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More on replacing business travel from Jessica Lipnack

Flickr CC from linh_nganLast week I wrote about Obliterate or strategically use business travel?

Then I saw this post on Facebook by NetTeams wizardess, Jessica Lipnack. Her emphasis on the social processes resonates. It is worth a link here…

Facebook | Jessica Lipnack’s Notes

…Many reporters, for example, The New York Times’s fine one, Steve Lohr, whose article, “As travel costs rise, more meetings go virtual,” took the headline earlier this week. Nothing wrong with Lohr’s article, good, solid reporting with news for the newbies to the area: Cisco’s telepresence offering, high price tag aside, makes participants feel like they’re “there;” “companies of all sizes are beginning to shift to Web-based meetings for training and sales;” and this, worth the pull quote:

A report last month by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, a group of technology companies, and the Climate Group, an environmental organization, estimated that up to 20 percent of business travel worldwide could be replaced by Web-based and conventional videoconferencing technology.

Twenty percent? Me thinks a lot higher. But, numbers aside, where Lohr’s article is like all the rest – and where it misses the point – is in this: Technology alone does not solve the problem. I’ve harped on about this before. Our old motto, “90% people, 10% technology,” is being drowned out by the reflexive action whereby companies/organizations throw technology into the hands that once held airline tickets.

Here are a couple of more related articles if you are interested in this topic of when and how to replace F2F meetings with virtual meetings.

July 31 Addition: As an added afterthought (I keep adding links) this is also a technology stewardship issue. Who is building the capacity to use these tools well? What does their community of practice look like!)

Photo Credit:
Uploaded on July 7, 2008
by linh.ngân

Obliterate or strategically use business travel?

Uploaded on July 24, 2008 law_kevinFast Company has a provocative article out yesterday under their “Big Idea” flag about “obliterating” business travel. Sounds like quite a headline, eh?

July 23, 2008
“Within five years, technology will obliterate the need for business travel.” – Inspired by new videoconferencing technologies and rising fuel costs

… Companies too are making an active effort to limit employees’ air travel for the duel-pronged benefits of cutting costs and being environmentally friendly. AT&T has reportedly reduced employee air miles by 15% through video conferencing and Web meetings, while Accenture plans to have 22 video conferencing rooms installed around the world by the end of this year.

OK, I am in firm agreement that we can cut out a lot of business travel, particularly when we are doing things like information dissemination. I cringe each time go to or hear of international gatherings where the structured interaction is all presentation. Thank goodness for meals and coffee breaks. But I think we should seriously rethink large conferences. See Jim Benson’s post on this… But what about the other things we get on airplanes and fly around the world to do, both explicitly and implicitly, with each other? (No, I’m NOT talking about mile-high clubs!)

We know we can do meaningful work and learning with each other at a distance, even without video conferencing. (In fact, please, I don’t want to have to get out of my yoga clothes for a vid!). Sales can happen via online technologies. But is there a “throw out the baby with the bathwater” element here? Will we obliterate business travel, or use is both more sparingly and strategically? I think it is the latter and here’s why.

Learning is not an instant… it is a path
I was chatting with Tony Karrer (lots of good stuff in his blog and at his new venture with Michele Martin, Work Literacy) earlier today about “training.” Oi, such a word. One of my friends says “training is for dogs, learning is for humans.” I’m not quite that rabid (or am I a dog?) but often feel like training is dumping information on people (see this clever slide show for an articulation of this.) We have expectations that training as an isolated act solves a skill or more general learning need.

In my experience, it ain’t that simple. Yes, there are certainly things we can learn and apply with a quick workshop – online or face to face (F2F). But taking learning and deepening it, applying it to work, innovating upon it – that takes time. And it sometimes takes poking at the issue from more than one direction. Working on it over time. Or perhaps with more than one stick. This is where blending online and F2F can sometimes be the thing that puts us over the current hurdle. I learn something online with you today. I go off and work on it. We help each other online. Then we get to meet, have a great meal and we start out talking about our projects, and then we go from there, discovering new learning from each other we never even imagined. Kismet, made possible by the space we create when we take time to meet F2F.

Why is there something important about this F2F stuff? Because so much of learning is nurtured by the social context and sometimes the online social context is not always sufficient for everyone. I find it very satisfying. My sister does not. Have we had some shared experiences to compare? You bet. So those of us who smugly say we can do it all online have not yet found a way to translate those rich experiences to others with different preferences and styles of learning and interacting. And, hey, we still can’t sit down and make/share a meal fully online.

Going F2F creates a different and time bounded social context. We give each other full attention for a limited amount of time. Online, we may spread that attention out – even if we are using synchronous technologies. One of the most powerful gathering experiences for me is being able to work and stay at the same place with people – a research facility, the same hotel, or in a colleagues home. The mix of work and play, of social and intellectual, creates a different sort of stew that jumpstarts my learning differently than online. Being able to “sleep on” what we said today makes tomorrow’s conversation deeper. This F2F stuff is different, not better or worse.

We benefit from that difference. The translocation to another place jostles new ideas and opens us up. We get out of our cocoon and I think that can be very productive. And in my experience, it bolsters and deepens both the learning and the subsequent online interactions.

So lets reduce business travel – it saves time, money and the environment. But lets not obliterate it because there is value in the social learning context of face to face gatherings, particularly ones that open the space for us to create meaning and ideas together. Skip the panel and the presentation. Break out the good food, wine and tea. Let’s sit elbow to elbow, look over each others’ shoulders and let’s get to work. AND, let’s do great things together online.

Photo Credit (CC)

view photostream Uploaded on July 24, 2008
by law_keven

How the World Sees the US

Water
Creative Commons License photo credit: celebdu
I’m back from Ethiopia and Las Vegas – talk about culture shock. I have a stack of half finished blog posts and a cold and the cold is winning. So in the interim, I’m going to post pointers to some interesting sites. (Doesn’t take too many brain cells which are not doing so well at the moment!)

First is a collection of music videos from the world music site, Calabash, which give a musical perspective on one of our US presidential candidates, Barak Obama. To get a sense of how the world sees the US, listen to the lyrics on viva música!: Obama – The WorldBeat Album.

When I work outside of my home country, people often ask me my political views. Trust is given or withheld depending on my answer. Regardless of your politics, it is really important to have a sense of how the world views the US because it is a global society and we can’t sit isolated from the world. In some ways, we are very good at playing out in the world. In others, we have a lot of ground to cover.

If you are a US voter, please think about this as you make your selection. How the world sees and understands us matters. Like it or not, that starts with our leaders! However, it doesn’t stop there. What we do to respond to the terrible losses in Burma or China matter as much as our response to losses in Oklahoma. So let’s be part of the world from the top down and the bottom up.

Want to take your blogging to the next level?

People ask me, “how do I become a better blogger and how can I make money at blogging?” There are tons of great resources out there on how to become a better blogger, and I usually don’t have a good answer for the second part. But today an email from Ben Rattray of Change.org gave me a thought. Change.org is looking for paid bloggers around activist issues. There is a monthly stipend – I’m sure it isn’t huge, but this is a paid gig. It offers a good writer the chance to hone her skill, get exposure and street cred as a paid blogger. And heck, while doing some good! It’s a good combination. Check it out…Change.org

Want to blog on an issue you are passionate about for an audience of hundreds of thousands of activists and nonprofit leaders?

Want to create the premier online space for your issue and become a leading voice for social action?

Change.org is launching a social action blog network this summer and is currently hiring a team of part-time bloggers/editors to help create a movement for change around the major causes of our time.

Each blogger will lead an online community focusing on a different social, political, or environmental issue, maintain a daily blog covering news and offering commentary, convene leading nonprofits and activists working on the issue, and help people translate their interests and passions into concrete action.

Musings on “community management” Part 2

Words from Community SessionMy last post was on the ground, in-the-flow practical stuff of online community management in response to Chris Brogan’s great post, On Managing A Community . This one climbs up to meta-ville a bit and asks a couple of questions.

Are we talking about communities, or are we embarking on the era of network facilitation?
If you read between the lines and through the comments on Chris’s blog I think he has begun to tease out some of the differences between community and network management! (I’ll come back to that word “management.”) Read through his goals which I think are different than what we have come to expect for what I’ll call “traditional online community management.” In the past this has been about the inward set of processes around hosting, moderation and facilitation of web based discussion communities – large or small. He speaks of outreach, of reputation of an organization in the world, and of mechanisms of learn from and with groups of people and even the wider world. It is an outward looking role, not inward. It is about spawning connections, not keeping existing connections organized.

This is not your mother’s discussion board, sweetheart!

When we move to the network, a couple of things happen. The notion of managing becomes even more of an illusion than managing that herd of cats called “community.” (By community, I mean a bounded set of individuals who care about something and who know they are members and interact with each other over time.)

Instead we are talking about scanning for things important for our organizations – conversations about us, niches or needs we can fill, feedback and suggestions for improving what we do. It is filtering and redirecting those messages to where they can do good. It is a little bit like listening to the universe.

Instead of managing conflict or spammers in a walled community, we are seeking to make connections between people that advance our organization’s learning and goals. That includes between disgruntled people and the people who might address that problem, between ideas, links and content to people who might use them, and between communities that exist within the humus of the network garden.

Instead of spawning or archiving threads, we are tagging and remixing. Instead of inviting in or kicking out members, we are mapping the network of relationships, looking for where to respond, and where to catalyze action.

These are not the list of community management skills we have come to know since the first big upswing in online communities in the mid 1990’s. We have moved to from community to network…. what is the word?

If we are talking about communities, are we really talking about managers?
I don’t think it is management in the traditional sense, in the sense of control and mold (or even “facilipulate” – manipulate+facilitate!). It is about sensing, scanning, filtering and connecting. And, it is about learning. Facilitating learning. Living the learning and creating the next iteration of that learning. It is about stewarding technology as wave upon wave of new tools crashes upon our organizations.

It is about weaving between the community and the network.

What the heck would this job be called? Which organizations have the foresight to invest in it — and realize that those who help them weave their organizations in and out of the networks will benefit most from those networks? If we were looking for this person, what skills would they show up with? What would their traces across the internet look like?