Learn and Lead: Collaboration

Showing posts with label Collaboration. Show all posts

Seven Survival Skills in Today’s World

Labels: adaptability, agility, Collaboration, communication, critical thinking, curiosity, education, IFC, imagination, knowledge, ReThinking Education, skill, skills, Tom Wagner, will 0 comments

I recently came across International Finance Corporation’s (IFC). It’s “6th International Private Education Conference, Rethinking Education, Shaping the Future, brought together thought leaders and investors in education from around the globe. On April 1-2, 2014 in San Francisco, USA, the delegates discussed how innovation and technology in education delivery and results measurement are giving us new tools for broadening access to quality education for millions of students around the world.”

Their YouTube channel provides you with access to videos of their conference.

The keynote address to the conference was by Tony Wagner. Tony Wagner “currently serves as an Expert In Residence at Harvard University’s new Innovation Lab. Prior to this appointment, Tony was the first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, and the founder and co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for more than a decade. His previous work experience includes twelve years as a high school teacher, K-8 principal, university professor in teacher education, and founding executive director of Educators for Social Responsibility.”

In this video, Tony makes some very pertinent points. Knowledge today has become commodity, available on every Internet connected device. It is no longer a scarce commodity available only with teachers. Because it was a scarce commodity in the past, it was considered that the more knowledge one had, the more value one had in the market place. Today one doesn’t need a teacher to acquire knowledge. And so how can one add value to the market place?

Knowledge is one leg of the stool, which is easy to acquire. The other two legs are Skill and Will. Skill is about asking the questions, how to acquire new knowledge, how to solve new problems. Will is the motivation to use the knowledge and skill.

In his research with companies on what are they looking for in new hires, Tony discovered that the set of core competencies required are very similar, not just to get a job, but to be a continuous learner and be an active and informed citizen. The seven survival skills in today’s world are:

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Critical Thinking is all about knowing how to ask really good questions, how to ask the right questions, not necessarily get the right answers.
Collaboration across Networks and Leading by Influence: Teams are no longer led by supervisors. They are led by peers through influence.
Agility and Adaptability: Schools are in complete contrast with this requirement of the world today with their unchanging environment and syllabus.
Initiative and Entrepreneurial-ship: Companies are not looking for employees who set 4-5 goals and meet all of them. They are looking at employees who set 10 stretch goals and succeeds 7-8 out of them.
Effective Oral and Written Communication: The kids can’t write today because they don’t know how to think. They are also not writing with voice, which is putting their passion and perspective in the conversation to be more persuasive.
Accessing and Analyzing Information: We need to teach the students to be able to search the Internet for information.
Curiosity and Imagination

What is Social Media?

Labels: Collaboration, communities, conversation, customers, media, social, Social Media, ubiquitous 0 comments

Two keywords of social media are "Social" and "Media".

Social media is about being social. It is about connecting with your communities: customers, employees, partners, investors, service providers. It is about conversations and collaboration between these communities. You are not social if you are not having a dialog. Remember, monologues were never considered social.

Social media is also about using media to be social. In the very near past (and even today), conventional channels of media were more unidirectional and slow for two way communication. Communities are now conversing using the new media in form of various social network site. People are blogging and commenting everywhere. Use these multitude of media to connect with them and start a conversation.

Devices these days have made media ubiquitous and your communities are having conversations everywhere and at all times. You need to be available 24x7 to connect with the communities.

Collaboration: It’s Not About Technology, It’s About the Culture

Labels: Collaboration, Employee portals, Google Docs, Micro-blogging, micro-messaging, Salesforce, Sharepoint, Socialcast, Socialtext, Technology, Tools, Webex, Windows Live SkyDrive, Workplace, Yammer, Zoho 1 comments

I got a chance to talk about how companies can use technology internally to collaborate and share more effectively. I started with examining what’s currently in use in organizations.

Email is the most commonly used collaborative tool. Unfortunately it is also perhaps the worst tool for open collaboration in an organization. You can only collaborate with people you send the email to. And the information is then trapped in email inboxes of people who were communicating with each other, with no access to others. The information isn’t shared beyond the people who the email was marked to.

There are other tools used for collaboration, like project-based collaboration using Microsoft SharePoint and wiki-based project workspaces. Amongst synchronous collaboration tools, there’s chat, video conferencing and online web conferencing tools like WebEx and Microsoft Office Communications Server. There are also tools like Salesforce that have the potential to be great collaboration tools if they are used correctly. And many employee portals also provide some collaboration features like discussion forums.

Of the tools that companies can use for collaboration, I am a proponent of micro-messaging in the workplace. Tools like Yammer, Socialcast, and Socialtext are great micro-messaging tools. Cloud documents is another collaboration tool that I feel companies should probably use more frequently. Services like Google Docs, Windows Live SkyDrive and Zoho are great online collaboration tools. Companies could also try Skype as a free video conferencing and web conferencing tool.

But I feel collaboration in companies is not really about technology. It’s about the culture. It’s the culture to:

- Broadcast yourself: Can you simply broadcast what you are doing without anyone necessarily anyone asking you? Executives in companies might be a little shy of doing this but unless you broadcast what you are doing, how can you collaborate?

- Openly seeking help: Don’t be shy to seek help, don’t worry what people will think about what you might not know.

- Respond to others: Collaboration is not one way. You have to be open to responding to others if you want collaboration as a culture in your organization.

- Share information freely: Do I even need to explain this?

- Build personal networks: The bigger your personal network is, the better your chances of collaboration. This is true even within an organization. The more people you know in an organization, the better your chances of collaboration.

- Not be afraid to make mistakes: You will make mistakes online. Can you build the culture where people are not afraid to make mistakes?

- Constantly be open to learning: Do you have a culture in your organization where everyone is eager to learn? The more open the culture to learning, the more collaboration you can expect in your organization.

It’s important to understand why companies should collaborate. Some contexts that have changed for me personally over last few years:

- I am as knowledgeable as the knowledge I have to I am as knowledgeable as the collective knowledge of my personal network.

- I am node of reference because I know things. Of course that’s true. But I am also the node of reference because I know who knows.

- I am expert because I know things, which is absolutely true. But if I don’t share what I know with others, I will soon lose my status as an expert. I am an expert because I share what I know.

- I can learn only from gurus. That’s something we should all let go. I can really learn from anyone irrespective of their position in the organization.

Here’s my presentation.

Collaboration 3.0 from Manish Mohan

Challenges with the Cloud

Labels: challenges, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Teamwork, Technology 1 comments

In the recent few months, I have encountered situations that required multi-location teams to collaborate and customers requiring almost real-time status update. I have tried to encourage usage of the “cloud” for the team spread across locations working on the same documents/spreadsheets. We have SharePoint Server as an option but that’s mostly used as file storage, if at all. I have explored Google Docs and Zoho. However for some reason working on the cloud just hasn’t take off. Here are the challenges I face with cloud computing:

INERTIA: We just aren’t really used to working on the cloud. Change is always hard and we just fall back on ways of working that we are comfortable with. It is always easier to simply email the document. It is easier to work just double click the document and start editing it rather than log on to the separate system in the browser and then navigate to the folder to edit the document.
NO INTEGRATION WITH EXISTING SYSTEMS: Using Google Docs or Zoho was hard because of lack of integration with existing systems. For example, we don’t always have a list of Gmail IDs for everyone in the team. This means an additional step to make the collaboration document accessible to all. Each cloud service requires a different login ID and password than the regular network sign-on on the machine.
ACCESSIBILITY AND SPEED: Many of our team members are traveling and are on the road so to speak. They don’t always have access to the Internet. So having documents on the cloud severely handicaps their ability to access the documents when there is no Internet connectivity. And working off the Net is slower than working off the local machine.
SECURITY FEARS: While we explored Google Docs and Zoho, there were fears whether we should actually store our company and client data on the cloud. While I am personally very confident that Google and Zoho will safeguard data stored on their server, there is still an inherent fear of putting up company and client data on their servers. Perhaps this fear is to do with the added responsibility that the individuals don’t own the data. There is no problem in having personal emails and chat on these servers, but putting company data on the cloud is just too much added responsibility.
LACK OF OFFICIAL ITS EVANGELISM: While we have SharePoint Server available to us, it is primarily used as file storage (if at all) rather than a real-time collaborative tool. Even with our SharePoint Server installation, there’s very little official ITS support available. There’s no one really evangelizing cloud collaboration as the new way of working. I would look for the ITS team providing awareness about official tools available and training on how to use them. This has to be driven by having cloud collaboration as part of the ITS strategy. I think this is the biggest hurdle to cross if cloud computing is to be embraced.

Do Your Systems and Processes Promote the Right Culture?

Labels: Collaboration, Creativity, Orgnization culture, Process, Systems 0 comments

I couldn’t help but smile when I saw this Dilbert strip. It also got me thinking. Are your systems and processes promoting the right culture that you want in your organization? You may have the most sophisticated systems and processes but if they stifle creativity, prevent collaboration, encourage fiefdoms and generally make it hard to work with each other in the organization, I recommend relooking at them. It would be great if we designed the systems and process keeping in mind the organization culture we want to create. Start with the culture in mind and then build the systems and processes around it.

Welcome!

Welcome to Learn and Lead. I write about learning, leadership, performance, management, elearning, training, blogging, tools, trends. Looking forward to your valuable comments.