I’ve been playing with this idea for a long time and it’s far from having any definite shape, but, as usual, writing about it should help. [This post is another round of thinking on What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda and an attempt to integrate bits of thinking that I don't have a name for, but tagged PAT for a time being.]

The “problem” line:

• in many of the professional activities sharing physical space is an essential ingredient
• shared space provides opportunities for various types of interactions – goal-oriented ones, but also informal, unstructured and those that we probably wouldn’t even call interactions – like observing or overhearing others
  • non-goal-oriented interactions are essential for the things that create a foundation for working together (and goal-oriented interactions) – common ground – developing shared understanding and building relationships
• when work moves into a technology-mediated realm, things start to break
  • non-goal-oriented interactions tend to disappear
  • where existed, common ground shrinks; new teams get into problems of establishing it
  • goal-oriented interactions weaken

In this case we tend to think of f2f as a solution, but it’s very resource-intensive and is not always feasible. So, I’m looking at how the effects of “being there together” could be achieved in a technology-mediated way.

There seem to be several essential ingredients for it:

• a shared space that provides
• excuses to be there that are not necessarily involve working towards a shared goal or being intentionally social,
• opportunities to see what’s going on and to be seen in a non-intrusive way,
• easy switching between inward- and outward-oriented activities.

[This list is heavily based on the ideas about conditions for emergent social activities in urban public spaces from Life between buildings by Jan Gehl. I also used similar terms to explain how weblogs support relationship-building across boundaries, see Blog as an edge zone.]

Now to what I believe is at the core of it: tools to support sharing, observing and interacting around presence and activity traces. Think of instant messaging, (micro)blogging, social networks:

• while to various degrees those tools support communication, all of them make it acceptable or even essential to broadcast various statuses and update
• seeing those updates from others is often similar to observing them in a physical space (Lilia is here/awake/recovering from a flu/thinking about presence and activity traces), reinforcing the feeling of being connected and finding where ideas coming from different people overlap
• updates might trigger interactions, that take relationship building and developing shared understanding further

So, that would be an alternative/additional to f2f way of “being there together”. That’s said there is lots of unanswered questions around it. For example:

• The balance between manual and automatic updates. Manual updates take effort, but they are likely to be more relevant for others (partly because the effort that goes into it signifies the importance); not everyone wants to/has time to blog or twitter. Automatic updates are easy, but we can easily get overloaded with irrelevant stuff and they raise lots of privacy issues.
• Number of channels and critical mass of relevant others. There is way too many tools already that work around presence and activity traces, creating a whole “how do I manage my presence and activity in all those places” issue. At the same time, to use them as a reliable substitution of f2f encounters all the right people have to be there (ideally in the same channel), which hard to expect.
• F2f spaces are organised around specific contexts (meeting, shared office, coffee corner, home, sport club, etc.) and moving between those physically correspond to switching between various types of activities and people associated with those activities. This is possible in a technology-mediated way, but not easy and natural, since in the most cases it requires a range of strategies and additional activities to make that work (e.g. LinkedIn for work and Facebook for friends, switching Twitter client off when focusing on getting things done, etc.).

And now I’m off for dinner wondering how much all of this makes sense :)))

• Life between buildings
• Why sharing a team room might be not so good
• What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda

While I came with the communication egg model to talk about things missing in distributed teams I feel that it could be useful in more contexts. In particularly to talk about the differences between different types of social constructions in the knowledge management context.

[At this point it makes sense to go and read Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :)]

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

Team communication is heavily shaped by the shared goals and agreed communication formats/processes. It’s very much about getting things done together and strong ties that needed for it.

Communication in communities is a bit further from actual work, but still has lots of connection with it (e.g. Q&A mode, where one uses an opportunity of being together with other experts to ask for solutions for a problem). It’s usually a mix of stronger and weaker ties that help to open up and share local practices. There is enough commonality and trust to hold people together and enough diversity to support learning.

Network communication is more opportunity-based and informal. There is not much in terms of shared goals and recurrent conversations, the ties are weak or latent. However, there is enough connectivity and opportunities to communicate that result in cross-fertilisation and emergent ideas and practices.

I guess the things on the diagonal could be also about the types of communication that is supported by specific managerial practices (performance – knowledge management/professional development – informal learning/innovation) or social tools (groupware – community tools – social media).

You can also use this framework to think on what is needed in terms of moving between different types of social constructions: e.g. moving from network to community by picking shared interests and adding a bit of structure (rhyhm, roles) or community-born projects, where shared goals and even more structures (e.g. deadlines :) appear to make sure that things get done. In the opposite direction you might think of “usual” KM practice of spotting overlaps between teams and establishing semi-structured community spaces and processes to make sure that practices are shared across and going to networking events or sharing one’s traces online to create opportunities for informal interaction that brings new contacts and new ideas.

***

Does it make any sense? I’m actually more happy with the picture than we the text around it, but anyway all of this stuff is thinking in progress, so hopefully will eventually evolve into something more understandable.

• Single community space: why communities are usually tied to one technology?
• Edges
• The Tipping Point and NLP

With the holidays I somewhat took a break from blogging on our work on the distributed Agile case, but there are still quite a few things there that I wanted to share to hear what do you think. This one is a bit scary since I picked up some ideas from linguistics without having a proper reading of the work behind it, but at times this is the price to pay* for sitting between research and practice.

So, the picture on the right is a simplified version of the work of Herbert H. Clark:

According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a “common ground” of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this “common ground” from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. [This is from a back of Clark's book "Arenas of language use"]

In my terms: communication is enabled by the common ground between the participants and, in turn, contributes to building more common ground over time. Taking it a bit further, it is useful to distinguish between two components of the common ground:

• information that the participants share (not necessarily explicitly, as it is often assumed that others know about X because of shared cultural, educational or work background) – I talk about shared knowledge and awareness of the bigger picture here
• relationships between the participants – knowledge about each other and trust

Now to the distributed Agile teams. At a starting point there is a big distance between the team members:

• different locations that make it difficult to rely on team-building and ad-hoc interaction that naturally happens in a co-located team;
• time differences that in some cases provide only a small window of opportunity for interactions;
• different cultures, organisations and levels of technical expertise create difficulties of getting a team “on one page” needed for seamless work.

Distance between team members across different locations creates a vicious circle:

• lack of common ground, the need for using technology and addressing time issues make communication challenging
• challenges in communication make it difficult to overcome initial differences between teams, to build relationships and shared understanding of the bigger picture behind work

This picture is not that far from what you can learn by reading about the challenges of distributed Agile and solutions to address them, but hopefully it can help to address the problems in a more systematic way: spending time on establishing shared understanding and relationships in the team (especially in the beginning) and finding ways to shape communication processes and tools that not only allow to get things done, but also contribute to growing awareness and relationships over time.

My personal “hobby horse” is around the last point. From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.

* The ideas behind this post are grounded in insights coming from research on computer-mediated communication and distributed teams, but I need more time to read papers and to integrate research ideas in a systematic way. Hope to blog about it soon.

• Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :)
• Teams, communities and networks in terms of communication forms
• Life between buildings

As promised – more thinking from our project looking at the challenges in distributed Agile teams. One of the first things we have observed was a heavy focus on goal-oriented communication between people in different locations: they would talk (this includes ‘type’ :) about solving particular problems around work, but hardly anything else. I drew a picture to explain what happens in this case that others found useful and quickly nicknamed “the egg” – so, here it is.

You can look at communication in a team across two axes. The first one (horizontal) is about what triggers it. I find it useful to distinguish between goal-oriented and opportunity-driven communication:

• Goal-oriented communication is about work-related problem solving and coordination. It’s the task at hand that forces you to approach others to sort out things with them. This is the case where you wouldn’t hesitate to plan a meeting, send an email or pick up the phone to call.
• Opportunity-driven communication is about things not 100% necessary, but potentially useful, or, even, not very useful, but just said at the moment (“good morning everyone!”). Think of the cases where you wonder if your email is ‘spamming’, add “by the way, do you also know…” or most of the conversations at the coffee corner. In this case communication is triggered by an opportunity – bumping into people, interesting things happening, ideas floating by or just an awkward silence that forces you to look for a topic to continue. This type of communication is piggybacking on something else: either happening around goal-oriented communication (e.g. side conversations at a meeting), other activities (having a coffee together) or observing others (e.g. seeing a colleague and remembering to ask them about something).

Vertical axis is about the ‘pre-arrangeness’ of communication (I’m not sure with the terms here, so any suggestions are welcome):

• Structured communication is expected and, to an extend, formalised. Planned meetings, promised memos and status reports are here. In this case there is time, space and resources needed to communicate (or, at least, nobody questions that they should be there).
• Informal communication is about everything else. It’s also expected, but in a more fuzzy sense (“let me know if there is a problem”). It’s not likely to be known in advance when and how it will happen, so it’s more difficult to allocate the resources for it.

In a co-located team all types of communication have place (the whole egg :). There are enough triggers for an opportunity-based communication and being in front of someone makes negotiating about time, space and channels for informal communication easy (you rather make a minute to talk about the thing, say “no” or make an arrangement about communicating later on).

In a distributed team communication shrinks to the basics (egg yellow :). From one side, when there is no “easyness” of face-to-face settings, we are likely to rely on structured communication, since negotiating time and resources for informal communication is more challenging (e.g. email might be not read for a while, phone is interruptive and costly, etc.). Informal communication is still happens, especially in the goal-oriented space, but the chances for it are lower, because it’s extra taxing (e.g. questions that would be asked in a meeting may not get get asked in email or IM chat). For opportunity-driven communication it’s even worse: lack of shared physical space results in far less triggers that might turn into a conversation: there are not many non-essential activities (no drinking coffee online :), it’s more difficult to observe others and even goal-oriented communication mediated by technology tends to be more “on topic” (from my experience “social talk” at a face-to-face meeting happens much easier than in a phone conference or email exchange).

There are quite a few more things to add here (in particularly about the negative effects of shrunken communication and ways to extend it), but nobody likes very long blogposts :)

• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda
• Individual in a public space: learning from weblogs and cities

Just reflecting on a couple of cases where team performance – by design – depends a lot on sharing the same room. Sharing a room is good for productivity and builds on all kinds of powerful activities that happen in  physical space. However, there are a couple of issues with that.

Operating in a shared space makes various interactions informal and their value implicit – everyone is there, questions are asked and answered, insights and artefacts shared, actions observed. However, this means that if someone is not in the room for whatever reason (ill, off-site, etc.) they miss important bits and don’t have an idea of what they have missed. Strong reliance on sharing a space usually means that there are not many backup information flows (to revisit from a distance or later) and that communication practices are not well articulated (so it’s difficult to change them or “move” to another – digital – format if the need arises).

Sharing a room creates convergence, but also thicker group boundaries. Developing shared understanding of what and how have to be done is great for getting things done, but also “locks” the team in it’s own practice. This makes it more difficult to change and to incorporate external influences. And it’s difficult to extend a group like that since it’s difficult for a newcomer to get “up to speed” fast and to bring own ideas to the table.

So, where a team room makes sense?

• projects that are more about getting things done than about interconnections
• projects with little travel or flexible work
• relatively short term projects, so needs to extend the group or change it’s practices are not that likely

Doesn’t mean that teams shouldn’t share rooms in all other cases, just that they have to make sure that they articulate their own practices and establish alternative mechanisms for developing awareness,  communicating and creating opportunities for incorporating external influences.

• Weblog as a backstage: performance is counterproductive
• Edges
• Bloggers cited in the dissertation