I’m reading an excellent book at the moment called Distributed Work by Pamela Hinds and Sara Kiesler (eds.). While reading the chapter on ‘Face-to-face Communication’ I was reminded of the global projects I worked on at IBM and how linking people across three continents required at least one geography to take the conference call in the wee hours of the night. It was interesting how different groups worked out who would take the late call.

I retell these stories to highlight how a seemingly small thing of scheduling meetings can become a major impediment to distributed work. Resentment grew in my second example and after a while the Asian contingent just didn’t show up for the meetings (you can read in Distributed Work how important ‘showing up’ is in social bonding).

Developing a set of ways distributed work might be done by the team or community (and effective boundary object) would help to dispel issues before they affected the group. Agreeing how the group will rotate timings for meetings should be early on the agenda. 

Narrative techniques can be applied effectively across a wide range of business issues—the more difficult the better. I’ve been recently working on how to use business narratives to align customer service with a company’s brand promise with my colleagues at BCS. Paul Stewart and Janelle Barlow (the founders of BCS) have written a great book describing the overall concept of branded customer service and this white paper describes how to use business narrative techniques to work out what is actually happening with your brand: how your customers really perceive your company and how your staff view your brand position. This knowledge is the essential starting point for better alignment.

I hope you find this useful. Let me know what you think.

Nancy White draws our attention to some interesting metaphors a startup called Socialtext uses to talk about virtual collaboration:

I have to admit I don’t know what VNC is and thought IRC was the same as IM. Can anyone enlighten me please.

I remember, while working at IBM, that only the people ‘in the know’ had internal blogs. And those in the know were the thousands of technical experts who dominate the company. Well it looks like blogging is becoming mainstream in Big Blue. According to whatsnextblog IBM has released to employees blogging guidelines. Worth checking out as I see blogging as an integral part of connecting and learning inside an organisation. It will be interesting to see whether my old colleagues from business consulting services start blogging. I had the feeling that they were reluctant to embrace new technologies.

One doesn’t implement communities of practice nor create them by management edict. Rather they require the right conditions to grow. Management’s role is to make it clear to potential community members that they support this new way of working.

In helping senior managers and the community support team remember some of the key community of practice principles, Chris Georgiou and I developed the following mnemonic. The mnemonic refers to Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping point” because communities of practice encourage tipping phenomena.

(T)echnology does not make a community but it is an important enabler.

(I)nsiders must decide on what happens within the community.

(P)eers and practitioners form the membership. This is no place for managers.

(P)assion provides the energy. Find passionate people and connect them.

(I)mportance of the community comes from increase responsiveness, innovation, ability to bring new employees up to speed faster, and avoiding reinventing the wheel.

(N)urturing a community requires resources. Companies need to invest in their support.

(G)rowth takes time. Communities are an organic entity.

I think adaptive tension is required for self organisation, such as the formation communities of practice. But what does this mean in an organisational context? Well 3M created an adaptive tension by mandating 30% of revenues must derive from products introduced in the last four years. GE created adaptive tension when Jack Welch made it clear that each division must be 1st or 2nd in the marketplace of it will be fixed, sold or closed down.

My experience with communities of practice suggests adaptive tension focussed on learning, professionalism, innovation is necessary for their success.

The examples above, however, are all negative. Does adaptive tension need to be negative in an organisational setting? If not, what would be examples of positive adaptive tensions?

I’m re-reading Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations and I thought this idea is worth keeping in mind. When facing conflicting and voluminous information avoid gathering more. Ignorance is not the problem. Rather, focus on principles, values and preferences to help you make a choice. In complexity you are best placed to choose base on plausibility instead of accuracy.

I find it interesting, however, that the knee jerk reaction of most organisations when faced with an unclear path (I suggest, if it isn’t already, this situation will be the norm) is to resort to gathering more information. Is this because these organisations have invested heavily in information technology and analytical professionals who are well equipped for this task?

Blogging seems to have taken a back seat in the last couple of weeks. I was in Auckland last week helping a law firm with their talent management strategy. My colleagues at FPO collected the anecdotes and we ran a sensemaking workshop. This week marks the beginning of some new community of practice work and the Introduction to Narrative Techniques workshop in Canberra. The workshop is fully subscribed and I look forward to meeting everyone on Wednesday.

Mark Schenk, who has just started his new business called Dialogue, and I are also working on an occupational health and safety project using business narrative techniques. Congratulations on your new venture Mark.

Keep an eye out for my latest paper which will be on how to align brand promises with customer service. If you are an Anecdote subscriber you will be the first to be notified of its availability.

The stories we tell not only help explain and provide meaning to our experiences, they also shape and legitimise our actions. This point is well made by David Boje et. al. (1982) where they explore the role or myths—which equate to dominate stories—within organisations. The stories you tell and retell, which become the accepted explanation of how things are around here, become difficult to dislodge and can only be replaced by another dominant story. The stories you tell about your children will be instrumental to the creation of their identity and therefore what they consider is possible. The same is true for the stories we tell about staff, managers, leaders and any other identity we wish to single out.