Getting Things Done helps you juggle more effectively, but as Marcia Conner reminds us in this parable, you may want to consider whether it’s necessary to juggle that many balls in the first place. (LQY)
Power Relationships and Collaboration
At the Open Collaborative Services Initiative meeting three years ago, I met David Hartzband, who at the time was VP of collaboration technology at EMC. We had several fantastic conversations, including this thought-provoking claim: True collaboration cannot exist in a hierarchical relationship. (LQK)
I disagreed with him then, and I disagree with this now, but I think I understand why he made this point. I was reminded of it again a few months ago, when Eugene Chan and I were having a conversation about the foundation world. He said that he wished fundees would be open with their program officers about the challenges they faced, but that the natural power relationship between funder and fundee discouraged it. (LQL)
This, I think, was the essence of David’s argument. Would you approach someone with a problem if that person was in the position to punish you for being in that predicament in the first place? This scenario applies to both hierarchical relationships within an organization and relationships between competitors. It’s further complicated by the presence of money. (LQM)
Even if your answer is yes, the fact remains that power relationships affect interpersonal dynamics. When you’re trying to improve collaboration, it’s better to be explicit about these relationships than to wish them away. (LQN)
A great example of this phenomenon emerged from the CIA workshop last September. Upper management there both encourages internal blogging it and are some of the most active practitioners. However, as the workshop revealed, there is still a tremendous fear of blogging amongst the analysts. The roadblock? Several people blamed middle management, whom they claimed actively discouraged blogging, even while upper management said and did the opposite. Many also cited an incident where an analyst got punished for writing something. (Others insisted that this was an oversimplification of what actually happened.) (LQO)
In response to these and other comments, Jerry Michalski (my hero when it comes to pithy wisdom) said, “Familiarity and fascination trump fear.” The fear in this case was a consequence of the power relationships. A more accurate (although less alliterative) word for “familiarity” is “trust.” (LQP)
Today’s San Francisco Chronicle reported the following stats from a recent Florida State University study: (LQR)
- 39 percent of employees surveyed said their supervisor failed to keep promises. (LQS)
- 37 percent said their supervisor failed to give credit when due. (LQT)
- 27 percent said their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers. (LQU)
- 23 percent said their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment. (LQV)
The problem isn’t that power relationships are inherently bad for collaboration. The problem is that most organizations do not have enough trust. Building trust is hard and takes time. But it’s possible. (LQQ)
Group Information Hygiene
When we founded BlueOxenAssociates, we were supposed to be a place for those on the cutting edge of collaboration. I quickly discovered that most people who want or claim to be on the cutting edge are held back by poor PersonalInformationHygiene. People need to start with themselves before they worry about the group if they want to improve their ability to collaborate. (This is a general theme that extends beyond KnowledgeManagement.) T (LPT)
Poor Personal Information Hygiene can often interfere with group trust, and trust is a prerequisite for good collaboration. (LPU)
In an ideal world, everyone on your team would be masters of Personal Information Hygiene, but in reality, that’s rarely the case. Frankly, I’m not sure if it’s always desirable. People have different kinds of intelligences, and it may be that certain kinds of intelligences are critical to a high-performance team, but are also orthogonal to good Personal Information Hygiene. (LPV)
Is it possible to have good Group Information Hygiene if people on a team have poor Personal Information Hygiene? Moreover, is it possible for the whole to be greater than the sum? (LPW)
You all know what my answers are. (LPX)
Part of the MGTaylor facilitation philosophy is to offload all potential distractions so that the participants may focus entirely on the task at hand. When you attend an MGTaylor Design Shop, there are several Knowledge Workers present, who are responsible for managing the distractions (among other things). They set up and reset the environment. They scribe your conversations. They manage the clock. (LPY)
The philosophy is not exclusive to MGTaylor. The Aspen Institute follows a similar process. So do high-level politicians and actors in big-budget films, where their schedules are minutely managed so that they can focus entirely on acting… er, and policy-making. So do fancy restaurants. The food at Gary Danko in San Francisco is fantastic, but the service is unbelievable. There are literally six servers hiding in the shadows, anticipating your needs and making sure your table space is always pristine. Your glass is always full. Your napkin is always folded. If you’re about to go to the bathroom, a server will pull out your chair and point you in the right direction. Remarkably, they pull this off without being overbearing and creepy. (LPZ)
We can debate whether or not this is always a good thing. (I think the answer is no.) We can certainly agree that this level of service is not always practical. What’s indisputable is that in a collaborative situation, these things need to be done by somebody. The question is by whom? (LQ0)
The Sacrificial Lamb (stolen from Jim Coplien and Neil Harrison‘s SacrificeOnePerson pattern) is both a pattern and an antipattern. Most of us are familiar with it as an antipattern, where someone “takes one for the team” and essentially does someone else’s job because that other person isn’t doing it. (We discussed this in great detail at last year’s St. Louis Collaboratory workshop.) (LQ1)
When it’s a result of broken trust, Sacrificial Lamb is short-term positive, because the job gets done, but it’s long-term negative because it hurts your working chemistry and often overloads your most productive team members. When it’s intentional and explicit, it’s net positive, because it’s not breaking any trust relationships. The essence of Jim and Neil’s pattern is that instead of dividing the necessary but dreary tasks among multiple peers, you designate one person as the Sacrificial Lamb and that person handles all of those tasks, at least for one cycle. You increase the likelihood of the tasks getting done and getting done well, and you increase the productivity of your other team members. If done right, the whole will be greater than the sum. The Knowledge Workers in the MGTaylor process are essentially Sacrificial Lambs. (LQ2)
The role of the Sacrificial Lamb is most often to maintain good Group Information Hygiene. Project managers will find this role familiar. For example, when scheduling meetings, you send frequent reminders, both to compensate for others who are not good at maintaining their own calendars and to correct potential miscommunications. These tasks are laborious, but they’re necessary for High-Performance Collaboration. (LQ3)
Collaboration can be a difficult thing to measure, but measuring Group Information Hygiene is relatively easy. I used metrics associated with Group Information Hygiene extensively with a client last year as one indication of the state of collaboration within the community and the potential for improvement in the future. Poor Group Information Hygiene is a natural obstacle to scale. (LQ4)
Getting Things Done
Last year, I reached a point where I wasn’t managing my time and tasks to my satisfaction, so I decided to check out the Getting Things Done bandwagon. I went to Green Apple to buy David Allen‘s book, but I couldn’t find it in the business section. I asked a salesperson for assistance, and to my horror (and amusement), they suggested I check the self-help section. (LPB)
Getting Things Done is indeed a self-help book of sorts, but it’s also full of good advice on information management. More importantly, the philosophy it espouses not only has important implications on task management but also on collaboration. (LPC)
The problem it seeks to address is, how do we manage our day-to-day, overcommitted lives in this age of information overload? Allen’s solution is simple. Keep your mind in a relaxed, ready-for-action state, which he compares to the “zone” that athletes often experience. In martial arts, if the body is tense, it will not react quickly or powerfully. Keeping your body relaxed is what separates the masters from the novices. (LPD)
Easier said than done, right? Allen’s method for getting your mind into this state is two-fold. First, get things out of your head into a system you trust. Second, frame tasks as something actionable. Starting with managing the nitty gritty in your life will free your mind to do the higher-level thinking we all wish we had more time to do. (LPE)
The ready-state and trust are critical concepts. Much of our day-to-day tension is the result of trying to balance all of the things we need to do in our head. The brain is not good at this sort of thing. Once you move all those tasks into a system you trust, you relieve your brain of that stress. (LPF)
Allen cited one of his clients, who said that she never stressed about forgetting about a meeting, even though she had a lot of them, because she knew that information was in her calendar. Whenever she scheduled a meeting, she immediately off-loaded it into her calendar, so she knew that it was always current. She wanted a similar trusted system for managing other types of tasks. (LPG)
Allen also noted that just as we feel guilty about breaking agreements with others, we also feel guilty about breaking agreements with ourselves. If you tell yourself you’re going to eat a salad every day, but you keep eating cheeseburgers, you’ve broken an agreement with yourself, and you’re going to feel bad about it. Even worse, you’ll lose trust in yourself, or at least, your system, and so continued use of that system will make you even antsier. (LPH)
How do you resolve this? By acknowledging that you are in fact making an agreement, and treating it as such. Just as you would call a friend to reschedule, you need to explicitly renegotiate the agreements you make with yourself. (LPI)
Explicitness is critical. The act of framing a task as an action is an important, but oft-neglected step. “Eat better,” is not actionable. “Eat fish three times a week,” is. The act of writing down an action item makes it both real and subject to renegotiation. (LPJ)
In keeping with his philosophy, Allen’s book is full of concrete actions you can take to improve your information management. These have been covered in great detail elsewhere, so I’ll just point out a few that I’ve found useful: (LPK)
(For a more comprehensive list of my GTD implementation and some other tips and tricks, see Life Hacks.) (LPN)
These sort of tips sound trivial, but when performed with the larger framework in mind, they are extremely effective. One of the things I really like about Allen’s book is his emphasis on environment, which parallels my philosophy on collaborative spaces. How you structure your workspace will have a great effect on whether or not your work processes are successful. (LPO)
Allen doesn’t spend much time on the implications of Getting Things Done on collaboration, but he does reiterate the importance of trust in groups. When you have a list of action items, and you’re not getting them done, others who are depending on you are going to lose trust. Since trust is the foundation of good collaboration, it behooves you to to be good at Getting Things Done. (LPP)
This is essentially the Personal Information Hygiene point that I made last year, although I like how Allen explicitly incorporates trust into his explanation of its importance. However, I also think it’s an oversimplification. One of the inherent advantages of a team over an individual, is that you can compensate for individual weaknesses. I’ll write more about this in a later post on Group Information Hygiene. (LPQ)
Commenting on Blogs
Mark Bernstein recently complained that the right place to comment on a blog post was by private email or by linking from your own blog, not via the blog’s comment mechanism. I still agree with this view, although my belief has been greatly tempered by own experiences. (LOS)
Several months ago, I turned off comments on my blogs because of spam. I miss them dearly. I’ve got enough of an active readership that folks blog about my blog entries, but I miss the quick-hit comments, which either contained nuggets of useful information or expressed humor, and which often came from non-bloggers. I still get these kinds of comments over email, but the numbers have decreased dramatically, and I keep having to ask permission to publish them. Blog comments have this just-right affordance that isn’t adequately met any other way. (LOT)
All of this is consistent with Clay Shirky‘s theory on how blogs avoid the tragedy of the commons. (Since I’ve been giving Clay so much link love these past few days, it’s worth noting that, “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” is my favorite of his essays.) Clay writes: (LOU)
Weblogs are relatively flame-free because they provide little communal space. In economic parlance, weblogs solve the tragedy of the commons through enclosure, the subdividing and privatizing of common space. (LOV)
Every bit of the weblog world is operated by a particular blogger or group of bloggers, who can set their own policy for accepting comments, including having no comments at all, deleting comments from anonymous or unfriendly visitors, and so on. Furthermore, comments are almost universally displayed away from the main page, greatly limiting their readership. Weblog readers are also spared the need for a bozo filter. Because the mailing list pattern of ‘everyone sees everything’ has never been in effect in the weblog world, there is no way for anyone to hijack existing audiences to gain attention. (LOW)
http://www.techcrunch.com/author/michael-arrington/ recently asked whether comments should be a requirement for blogs. My answer is definitively no. The distinguishing feature that makes blogs unique are the use of links for commenting. In this sense, Permalinks are more of a defining characteristic than comment sections are, because they are what enable this blogs-as-conversation capability. (LOX)
That said, I’m anxious to turn my blog comments back on, which will happen once I upgrade my blog software. (Soon, I swear.) (LOY)