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Your Story: Throwing new tools at a communication problem?
Merlin Mann | Mar 15 2008
I'm working on a (likely non-43 Folders) piece about a topic that seems to keep coming up whenever I talk with people about how their team plans, collaborates, and generally communicates with one another. I'd love to hear from you in comments if you have a contribution to make. What’s your story?Do you have a story about a time when your team or company tried to solve a human communication problem by adding a new tool? In your estimation, how did things turn out?
Yours doesn't need to be a horror story to be included here -- there are certainly ample examples in which a thorny problem disappeared by introducing a bit of high (or low) technology to the mix. But, the anecdotes I hear from worker bees often focus on the frustration they felt when a wiki, a new CMS, a mailing list, or some other tool was introduced into an ecosystem that was suffering from a more fundamental communication problem. A lot of people tell me that this makes matters much worse all around, often amplifying the complexity of the original problem, in addition to piling on burnt cycles that were committed on getting everyone up to speed on the new "silver bullet." If you have a minute over the next week or so, please share your story here. Redact details that you think need redacting, but please consider telling me how things went for you and your group. And, if you feel like a whole or partial solution to the core problem ever did come along, that would be great to know, as well. Already documented this someplace else? Know of someone else who did? Links to relevant stories are also greatly appreciated. If things pan out, I may be contacting a few of you offline for more details, and conceivably, an interview or two. Thanks in advance. 34 Comments
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New tools for newsSubmitted by knackeredhack on March 15, 2008 - 5:47pm.
Running a large news organization in the midst of a rapidly changing media, finance and tech ecology in the late 1990s, it struck me that the only way for the journalists to remain relevant was to speed up their ability to collaborate to absolute real-time, and across disciplines. The culture has caught up with us, and I see Twitter being used in just such a way as I applied mIRC, but in an open source way. More about that in this link here. http://knackeredhack.com/2007/12/19/66-characters-in-search-of-a-story/ My main advice for managers would be to understand in detail the nature of the problem to be resolved, and to observe with great care the individual interactions. Collaboration needs a light touch from the manager to allow a particular type of personality to emerge that can hold a team together. That person won't necessarily be someone normally found in a supervisory function and may be as important as the functionality of the tools chosen. » POSTED IN:
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