Don’t Try This Alone! Whacky for Wikis and Crazy for Collaboration

Happy New Year everyone!  I live in California, so my snowmen have to been made of something besides snow, as you can see.  I do hope you are not succumbing to the temptation to sink into doom and gloom due to rampant forecasts of imminent and long-lasting economic disaster.  Resist the urge!  It’s a mood disorder that is perpetuated by the downward spiral of negativity.  Keep hope alive!  In December I got a boost to my hope for the planet when I attended a conference called the “Program for the Future” in honor of Doug Engelbart—best known as the inventor of the computer mouse, but more accurately described as a champion of technology and tools that increase our collective intelligence.  (Ever notice how a collection of really smart people can still have the approximate IQ of an insect?!!)  Years in the corporate world had made me occasionally doubt the existence of such a thing as collective intelligence, so I signed up right away. Legends like Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay were among the luminaries. (I’m pretty sure I was the least famous person there, outside of the one refilling the coffee.) It was a fascinating exploration into the need for collaboration to solve the most pressing challenges facing our world, and the tools that enable it. It seems to me that this should be a topic near and dear to every project leader’s heart. After all, this is what we spend much of our working lives doing—steadfastly facilitating collaboration in the pursuit of often seemingly impossible goals outside of the reach of a single human being.

Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight
Unfortunately, most of the individuals, teams, and organizations I consult with are still limiting their collaboration methods to phone calls, email, or face-to-face discussions in a stuffy conference room. Many meetings are devoid of anything more sophisticated than a pen and paper to capture a few notes, just in case anything worthwhile is accomplished. Don’t get caught bringing a knife to a gunfight! In order to avoid the madness of the mob, at the very least, your meeting facilities should have a white board, a flip chart, and a couple of magic markers that haven’t dried out from disuse. Maybe throw in a healthy supply of sticky notes—different colored ones, not just the boring yellow kind. These rudimentary supplies enable people to share and capture ideas before they fade away along with the sound waves and the memory of the meeting itself.

Take enabling tools a step farther and consider adding graphical facilitation to your meetings. This is where an artist jacked up on caffeine captures pictures and words from your meeting content at speeds surpassing that of most industrial robots. The essence of your meeting becomes a huge colorful chalk poster on a wall covered in butcher paper. Go completely off the hook and get a couple hundred people to collaborate on creating a forty-foot mural and you really have something you can touch and feel that starts to reflect the wisdom of the crowd.

Techniques like graphical facilitation and giant murals quite literally get people on the same page. Everyone can see what is being drawn or written. And they create a record of what has been said so we’ll have a fighting chance against the entropic forces continually working to unravel whatever group memory, agreements, and organization we establish in the chaos of a large and challenging project. But the bottom line of the conference was clear—tools alone are not enough. We must fix the human problems of collaboration.

Whacky for Wikinomics
This conference put me into a remission of sorts. I have a bit of an addictive personality, and had just been recovering from a 3-month obsession with 21st century collaboration methods. The trigger was reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Wikinomics is not just about Wikipedia, and it’s certainly not just about the internet either. It’s about how hordes of people working together can solve problems and achieve results outside the reach of a single human being, or even hundreds of them. I recognized instantly the power of some of these ideas to transform project management for the better. Although many naysayers scoff at the claims of a “birth of a new era,” I think that just proves that these radical notions really are destined to revolutionize how businesses run and how work is done. After all, pretty much every fabulous idea throughout history has been pooh-poohed by respected experts before being embraced.  If you haven’t already been bitten by the bug – - – it’s time!  Read the book and check out the tools discussed there.  If you are not already using at least a handful of them – you’re behind.  Get busy!

And don’t fall prey to the largely self-induced economic mood disorder sweeping this planet!  Remember, hope grows back!  Have a spectacular year!  – Kimberly

Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management – The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces, hovering among the top project management books in the USA since launch in 2007. She is the founder of Wiefling Consulting, a scrappy global business leadership consultancy committed to enabling her clients to successfully tackle seemingly impossible goals. For the past 3 years she has  collaborated with ALC Education, Inc., in Tokyo, working primarily with Japanese companies committed to becoming truly global through transformational leadership and execution with excellence.

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Tagged as: Alan Kay, Collaboration Methods, Collective Intelligence, Doom And Gloom, Doug Engelbart, Downward Spiral, Economic Disaster, Famous Person, Flip Chart, Gun Fight, Gunfight, Happy New Year, Impossible Goals, Insect, Inventor Of The Computer, Inventor Of The Computer Mouse, Luminaries, Magic Markers, Many Meetings, Meeting Facilities, Mood Disorder, Pen And Paper, Project Leader, project management, project manager, project managers, Snowmen, Steve Wozniak, Sticky Notes, Tempation