much to say about how slaves were treated, but it cannot be denied that they did accomplish much. In the case of slaves there was much control and little motivation. In today’s world monetary remuneration has been added to create motivation for individual workers. The most common way to justify the amount of monetary remuneration is to tie it to the number of hours worked, which is used as an estimate for accomplishment. However, that leaves still the challenge of having to control the number of hours worked and also the problems with working hours being a poor estimate for accomplishment. To answer to these challenges, organizations have created an array of motivation systems, but they still all have in common the combination of motivation with some sort of control, which tied to location and short distance. Is that necessary in the society where it is common knowledge that virtual workers work longer hours and have less sick days? And there are more reasons that show the advantage of telecommuting over traditional office work, e.g. reduced real estate and parking costs, a more effective recruitment from a larger pool of applicants and the higher chance of retaining employees if their life circumstances change (5). It seems like managerial control in offices is only an illusion and office workers already find intrinsic motivation to do a good job.
Perhaps it is time to let go of the idea of control and concentrate on the other side of the coin – motivation. Building virtual and physical spaces and systems where goals, values, motivations and responsibilities can be created and discussed instead of building control systems seems to be more effective in the modern organizations. In virtual settings top-down control can easily be replaced or augmented by bottom-up and peer systems. New ways to align the purpose of the organization with the needs of the stakeholders to create motivation are a valid option.
Old concept: Office gives people a possibility to enjoy free time
New concept: Work and free time intermingle and boost creativity
The emergence of labor laws and unions over hundred years ago, created an eight hour work day. It was a great social advancement which helped people to have a balanced life but it also advanced their careers. Offices were a place to keep business and personal life separate. But that is not the case anymore. Most people do not set up out-of office notifications on their emails anymore and there is even a term for working during holidays “worlidays”(6).
Offices are not so popular anymore for many reasons. Organizations are geared towards saving money and offices are a big cost for real estate and facilities management. Employees of global organizations reside in different places of the world and travel also is a significant cost at a time when technologies exist from people to work from anywhere and anytime. In addition, people want to align private life and work and spend less time commuting. However, they still want to maintain social relationships with their working peers.
What will happen to offices?
This all doesn’t mean that offices will cease to exist but their forms and functions will change. “The office of the future will be chaotic and hyper-connected” (7). Offices will be places for human interaction. Offices will be places, which motivate people to meet and to bond with their colleagues (maybe they won’t be called offices anymore). Yes, offices will also have meeting rooms (although many meetings of the future will be virtual) but meetings can be hold at other places as well – in specialized meeting facilities but also in all other kind of venues. Face-to-face meetings will be designed to fit the purpose, and this includes creating engaging spaces. Office buildings might have certain rooms which people can lock from inside and where they can work undisturbed and chose from a variety of entertainment options, hot and cold drinks. Where there is now one dedicated office space for each employee, companies will scale their real estate down by 50 per cent or more. “As employees become more mobile and less tied to their desks, the average amount of space per employee nationwide, in all industries, has dropped to 250 square feet from 400 square feet in 1985 … Within 10 years, that is expected to drop further, to 150 square feet.” (8). Large companies have started to redesign their offices: “In the last two years, Intel has quietly been trying to inject a little more fun into its offices and make them places where employees can be more collaborative.” (8) All in all the challenge will be to support “efficient, intuitive, user-oriented and ‘human-centric’ work environments where technology is aligned to organisations and human behaviour, enabling people to work together irrespective of constraints in location and time” (9).
One example of new ways that offices have evolved is the very popular co-working spaces, which again come in different forms and shapes, as CNNMoney article describes (10). These co-working spaces are mainly used by start-ups – but it is just one expression of the freedom of choice that a new generation of workers are demanding.
What if we worked differently?
References:
(1) TV series Office on CBS: http://www.tv.com/shows/the-office/
(2) http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t06.htm
(3) Reader’s comment on a blog post Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past
(4) Jason Fried’s comprehensive summary of why efficient work is not taking place in the office. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XD2kNopsUs
(5) http://freelancemom.com/blog/2007/10/03/9-advantages-to-companies-who-let-their-employees-telecommute/. See also an article from 1996 (!): Six Organizational Benefits of Telecommuting. Paul C. Boyd, Ph.D. http://research-advisors.com/articles/ttorgbens.html
(6) Switch off and stay on through worlidays. By Lucy Kellaway. Financial Times, July 31, 2011 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f0a90578-ba28-11e0-b313-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1Wh8Yl7pZ
(7) Future Office. Sydney Morning Herald. Feb. 4, 2011. http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/management/blogs/management-line/future-office-20110130-1a97r.html
(8) Office Work Space Is Shrinking, but That’s Not All Bad. New York Times, January 18, 2011.
(9) Hans Schaffers, Torsten Brodt, Marc Pallot, Wolfgang Prinz: The Future Workspace. Perspectives on Mobile and Collaborative Working. 2006, MOSAIC Consortium. Download as PDF.
(10) Berlin’s ‘poor but sexy’ startup hub. CNN Money. August 9, 2011. http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/09/technology/startups/berlin_soundcloud/
The cartoon is copyright of http://www.cartoonstock.com/
Part I of a series on What if we worked differently?
An average office worker spends a total of about 80 000 hours in an office during his/her career and that does not include commute time. Why is it that we work in offices? Why has the office become a pinnacle of work life? It seems like collecting masses of people in one place and having large amounts of money invested in real-estate is not so efficient in the 21st century. How did our work life get set this way?
We all know the history of the industrial revolution and its impact on the way companies started to extract value from organizing production lines in large factory buildings in order to optimize manufacturing processes. At that time it was a radical shift from traditional patterns of cottage work and farming. We also know that the steam engine, together with the exploding demand for products in the first global economy made that development possible and feasible. But when and why did companies decide to gather people in large offices for what was originally clerical work, and what were the technological innovations and logic which supported this development?
The beginning of the modern office work started from small clerical quarters. In the 1820s, “the Equitable Society of London–then the largest life insurance office in the world–was entirely managed by an office staff of eight clerks” (1), and still in the 1840, in the office of a leading mercantile firm in New York City “There were two or three copiers, a bookkeeper, a cash keeper, and a confidential clerk who handled business when the partners were not in the office” (2). The first offices were just small highly efficient administrative places.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the size of offices, and the number of people working in those offices exploded. “In 1896, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. of New York’s audit division alone had 550 clerks. The central filing system was maintained by 61 employees. Checks were processed by 32 clerks. In 1914, the company had 3,659 white collar workers at its headquarters building. The audit division had 1,000 clerks. The actuarial division had about 490.” (3) This development was led by industry sectors such as investment banks and insurance companies who needed to crunch large amounts of numbers. Also having non-production workers tightly working side by side lowered the transaction costs of information, which at that point were very high. At the same time rising land prices and innovations in the building industry affected the way office buildings started to take their shape. Large towering office buildings became the most efficient way to house large numbers of office workers. The final boost to vertical office building was provided by Elisha Otis who invented the first successful elevator safety brake in 1852 and installed a steam passenger elevator with a safety brake in a five-story store in 1857. (4) Office buildings as we know them today were shaped only 150 years ago.
The ultimate invention for the interior of the modern office space was the cubicle. In 1960, Robert Propst, once a graphic artist and sculptor, became president of Herman Miller Research Corp. He investigated how the world of work operated, and came to the conclusion that “today’s office is a wasteland. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.” Furthermore, in his landmark book The Office: A Facility Based on Change, he wrote, “We find ourselves now with office forms created for a way of life substantially dead and gone.” (5) Propst proceeded to solve the challenges of the office life by developing the cubicle. His thinking was that cubicles give privacy and decency to office employees and yet are flexible and low-cost.
Another rationale for erecting office towers took origin in a very human characteristic: the strive for displaying power and importance. Office buildings are symbols for the supremacy of large corporations. Many of the early 20th century office buildings are still known by the companies that built them, such as the Chrysler or PanAM buildings in Manhattan, even if the company itself does not exist anymore or has moved on to other hotspots of the global economy. This hasn’t changed much, although today’s monuments made of glass and steel are more often the expression of governments of emerging economies, showing off against the traditional economic and political global power holders.
Given that technology, transaction costs and the human psyche facilitated the development of large office buildings, the way we work in offices in general was shaped mainly by advancements in the discipline of administration. Architectural and design elements played only second violin to the changes in the organizational structures and managerial systems. Offices only really became the pinnacle of work life when an entirely new social class emerged – the managers. Their sole raison d’être was to make sure that the organizational goals were implemented. Scientific control mechanisms were invented and these new organizational systems could easily be implemented only when all workers were under the same roof and managers could administrate direct control. Office life – as we know it – was invented and has probably never been portrayed so sharply as in Terry Gilliam’s movie “Brazil”:
If we now look back at the logic behind the rise of office culture, four separate needs can be pointed out:
1. large amounts of numbers needed to be crunched;
2. information needed to be collected efficiently;
3. the office building became a status symbol for corporations; and
4. business needed to be managed and people needed to be controlled.
Because people were needed in crunching numbers, information transaction costs were high, corporations wanted to show off, and businesses were centrally managed, the obvious solution was to set up offices.
However, conditions in the modern day society are very different and we cannot but conclude by asking “What if we worked differently?”
(to be continued)
References:
(1) Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, 1996, p. 16.
(2) Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand, 1977, p. 37
(3) and (4) http://www.officemuseum.com/offices_large.htm
(5) http://www.hermanmiller.com/Products/Action-Office-System
Photo 1: archive image from Life magazine, hosted by google
Photo 2: http://www.strawberrieschocolategift.com
Places and Dates:
New York: August 25, 2011 from 9AM to 2PM
London: October 22nd, 2011 from 9AM to 2PM
San Francisco: October 28th, 2011 from 9AM to 2PM
Berlin: November 7th, 2011 all day
Brussels: December 9th, 2011from 9AM to 2PM
You are invited to join us for a four hour experiential workshop plus subsequent lunch. The workshop in Berlin will be a full day workshop.
Purpose of the workshop
The way we work has become very stressful and ineffective because we are connected 24/7 – but not on our own terms. We are bombarded by email and many other communication channels. However, instead of following the established paths we are forced into, we all can take responsibility to create the spaces in which we work. The tools and spaces are there – it is all about us taking the initiative and designing new working environments.
In the workshop we discover the importance of virtual and physical spaces and processes for the quality of collaboration. Participants will explore what impact different environments have on the dynamics of the conversation. We will then transfer the learnings from our field exercise to the virtual world.
Approach
The major part of the workshop will take place on the streets of different cities in public spaces. Participants will walk around and experience the impact different spaces like parks, churches, coffee shops, subway stations etc. have on the way they interact with each other. In the final hour before lunch, Holger will provide some insight on how that applies to the design of engaging spaces for virtual collaboration.
Agenda
09:00 – Meeting, getting to know each other. Introduction to the concept of engaging spaces.
09.30 – The group will test 3 different public spaces for their impact on collaboration. While doing so, the participants will work on a team assignment. We will break into smaller groups of four for this assignment.
11:00 – The participants will compare notes and draw lessons learned.
11:30 – Our facilitators will give an introduction to the concept of different virtual spaces (chat rooms, wikis, web conferences, etc.). The group will explore how those spaces can be designed in a way to motivate people for creative, effective and joyful virtual collaboration.
12.30 – Joint lunch.
14.00 – Closing of workshop
Workshop Fees
The number of participant is limited to 12. Please be ready to pay an upfront contribution of US$ 30, which will contribute towards the expenses for the joint lunch and a small administration fee for our outsourced registration service. Please note that the Berlin workshop has a different concept and will be part of the Berlin Change Days 2011
Bring your iPad, smart phone, photo or video camera along!
Please direct your questions to hello@radical-inclusion.com
For more information and registration, please go to: http://www.radical-realtime.com/events
IT IS TIME FOR OUR ANNUAL EVENT.
For the third time, Radical Inclusion, this time in collaboration with the Aalto University in Helsinki, hosts the Radical Real Time, a virtual conference.
Date: May 28, 2011
Time: 14.00-17.30 GMT. Please check other timezones.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
- Our topic is “Innovation Cloud: Virtual Spaces for Creative Collaboration”. For initial ideas behind the topic, click here.
- To see what “Innovation Cloud” means to other participants and to add your thoughts, click here.
- Click for general schedule and sessions we have so far.
RULES AND PRINCIPLES:
- Everybody can contribute and host a session on an innovative topic that fits the title of the conference).
- Everybody can join, no sign up is not obligatory (although we actually would love to know if you intend to come, so you if you don’t mind register here).
- Everybody can swap sessions. If you end up in a session which you don’t like, just move on the the next one.
- Your objectives should be to meet interesting people from around the world and to spend some exciting 3 1/2 virtual hours with us.
WHAT ARE THE TOPICS?
Please have a look at the draft agenda which is still building up, some of the workshop titles are:
DISTRACTION UNTIL IT PAYS OFF? – MANAGING TIME AND TIMING IN INNOVATION
BUILDING PHYSICAL SPACES TO MANAGE CREATIVE WORK
CROWDSOURCING & CONNECTING PEOPLE – BEYOND IDEAS
DESIGNING ENGAGING SPACES FOR VIRTUAL COLLABORATION
EXPERIENCES OF WORKING VIRTUALLY
In their March issue, The Marker – the leading Israeli business magazine – published a long interview with me. Under the title “The right time: conference calls – long gone, business flights – not needed, emails – for technological dinosaurs only” the magazine covered a lot of our innovative ideas on collaboration.
When Holger Nauheimer, one of the five founders of the Radical Inclusion company has a first meeting with global clients, he asks who are the people that need to wake up in the middle of the night for the conference calls. “Everyone is laughing,” he says, “but it is a bitter laughter which shows that the problem is known.” Working for an international firm demands a great effort, and it turns out that the quality of the virtual workspace is especially important. The question is whether we are using the tools properly to contribute to the goals of the organization and to make the work more efficient. “In my experience the answer is usually negative.”
The interview further highlights the need for a more strategic view on collaboration. I talked about that we spend a great deal on designing the right environments:
the architects think about the size of the cafeteria and in the conference rooms we decide who sits where and on what chairs…. However, discussing the virtual environment and tools is intuitive, almost random, rarely a rationale process.
We have seen with most of our customers that the tool selection process is influenced by all kinds of factors but rarely made to suit people’s needs and the company’s processes.
For example, an employee discovers Skype– and his people start to use it. Another manager finds a different tool – and his people use the other one. Companies equip rooms with a modern video conference system, but no one uses it and conference calls are made via mobiles. People are used to the same old tools and no one thinks there might be a different and better way to collaborate, which, at the end, creates a lot of frustration. … You need to embed virtual collaboration as part of the strategic thinking and form an environment that answers the real needs and stand in line with the corporate values.
It was good for us to see that the interest for virtual collaboration is high in Israel. Why is that so? Many Israeli companies are international, with production sites, sales organizations, research and development branches in countries around the world. To stay in business, they have to constantly re-invent themselves. And Israel is provides a highly innovative business environment with probably the youngest managers on average I have seen.
I am afraid to work with virtual tools. It is all too much, I feel inundated by information. I really think that I will suffer from information overload.”
During one of our online trainings on virtual cooperation, several participants gave us feedback about the information overload they experience, or expect to experience when increasing their exposure to virtual collaboration tools. This made me wonder: Is information overload the actual problem? And how can virtual workers best cope with this?
1) Information overload isn’t the real problem
My first eye opener was a presentation by Clay Shirky: It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure. Already in the 15th Century, after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with interchangeable letters, people complained that the world was suffering from information overload because there were more books available than men could ever read. The same happened when other communication technologies such as telephone, radio and TV were introduced. Shirky points out that not information overload is the problem, but the inability to apply filters to cope with the huge amount of information. More than six centuries ago people were already complaining about this! This should put our problem into the right perspective. So, when somebody complains about information overload, we should acknowledge this, take it as a fact, and help them to develop filters, using technological and human solutions.
2) Use virtual tools to filter information
The virtual world provides a wide variety of tools for filtering information in the most efficient way. If you are new to using online tools, you can try basic information filters such as RSS feeds, social bookmarks such as del.icio.us and Stumble Upon. For tips about how to use these 3 tools, click here.
But of course there are many more filtering tools available. Perhaps it helps you to organize your social sources into a neat newspaper or magazine (Flipboard, Paper.li), to use a tool like My6Sense to find sources and people based on your past choices, to custom filters by keyword searches and your own criteria through DataSift, or to join social curation communities such as Pearltrees and Scoop.it to discover, organize and share your topics of interests. For an overview of technology approaches and more links, you can read this blog written by Beth Kanter. Discover online, experiment and work out what tools are most applicable to your and your clients’ situation!
3) Work on your skills and habits
With technological tools alone the filter problem can’t be solved. Like after the invention of the printing press and the telephone, we have to take personal efforts to create the right habits and skills. For example, you wouldn’t possibly call somebody at 2 a.m., and if you do, the person would probably know that it is either an emergency call or that you are deeply in love with him. Same with virtual working skills. Try the following:
- Act and decide immediately
- Clean your virtual desk regularly
- Design your own information strategy; determine your goals and expected achievements
- Don’t try to absorb all possible information that is available for you. Be very selective and make mindful choices
- Take breaks, slow down and leave time to process information
- Apply time management skills to limit the exposure and work time on different media
- Don’t forget to breathe (ppff, I almost forgot…)
The rapid increase of information available is a fact but not a valid argument against working with virtual tools. However we can support ourselves and our clients in creating the right filters, by using technology and by changing our personal habits. Time for some virtual and personal experiments!
Can the specific effects of the World Café method (networking, fast exchange of ideas and experiences in a fun and creative way) be reached in a virtual context too?
The World Café
The World Café method is all about quick networking among participants and a fast exchange of ideas, opinions and experiences in an informal environment. In a face-to-face setting, the participants are divided in groups (4-6 persons) who sit together around a table. The groups’ composition changes 3 times, to stimulate a high level of networking and exchange of impressions. The possibility to write and draw on the table in order to visualize the points of discussions is a vital part of the exercise.
The World Café has developed into one of the leading workshop methods. It can be used as prelude for introduction of ideas and participants, to develop a vision as well as for discussion about topics during the implementation phase.
The virtual challenge
The method was developed for real-life situations, so the question is: can this method be applied to virtual workshops without a loss of quality? Is it practically possible, and will networking and understanding evolve at the same speed? Our experiment, using Vitero software with about 40 participants from the Xing Group ‘Virtuelle Moderation’ shows: a virtual World Café is possible!
The experiment: how did it work?
All participants came together in the plenary. In Vitero, participants ‘sit’ with their portrait pictures around a ‘table’, that can be used as presentation board for desktop and application sharing simultaneously. Two presentations served as background to subsequent World Café discussions, around the topic: ‘Experience with the virtual world in businesses’. The participants were then divided into 6 groups. In three café rounds (20 minutes each) they discussed the following questions: What is our own experience with the virtual world? What are the challenges? What kind of support is needed to work in virtual worlds?
Each working group had a ‘moderator’, who kept an eye on the results too. The participants had the possibility to write on cards that were visibly placed on the whiteboard. So the table board from the face-to-face World Café is there! In the summary plenary session, the group moderators reported, showing and using the whiteboards to share the outcomes, followed by open space for discussion.
Organize it yourself?
Some practical experiences and tips for those who want to organize such a Virtual World Café:
- The virtual tools and platforms strongly influence the design of a World Café. So be aware of the specific possibilities and make an inventory of the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms.
- Breakout-sessions are a particular challenge in a virtual environment. Connecting to voice communication, application sharing for presentations and collaboratively working on whiteboards with over 10 participants always are prone to the risk of connection instability. Another risk is switching from plenary sessions to group sessions and back. Continuously changing group arrangements can hamper the flow of discussion, by which the deepening of conversation, which is one of the main benefits of a face-to-face setting, might be difficult to reach.
- Another challenge is reaching the goal of a self-regulated discussion, one of the particular strengths of the World Café. The host in a World Café setting isn’t a classical moderator, while most web conference platforms are optically and technically designed for such a role. So it is important to think about how to promote self-regulation in the working groups! In each group, there should be at least 5 participants. In a virtual setting, more input is needed to inspire other participants to continue with the discussion.
Conclusion
For participants with experiences in working with online tools and platforms, who won’t be discouraged by technical problems and who can endure a 3-hours conference session behind a computer, this design is a suitable method. It approaches the specific benefits of a face-to-face World Café in many ways. The possibility to bring together people from different places, without too much effort, to participate in a productive meeting makes this method a powerful instrument, also in the virtual and blended world. It can be applied at the start of a process, but also as a stand-alone activity to quickly address different aspects of a complex theme in a way that is fun and makes you eager to learn and discuss more…
And what’s next? Perhaps we should change our mindset and design platforms in a new way. Not focused on how to recreate the same situation as in a face-to-face setting online, but on how to reach the goals and particular effects of the World Café in such a virtual environment. Even new goals might become feasible in such a virtual working environment: The development of a World Café 3.0? Try it yourself!
