What kids can teach us about living and working virtually September 27, 2010

My son RJ (on the right) and his friend Toby (on the screen) are two happy 9ish kids who have known each other for years; they’ve gone to school together, and actually both sets of parents get along pretty well too, spending holidays and other fun times together.

About 2 months ago, Toby and his family moved from Amsterdam to Lagos, Nigeria — Toby’s dad is on an international assignment.

RJ misses Toby, Toby misses RJ. We miss his parents, his parents miss Amsterdam and their friends and family. We know that we’ll see each other at Christmas, but that still does not completely fill  the break in the cadence of our previous day-to-day living.

Toby and RJ are physically separated by 3170 miles/5101 kilometers.

Not even as long as 50 years ago, such physical separations between people were the death knell for most relationships; jetting about was not yet in vogue or available to the masses; international phone calls were outrageously expensive and letters could only fill the gaps so far and for so long before contact would become sporadic and then flicker out completely. That’s just the way it was: out of sight, eventually out of mind.

With the rise of the Internet and email, and then later the World Wide Web, an amazing thing started to happen: asynchronous communication with shorter cycle times meant that relationships could remain more “vital” through repeated contacts as people moved from paper to electrons flashing on a screen. Later came real-time voice and video communications, and then finally came the tidal wave of mass communication computing through commoditized, integrated social networking platforms combining mail, IM, voice and video.

With all of these new, interconnected tools and  technologies at our disposal, it is not only possible to maintain relationships, but rekindle long lost ones; it seems that we have finally overcome physical barriers in maintaining our friendships and other relationships. This is all a wonderfully creative amalgam fueled by disruptive technologies and the need for human beings to communicate, to be seen and heard, and to maintain a sense of belonging.

But all of this potential is not limited to us as individuals, friends and families; the implications are far broader. Businesses and organizations are becoming increasingly aware that fundamental change is afoot and that technology is the leading, enabling edge of that change. Clients come to Pentacle with three questions: “how can I make all of this work for me? How do I, my team, my company, work successfully in this increasingly virtual world? Can you tell us what the rules are?”

At Pentacle, we call of this glorious confusion the World After Midnight and in response to our clients’ questions, we teach the 12 New Rules for the New World day in and day out. Working virtually – that is to say, at a distance and through the use of technology and specialized organizational and behavioral rules – is a way of life for Pentacle tutors; we are spread out around the world and sometimes do not see each other physically for months at a time. But we talk to each other frequently as individuals, meet virtually in groups at regular intervals and in doing so maintain our rhythms as a team.

We hear from many of our friends “yes, yes, I hear you…. but in the real world …..” when we propose solutions on how they can get their organizations to embrace and benefit from virtual work practices just as we do — except at greater scale. People see and hear the buzz about these new technologies, but cannot quite see themselves or other people in their organizations actually working that way. They cannot see themselves adapting the technologies in such a manner; they insist that face-to-face meetings, which require huge expenditures of time and money, are the only way to maintain purposeful relationships and “control” over people and resources, and a “grip” on the predictability of their businesses.

Hmmm.

I set up a Skype video call between Toby and RJ last weekend so that they could say hello to each other. They promptly went into a full-scale play date. Virtually. For the next hour, there were no barriers between them. They laughed, they played with their cameras to show different things in their rooms, they screen shared each other playing video games (the bandwidth between the Netherlands and Nigeria is very good); in short, they were present, they were effective and their interaction was natural. Like ducks to water, these children adapted spontaneously to the shift in their environment. They did not hesitate and ponder the implications of how they were interacting; they just did it. They know who they are to each other, they know their shared history and they just picked up where they left off. I spoke to some friends of mine and they have observed the same phenomenon with their kids.

Can we take these kids’ experience as a learning point for ourselves and the organizations we work in and with? I think so.

Communication and information technologies are innovative and forward looking; they are just as much about tomorrow as they are about  today. Our children represent the adaptive tomorrow. I would say that if they can absorb and successfully integrate into their lives what we are throwing at them today – and do so quickly and effectively – then we must be on the right track in proving a fundamental proposition: not only can we work, play and otherwise interact with each other virtually in a meaningful and natural manner, but it would seem that we are biologically and intellectually predisposed to do so. Our children are proving tomorrow’s business and organizational development case today.

The key challenge to realize tomorrow’s benefits today is to unlearn what we think we know works and is possible and instead learn and apply the New Rules just as your children and other young people already have. Just watch them and remember what Eddie says “the future is now, because many of us are already too late.”

Social networks and blogs: use ‘em or lose ‘em September 7, 2010

Can it really be 6 months since my last blog? Apparently it is. I have looked at the WordPress icon on my FireFox icon bar the past weeks with increasing discomfort and trepidation and now I know why: I SHOULD BE WRITING STUFF. After all, I spent the time to set up the blog, make it look  nice, link it to Twitter, Facebook and Linked In.

In fact, I have invested in these digital social arenas and their friendly suggestions for dressing up my profiles to the nines with pictures, my interests, hobbies, etc, etc., etc. And then I do very little or nothing with them. Why? I know that I am not alone in this – I am compliant to the trend, but I am not always compliant to what is required to maintain the trend. I have built the infrastructure, gussied everything up, and I actually have lots of things to say. So, why am I not doing it?

My mind goes back to my mother who said “a writer writes.”  And there is the rub. Writing can be a chore. Although I write almost ever day, what I write is for communication purposes in daily life, not reflective or critical thinking prose about what is going on in the world after midnight. Eddie Obeng says continually to “not start a blog because once you have set it up you will regret it – you will feel guilty for not updating it and a good blog takes a lot of time.” In short, nothing looks sadder than a blog site with long, lonely gaps between entries.

My interest was piqued in this almost Freakonomics phenomenon of investing time/effort into new world media with no other return than, well, more pain  and so I decided to do a bubble diagram to see if I could come up with an explanation of my own psyche and behavioral habits. Bubble diagrams are a key tool we use at Pentacle to map, understand and explain to others various patterns and causalities of behaviors/outcomes in systems. I used a nice piece of web-enabled freeware called bubbl.us at http://bubbl.us/beta. I spent about 20 minutes putting together the map below (click on picture for full size.) I use the acronym MSN for Mainstream Social Networks.

The green blocks represent elements in a loop or pattern; the yellow blocks are influences to the patterns. There is a specific method to putting this together using causative and deductive reasoning, but that’s for another entry <wink>.

Following the pattern blocks and loops, the main problems, at least for me, are:

1. I continually am exposed to new social media that I am led to believe I have to be a part of to maintain currency. This is the key fallacy for many people, I think, and can be classified under the “not everything that glitters is gold” category. Keeping current to continually evolving social media can be a colossal time eater with no effective reward. In Pentacle terms, this is a non-Money Making Machine, and violates a prime Pentacle directive of “Do Nothing of No Use.”

2. Some social media are more fun than others. I actually have become quite fond of Facebook (as long as I don’t contemplate the evil machinations that lay just below the surface) in its power to connect, reconnect and, more importantly, stimulate. It is a rich environment that is both asynchronously and synchronously interactive. It does not take too much brainpower and, in economic terms, gives a pretty good return for each time investment you make as you are virtually guaranteed  to receive a like, comment or other Pavlovian response to 20% of your contributions. In comparison, blogging is a lonely sport with little feedback to motivate you.

The two patterns above meld into the final pattern:

3. I am not regularly updating all of my MSNs because a) although I feel I must be compliant to MSNs and I spend the time to set myself up (ie., the capital investment), b) the time requirements (ie., running costs) for maintaining all of the MSNs I have set up is too high, so that c) I only update the MSNs that I consider fun or get a direct stimulus from.

So, at the end of the day, although I am registered with LinkedIn, Facebook,  Twitter, MySpace, Classmates.com and have my own blog I only regularly interact with Facebook and LinkedIn as they give me something “tangible” for my time investment. I already consigned my MySpace page to the bit trash heap of history a while ago. Time to rethink the rest of these and either consolidate or eliminate.

Digital social networks and physical social networks share the same fundamental rule: use them or lose them.