Category: Knowledge work

Excellent tips for more productive conference calls

Jessica Lipnack provides an excellent set of tips and best practices for making conference calls more productive. For all the time I spend on calls, I frequently find them immensely frustrating. I plan on incorporating these practices in whatever calls I can influence.  I’ve excerpted a few highlights here:

Could you please repeat the question?

As promised, best practices for conference calls. Not surprisingly, I’ve discovered that I’ve done quite a few posts on the topic, for instance, here and here and here.

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And…why did I title this post the way I did? Surefire way to know if someone isn’t paying attention on a call: When asked to comment, they have no idea what they’re commenting on, thus, they say, "[see title]."

  1. No agenda, no meeting.
  2. Avoid status reporting
  3. Use screen sharing
  4. Rotate facilitator, note taker, timekeeper, "break" buddies
  5. Keep notes, display them, distribute immediately
  6. Check-in: go around face clock
  7. Get voices in room with "ice breaker" question
  8. Say your name each time you speak
  9. Generate heat: Discuss, disagree, decide
  10. Check-out around clock

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The notion of a "face clock" is one of those wonderfully simple and powerful ideas that are so obviously useful once someone else has come up with them:

…6. Check in. Face clock? I better post that right here. One of the graphics that is useful for keeping people aware of one another has each person’s face at a particular hour on the clock. (Thanks, Tom Kunz, for inventing this idea and for allowing us to continue to use this graphic.)

Face clock

 

Could you please repeat the question?
Jessica Lipnack
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:03:17 GMT

You would do well to read the entire post (you should be following Jessica’s blog anyway).

Learning to love the backchannel

Just before Thanksgiving I was at the KM World 2009 conference in San Jose listening to a keynote presentation by Charlene Li. Like many others, I was tweeting during her presentation and posted the following:

image

At just about the same time, on the right coast, danah boyd of Microsoft was delivering a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City that didn’t go as well. Her experience and the subsequent conversation around it represent the latest installment in the evolving relationship between audience and presenter. It also contains comparable lessons for the successful adoption of social media within the enterprise.

If you ever expect to stand and deliver in front of a group, these are issues you need to think about beforehand. That can be as adrenaline inducing as boyd’s keynote or as seemingly innocuous as running a status meeting while the team focuses on their laptops, Blackberrys, and iphones.

I’ve been gathering and organizing links to some of the more useful and informative material I’ve found on this topic. For starters, here are some key pointers specific to boyd’s experience, including her own reflections and assessment:

danah body isn’t the only one dealing with this new relationship between audience and speaker. Here are some other accounts and overviews of other less than successful encounters, both recent and not-so-recent:

Fortunately, we’re also starting to see some good advice emerging on how to cope:

These examples are highly visible. They also take place in settings where you have the additional problems of a degree of anonymity that seems to encourage a level of boorishness more reminiscent of middle school than anything else. At the same time, they are also leading indicators of a default working environment that will be more public and transparent than we are accustomed to or comfortable with. Paying attention here and thinking through what lessons are available and how they translate into other settings is time well spent. Some of the questions on my mind include:

  • Where and when can you influence the tenor of the backchannel? As a presenter? As a conference organizer? As a member of the audience?
  • What can you do before the fact to set useful expectations or standards of interaction?
  • What can you do in the moment?
  • What can you do after the fact?
  • What’s likely to differ in more private venues? What will differ for the better? For worse?
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Asking more relevant questions about focus and multitasking

I’ve been uncomfortable with the ongoing discussions about the promise or threat of multitasking without being quite able to articulate why. Stowe Boyd finally helped my crystallize my concerns with a nice dissection of the most recent wave of debate on the topic. Let me extract two paragraphs from his excellent analysis:

So, the war on flow continues. I liked the study from a few years back that equated multitasking with smoking dope in its effects, and perhaps the most masterful attack was leveled by Christine Rosen in her Myth Of Multitasking (see Christine Rosen Joins The War On Flow), or Nick Carr, who said the Web is making us stupid. They are all looking backward, and using old tools to measure, ineffectively, what is emerging.

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If you judge a juggler by how many times the balls hit the floor and contrast that with someone throwing and catching one ball at a time, the juggler will lose. But the juggler is doing something else. You could argue that doing it that way makes no sense, that throwing one ball at a time is more efficient, leads to less sleepless nights, and doesn’t confuse the mind. But it isn’t juggling.

The War On Flow, 2009: Why Studies About Multitasking Are Missing The Point
Stowe Boyd
Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:33:48 GMT

The current discussion around whether multitasking is good or bad flounders on a host of unarticulated and unexamined assumptions. The question is not about whether multitasking is a better way to do old forms of work; it is about what skills and techniques do we need to develop to deal with the forms of work that are now emerging. There is a complex interaction between an evolving environment and developing technologies. Much of the discussion to date is comparable to trying to understand the automobile as a horseless carriage.

I am reminded of an old observation by author Larry Niven; "good science fiction writers predict cars – great science fiction writers predict traffic jams." One of the useful things to be done is to spend a more time watching the juggling (to borrow Stowe Boyd’s image) and appreciating it on its own terms instead of criticizing it for what it isn’t.

Hacking complex knowledge problems: Van Halen and Brown M&Ms

I had never actually heard the story about Van Halen and brown M&M’s before I came across this Boing Boing entry. Of course, Boing  Boing is always a good for fun stories. Here’s one that also has a useful point about dealing with complex knowledge problems between organizations.

 

nomms.jpg
Spotted via Andrew Baron’s tweetstream, this fascinating — no, really! — snopes article on why Van Halen had that line in their concert rider about ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN M&Ms EVER.

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Snopes.com: Van Halen Brown M&Ms. The actual 1982 rider was first published online at smokinggun.com in 2008.

 

Van Halen had good reason to ban brown M&Ms in their concert rider.
Xeni Jardin
Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:49:58 GMT

Take the time to check out the Snopes article (Snopes.com: Van Halen Brown M&Ms). It presents a design problem of how to ensure that an organization you’re contracting with is exercising the appropriate attention to detail. It reminds me of a similar design hack/lesson I learned first back in the 7th grade. A version of that lesson is, of course, available courtesy of a moment’s effort with a search engine(Directions Test).

What makes this example important is that more and more of our work gets done through other organizations. That increases the problems of incomplete contracts where the tasks in question are sufficiently complex and the environment indeterminate enough that it is difficult, in not impossible. to specify all the relevant conditions in advance. "Brown M&Ms" provides an excellent reminder that the point of the contract is to ensure a successful outcome for all parties.

Will organizational leaders accept the evidence about incentives and creative work?

Daniel Pink, author of the excellent Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind, has a new book coming out in December. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us takes a look at the evidence about the links between incentives and creative, knowledge work. Recently, he spoke about his work at a TED talk in England:

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, his conclusions should come as little surprise. This is simply one more brick in the growing wall of evidence that the fiction of "rational economic man" has long outlived whatever utility it might have had. The evidence boils down to this; if you need creative and original thought out of people, economic incentives don’t work. Creative work comes from internal, self-motivation and requires autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

This is not news. The question that is interesting is whether organizational leaders have finally reached the point where they are prepared to act on this knowledge. If what your organization needs is creative, mindful, independent thought from all quarters and you must finally abandon the pretense that you can elicit that behavior with specific, concrete incentives, then how much harder has your leadership task become? If, to use Pink’s phrase, "sharper sticks and sweeter carrots" won’t work, what will?

The answer comes down to leadership. More specifically, it comes down to the kind of leadership exemplified by Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics. For Russell, leadership was about getting the best out of each of the players on the team more than it was about getting the best out of himself.

Nip it in the bud or wait for the crisis

Twenty five years ago I was running an internal project for the consulting arm of Arthur Andersen & Co, back before it split off to morph into Andersen Consulting and then Accenture. We were creating a system development center to provide all of the development tools and facilities to support large scale information systems implementation projects. This was in the day when serious development was done on mainframe computers and setting up an environment for productive work could chew up a lot of time and fees without adding value for either Andersen or its clients. The centers turned out to be a successful venture for several years.

Setting up the first one was a large scale project management problem in its own right. Some challenges in creating a work plan and work breakdown structure for something that hadn’t been done before, but nothing out of the ordinary.

One odd conversation from that effort still sticks with me. It was early Monday morning, well before 8AM, and I was parked in the partner’s office. I had learned that the only way to guarantee Mel’s attention was to catch him before he got wrapped up in anything else. He rolled in a short time later and the conversation unfolded like this:

Me: I’ve been going over the project plans for the development center. We’re on track, but I’m worried about the scheduled install of the mainframe next month.

Mel: So?

Me: Do we deal with it now or wait until it’s a full blown crisis?

Mel: Wait until it’s a crisis

You need to understand that Mel was and is an excellent manager and leader. But I was certainly greatly puzzled at the time. Isn’t management supposed to be about anticipating problems and dealing with them before they get out of hand?

Consider some of the possibilities at this point, setting aside issues of organizational turf warfare or operating beyond your authority.

  1. Not all anticipated problems materialize. Calvin Coolidge’s observation about problems may apply, "If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you."
  2. This is a management development opportunity. Someone who reports to you needs to recognize and deal with the problem. It can short circuit or undermine their development if you point out problems before they’ve had an opportunity to see them for themselves.
  3. A crisis can be put to good use. Allowing an issue to become more troubling and more visible may be a necessary step in garnering resources you may need later
  4. You or your organization confuses heroics with effectiveness. This is the dangerous case. If you’re confused, you can either get unconfused or seek out an occupation where heroics are relevant. On the other hand, if your organization (or your client) is confused that can be a serious problem. It takes an astute manager to recognize that "no muss, no fuss" indicates effective management. Or to distinguish between a real crisis and a manufactured one.

In my earliest managerial days, crisis was my too often default mode, out of ignorance and inexperience. Since then, I’ve learned to prefer bud nipping. More importantly, I’ve learned (and continue to relearn) that there aren’t many either/or choices in the real world. What strategies have you chosen when you see a problem on the horizon?

links for 2009-08-11

danah boyd on new habits in a connected world

I have got to meet danah boyd in real life one of these days. Her work, as revealed through her blogging, shows what can happen when you drop a well-trained, smart, and articulate observer into new environments. We all learn from her sharp attention to what is really going on. So much better than listening to what others think is going on.

She’s just posted an illuminating perspective on her recent experience at an academic conference in Italy that brought together a combination of young Turks and old farts. It’s a reflection on the slow emergence of new habits and behaviors in shared public settings; a look at how and why blackberries, twitter, backchannels, laptops, and iphones might actually be making meetings better for all concerned. Here are just a couple of quick excerpts. Go read the whole thing.

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There’s no doubt that I barely understood what the speaker was talking about. But during the talk, I had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.

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Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.

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My colleagues aren’t that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren’t used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it’s utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging.

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What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.

I want my cyborg life
zephoria
Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:16:26 GMT

links for 2009-07-07