Kindergarden Teams

Why so many people work better on small teams, in the same room.

Ever since I was 4 years old, I was being conditioned to work in small teams I was able to see, touch, and talk-to; in real-time. When i was growing up, remote collaboration wasn’t possible. My school didn’t think it was an important skill set to learn. Although it’s important to learn how to work with others IRL (in real life), it’s becoming more important to learn how to work with others who aren’t in the same physical location.

From a productivity standpoint, I’m able to do a lot more work in the same amount of time when I work on distributed teams. The past few years has been a new learning experience though. I feel like I’ve made it through the kindergarden of remote collaboration. I have the basics, and just need more time and experience before I’m really great.

While there are a substantial number of organizations that have adopted some form of remote collaboration, I feel like most organizations still have kindergarden-levels of collaboration. “We’re awesome when we’re gathered around one table and get to play with the same blocks.” If they were asked to play blocks with someone on the other side of the world; they start to get confused. Many organizations would put both parties in front of web cameras and give them the same blocks to play with. This approach to remote collaboration is fraught with potential issues:

1. Handicapped team-members: get produced when a subsection of a team is brought into an established IRL collaboration process remotely. For instance, if a team hires me to work on a project remotely but is used to working together in the same office, I would try to dial-into their environment as often as I can. If they’re in the same physical space, and I’m not, there’s bound to be times where I’m going to excluded. If the whole team was distributed, and relayed on remote collaboration tools to communicate, I wouldn’t have that same handicap.
2. Communication is not collaboration: but is often all that organizations offer to remote employees. There is an important distinction between communication and collaboration; the creation of something new. New knowledge, ideas, opinions, etc. are the result of collaboration. The confusion is generally because collaboration involves communication; but communication doesn’t necessarily involve collaboration. Plopping two people in front their web cameras may facilitate communication; but may have no effect on collaboration.
3. Common & unique experiences: have nothing to do with whether an experience is shared or experienced individually; they’re about perception. For instance, a common experience can be experienced individually if a person is watching a TV show (alone); but one that others are watching. A unique experience is less about being alone, and more about having a unique perspective of an experience. Many times two individuals can experience the same event, but have different perspectives regarding what happened. Helping people share common experiences is often leads to good communication; helping people share unique experiences often leads to good collaboration.
4. Herding cats: typically refers to coordinating communication between many different groups or individuals. As a former project manager, this is a huge task, that takes a lot of time and effort. A problem that gets exponentially easier when working with completely distributed teams. The big issue is legacy tacit knowledge existing within individuals who don’t like distributed teams, and don’t want to work with them. Typically, the more tacit knowledge, the more senior an individuals title will be. These people have found a way to stick around an organization for such a long time they’re indispensable. These people are often the most difficult to schedule; which makes it somewhat ironic that they’re often the most adamantly opposed to evolving the level of collaboration they currently have. People who need to make the most of the little time they can spend between projects should really embrace the power of remote collaboration.

Remote collaboration tools have come a long way over the past 5 years; and they’re still evolving. They’re at a point where it makes sense to learn how to use them; but more importantly, we’re at a point where it makes sense to learn the psychology and sociology associated with working on distributed (and semi-distributed) teams.

One of the biggest selling points of any organization, looking to be acquired, is the strength of collaboration within their team. Most of the time, the real value in an organization, is the team; opposed to some superstar individual. I imagine one day, organizations will see an ecosystem of tools that enables distributed teams to produce products beyond anything we can imagine ourselves. When this happens, when the business case for using distributed teams is undeniable, I can imagine organizations reinvesting their assets away from creating an physical environment, conducive to collaboration, to creating an ecosystem designed to remove communication barriers and foster collaboration between team members located anywhere around the world.