Comments on: Forming and norming groups online

By: phil

phil — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:27:07 +0000

OK – maybe not the absolute last word from me: here are links to a couple of relevant papers that shed more light on this issue:

http://www.knowab.co.uk/wbwtrust.html http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue43/panteli/

Also you may have noted a very helpful contribution from Jessica Lipnack who is one of the authors of the book to which I referred above.

By: phil

phil — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:24:53 +0000

Thanks for that Jessica – it is a very interesting and important finding, and we shall keep it in mind as we develop our practices with groups online. I am in no doubt that some of our own experiences with organisations bear out this view.

By: jessica lipnack

jessica lipnack — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:42:26 +0000

Thanks, Phil, for picking out material from “Virtual Teams.” Great blog on an ever-more important topic. One interesting tip we picked up in later research that we published with two business school profs in Harvard Business Review: virtual teams tend to storm to form. Lots of discord at the beginning turns out to be a good thing – and the very stuff that causes the distant co-workers to bond.

By: phil

phil — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:47:19 +0000

Some things, of course, are a simple mix of intuition, experience and commonsense. But that is my final word now on this topic now – dialogue is so much more fun than monologue, so I’ll wait and see what you think!

By: phil

phil — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:45:32 +0000

Here is another telling piece of evidence from page 147: "The people at Buckman Labs found, as have many other companies, that a very active online conversation can be fast-paced enough to seem almost real-time. Buckman's early chat rooms allowed people who had never met (and might never meet) to have “screen” conversations where people talked about their families and hobbies. The major advantage of these sessions is that they quickly build a modicum of trust and usually cause affection to develop among the participants as they glimpse one another's private lives.

Sun Microsystems uses integrated digital environments that bring together features of chat with shared computer screens and the telephone.

Intel is pioneering the uses of desktop video conferencing for virtual teams.

Technologies that work well for small face to face groups and capitalise on the peculiar strength of the digital era are driving the explosive growth of teams and team capabilities. Intranets combine all the digital media into "digital" campgrounds. These "virtual watercoolers” - reminiscent of the Kung gathering around Kalahari watering holes - offer entirely new new options for shaping meaningful aggregation in virtual teams while supporting their dispersion.