Over at CollaborationLoop Deb Schiff has just shared a very enlightening weblog post about the subject of how crucial for any kickoff project face-to-face meetings are in whatever the environment, but specially if you are about to start working on a project with distributed peers all over the place. Over there you would be able to read about some precious gems like this one: "[…] nothing can replace the magic that happens during the face-to-face interactions among colleagues or other collaborators." Working in a distributed world like nowadays I would certainly agree that there are a number of different perks towards working virtually, but while that is just so accurate I am not going to deny the fact that having face-to-face meetings to kick things off is a great starting point towards improving and encouraging some more knowledge sharing and collaborative techniques.

Deb shares as well a few comments from a recent interview she conducted with Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham around this very same subject of conducting real life meetings specially meant for virtual teams. In fact, Jim puts it very clearly with statements like this one:

"[…] if you don’t start that team interaction off with intense face-to-face interaction, you’re going to have a lot of problems later on down the line in terms of communication, misunderstanding of goals and handoffs."

I certainly agree with that statement, even better, I think that it applies not only to team projects but also to communities themselves. Indeed, for the well being and long life of a brand-new community you would always want to take advantage of the possibility of doing a face-to-face kickoff / launch so that folks have got the opportunity to get to know one another, build up their social capital and trust levels and get to know other community members beyond the strict rules of work. That way people are able to establish different connections that they can relate to, and which may not have much to do with work, but still be very beneficial as part of that social capital that will encourage people to share what they know with others because they trust them, and they trust their work.

This is indeed the reason why those real-life meetings would be very beneficial for teams as well as communities but even if you feel that you may not be able to get the entire community off to that live kickoff event I can imagine that it would still be very beneficial if you could manage to actually get a core group of community members together, i.e. core team members, liaisons, facilitators, brokers, whatever you name them, in order to help build those relationships that they can then spread around and share with others and be able to build up quickly strong ties that could well be have a huge effect on the well being of the group once they get back to their own locations and continue working virtually.

Following up further on this, here is another interesting quote as well, from the same article, but this time around from Charlie:

"Recognize the need that people have to socialize"

Yes, indeed, that is something that we may have been able to see it a few times and although people still may think that with the emergence of social software or the so-called Web 2.0 things are a lot easier to establish that virtual contact, I still feel that there is nothing like the face-to-face contact as you would be able to relate to others and socialise with them through the usage of games, icebreakers, games, etc. etc. and from there onwards break the traditional barriers that people may have against collaborating and get things off to a great start.

But that is not all of it either. You cannot expect to have a face-to-face kickoff meeting and then expect that things would run smooth forever. On the contrary, one of the things that you would have to provide to consolidate the successful kickoff launch event is the capability for group members to get together at a later time and on whatever the more or less regular basis, i.e. once a month, once a quater or once every six months to a year, that is something that you will have to establish within the community itself. The main key benefits from this approach is that people would be able to build stronger links with others boosting their relationships and touching base on things not only related to work but also others related to different social events. The key message here is the fact that although face-to-face meetings are certainly very helpful for project kickoff that is just not good enough. You would also need to encourage folks to get together, at least, once a year so that people have got a huge opportunity to keep working on their social capital apart from the Intellectual Capital.

So next time around you embark yourself on the launch of a community think first how and where you would want the group to meet up and, much more importantly, establish as well with which frequency they would all be working together again in a face to face event. Chances are that thinking about this ahead of time will bring your community off to a healthy and strong collaborative environment from the very first beginning and for many years to come.

Tags: Face-to-Face, Meetings, Virtual Teams, Distributed Teams, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Capital, CollaborationLoop

In the past you may have noticed how I have been weblogging a few times already on the power of storytelling as to how crucial it will certainly be for any healthy Knowledge Management strategy to bring forward and incorporate storytelling as one of the different techniques put together in order to help boost knowledge sharing and collaborating within the enterprise. That is why for a number of different weeks I have been watching out with great interest the different developments that the folks over at Anecdote have been putting together on a new initiative they are working on called Zahmoo, which is certainly going to help out in this space a huge deal ! They have just recently announced the launch of the Zahmoo weblog as well but just in case you may need to find out some more about what this particular new initiative is all about here you have got a small introduction to it: "Zahmoo makes it easy for you to manage your most significant change projects. Use Zahmoo to collect stories, organise selections, and keep track of the selected stories throughout the process.

Indeed, it looks like most significant change is becoming a hot topic at the moment in the world of KM and somehow Anecdote seems to keep themselves ahead of the curve, which is a good thing because thanks to their efforts you would be able to experience how stories could influence and improve the way people do business by allowing them to share much more knowledge than ever before and collaborate in a more effective and efficient way. And you can get things going for yourself by signing-up to Zahmoo to enter their pre-release beta already in the making. I have already signed up myself and I am currently waiting to be able to test the pre-release beta. So we shall see how that goes further. Of course, as soon as I get some experience with it I shall be weblogging about it and share some further insights.

For the time being, though, and if you would want to read some more about this as part of the background of what is happening with Zahmoo, check out the following weblog post that Shawn Callahan shared a few months back titled Evaluating the soft stuff. It does actually make up for some really good reading around the topic of most significant change and how it can impact the way companies build up their knowledge within the enterprise and beyond. Highly recommended.

Tags: Zahmoo, Anecdote, Storytelling, Narrative, Telling Stories, Knowledge Management, KM

World

Champions ! ! !

Nothing more to say, nothing more to add. Now, just time for a huge celebration after such an unprecedented and unforgettable achievement ! Thanks ever so much, Pepu!

Tags: ÑBA, Basketball, Spain, World Championship 2006, Japan, Finals, World Champions

I know that this weblog post hasn’t got anything to do with Knowledge Management, Communities, Collaboration or Social Networking for that matter but I just cannot let this day passed by without mentioning it. Earlier on this morning I was preparing my way to do some blogtipping as it is the first day of the month again but I just got too excited about this:

Those who know me in person would tell you how passionate I have always been about basketball. I played it for more than half of my life in my younger years and still enjoy it very much and perhaps today more than ever before because, indeed, after having waited for 24 years, Spain has finally made it into the finals from the Basketball World Championship 2006 after an exhilarating and exhaustingly last-second win over Argentina, 75-74. WOW! Incredible ! Fascinating ! You gotta love this game ! I am still getting goose bumps from just thinking about it. So much so that I can hardly think about anything else at the moment. I mean, it has taken us 24 years of frustrations, bad luck, bad timing, bad matches, you name it, and now it was certainly our chance and we made it!!! Wooohooo!

Now on to the finals to meet up Greece after having performed some incredible team performance against the USA. It sounds like it is going to be a great final, indeed ! And I am sure the best one will win. Time to enjoy it now, so with all that excitement I think you would have to excuse me for the rest of the week since I am surely going to enjoy the moment, because you never know when we would all be in a similar situation… Hopefully, we would not have to wait for another 24 years …

Tags: ÑBA, Basketball, Spain, World Championship 2006, Japan, Finals