Three Simple Hacks for Making Delightful Virtual Spaces

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

This is Katie Krummeck. She’s the Community Experience Coordinator at Stanford’s d.school. What exactly does that mean? It means a lot of things, but you can get a tiny taste by reading her sign, which sits on her desk on the first floor of the building.

I am in love with the space at the d.school, which — not surprisingly — is beautiful and functional. But Katie’s sign might be my favorite thing there. Why? Because it’s low-tech, it does what it’s supposed to do, and it adds a touch of humanity (among many) to the space. If you’re wandering around the lobby, lost or looking for something, you will eventually run into Katie and her sign, and you will not only know immediately that she can help you, but that she is happy to help you. It’s the difference between a functional space and a delightful, inviting space.

Creating delightful, inviting spaces is simple, but not easy. Unfortunately, we often make it unnecessarily complicated. I don’t expect most workspaces to have wide open, reconfigurable spaces with natural light on two sides and moveable whitewalls and furniture. But why can’t all workspaces have signs like this? How many actually do?

Here are three of my favorite, low-tech hacks in the same spirit as Katie’s sign for making virtual interactions more human and delightful.

Welcoming People to Online Forums

This is one of the oldest, most powerful tricks for making even the crappiest online forums inviting. When people post for the first time, respond to their post, and welcome them. It’s simple, requires no training, and it works with all tools, including face-to-face.

Distributing a (Silly) Printed Team Picture for Conference Calls

Our intuitions about video are largely wrong, and the technical costs and inconvenience are still quite high. (Think about the 15 minutes that we often waste at the beginning of each call, because someone can’t get the tool working.)

Here’s a trick I learned from Marcia Conner. Take a photo of the team, preferably a silly one, and distributed printed copies to everyone to post on their walls during conference calls. It’s cheap, it’s just as good (if not better) at creating a sense of connection and fun, and it works with both synchronous and asynchronous tools.

Theme Your Online Tools

Groupaya was a virtual company, even though we all lived in San Francisco. We took advantage of our physical proximity by coworking twice a week, but we wanted a way to stay connected virtually as well. We tried Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Google Plus, and Status.net. None of them ever got any traction.

Then we tried WordPress with P2, a hack whose features paled in comparison to the other tools. But one thing we could easily do was re-theme it. So I spent about 20 minutes making the background orange — the same color as Kristin Cobble’s beautiful kitchen, where we often worked — and choosing and cropping a meaningful, delightful photograph to serve as the header image.

That was the difference that made the difference. It rapidly succeeded where the other tools had failed. Our usage numbers only told part of the story. Everyone simply loved using the tool.

Kristin's Kitchen

Marcia Conner on Sharing

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Back in 2006, Mark Oehlert invited me to participate in a workshop with the CIA on collaboration in the intelligence community and the potential impact that social media might have. Several friends participated, including Marcia Conner.

Seven years later, Mark is itching to put together an updated piece on the importance of sharing, of conversation, and of being human. He’s got some cool ideas, but they’re all still coagulating. Rather than wait for it to come together before revealing it to the world, he reached out to some of the original participants and asked us to model these values by having conversations on these themes via Google Hangout and by sharing them openly with the world.

Mark requested that I talk with Marcia on sharing, which we did this morning. Enjoy!

One Small Change

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

How do you improve the productivity of software developers? Software engineering guru, Martin Fowler, has a surprising answer: Give them bigger screens.    (LV4)

Thinking like this fascinates me. In Super Size Me, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock suggests that the way to improve U.S. schools is to eliminate junk food from cafeterias, and cites studies correlating physical education and test scores. Learning guru (and Blue Oxen Associates advisor) Marcia Conner recently cited studies showing how outdoor education affects learning in the classroom.    (LV5)

In previous posts, I’ve speculated that improved geography skills will lead to better foreign policy decisions, and I’ve also discussed the role that more and better dialog might have on the world.    (LV6)

What would be One Small Change that would drastically improve the way you or your team collaborates? Post your ideas to your blog (and link back here), or Ideas send them to me.    (LV7)

Learning and Collaboration

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

On a warm summer evening in Virginia last July, I sat on Marcia Conner‘s porch and wondered aloud whether we were in the same business. Marcia cares about collaboration, but she’s nuts about learning. If she doesn’t hear the word “learning” in the context of projects she’s involved with, alarm bells go off in her head.    (LJ7)

I’m equally passionate about collaboration and learning, but I can talk about my work without ever mentioning the latter. My reasoning, as I explained that night, was that good collaboration encompasses learning, and the best way to learn is to collaborate. You can’t talk about “collaboration” without also thinking about “learning.”    (LJ8)

Doug Engelbart often says that high-performance communities are experts at CoDIAK — collectively developing, integrating, and applying knowledge. I hate the acronym, because I think it’s unnecessarily esoteric. What CoDIAK boils down to is:    (LJ9)

  • Learn.    (LJA)
  • Share and apply what you know.    (LJB)
  • Repeat early and often.    (LJC)

There’s that “learn” word again.    (LJD)

I still believe that collaboration encompasses learning, but I’ve changed my mind about whether it’s important to explicitly mention learning in the context of my work. Marcia, of course, is to blame. We were chatting in the attic of a colleague’s home last Friday, with her two year old son, Clarke, playing on the floor as we talked, and our conversation again drifted towards learning. I was talking about a project I’m involved with, and I explained that while it still felt important, I wasn’t learning any more.    (LJE)

As soon as I said it, I laughed to myself, because it sounded like something that Marcia would have complained about. Yesterday, as I was reading Allison Fine‘s Momentum, a book that Marcia gave me, I was again struck by how important learning is to my work. I believe very strongly in defining projects concretely and getting things done, but I refuse to take on a client who doesn’t care about learning. I expect to learn from my work, and I expect my clients to want to learn as part of our collaboration. This is not a requirement to be in this business. There are plenty of projects where clients don’t give a damn about learning. They just want you to get the work done. I’ve been offered these kinds of projects in the past, and the work itself is often intellectual, enjoyable, and well-paying. I still turn it down. My mission is to help people learn about collaboration, and I won’t work on projects where that’s not happening.    (LJF)

I’ve already made it a practice to describe Blue Oxen Associates‘ long-term goal as building and facilitating a Learning Community centered around collaboration. I could just as easily have chosen Engelbart’s term, Improvement Community, or Etienne Wenger‘s term, Community of Practice, but I chose Peter Senge‘s instead, and the fact that “learning” is there was a major reason why. I’m currently in the process of revamping our web site, and I plan on making “learning” a more explicit part of our message.    (LJG)