Reflections on culture and technology
I find that the only way I really deepen my cultural competency is when I am immersed in a process with people who are in some way different than myself. I can read about diversity and inclusion, and benefit somewhat, but it’s only when I am challenged by being in-relationship with others that I reach those deeper places where resistance lives
I spent last week in a class at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC) in Portland, Oregon. This is my fifth year at SIIC, and like every other year, I learned a lot about my limitations and how much I don’t know. The classes range from a couple of hours to five days, with my favorite being the five days. It’s enough time to dig deep into a topic while taking advantage of the diversity in the room to experience walking up to my edge.
Terry Brake, of tmaworld, taught the 5-day class on Culture, Technology, and Communication in the Global Workplace.
Lessons about Global Virtual Teams
Virginia Yonkers stopped by this blog each day with very helpful insights. She wrote a blog post, entitled Lessons Learned in Working with International Virtual Groups, which summarizes insights that she and her classes have gathered over the years about working with global teams. It’s a great resource list and very little is about the technology itself. Curiosity, resiliency, and patience seem to be at the center of the required skills.
I also had the pleasure of interviewing the faculty for the class, Terry Brake, for the ASTD-Cascadia podcast. We talk about his upcoming book, Where in the world is my team: Making a success of your virtual global workplace. I’m really looking forward to it, because we got a preview of the material in class. It has a lot to offer anyone who is building diverse teams
Moving beyond the class
The class has a Facebook page where we plan to continue sharing resources. We have also chosen a delicious tag (siic2008cct) for collecting things that may help. If you are interested in the intersection between culture, technology, and communication join the Facebook page or tag some resources.
Reflections on my participation
Facilitation skills + technology skills + some cultural competency ≠ competent participation on virtual global teams.
I’ve been a facilitator for a long time. I know that the process is foundational, and must be operating smoothly for the content to be effective. Why then, did I jump right in with everybody else to focus on content/task/outcome. Did I leave my facilitation skills at home?
We kept hearing about continuous partial attention, the state many of us are in while we are managing multiple tasks. We would encounter a challenge in class, have to come up with a way to use technology, navigate the cultural differences, listen to very fluent but accented voices, and achieve some kind of outcome in a short amount of time. Not to mention checking email and answering inquiries from the office.
Kermit Pattison’s article, Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching in Fast Company wonders about the impact of our behavior:
I argue that when people are switching contexts every 10 and half minutes they can’t possibly be thinking deeply. There’s no way people can achieve flow. When I write a research article, it takes me a couple of hours before I can even begin to think creatively. If I was switching every 10 and half minutes, there’s just no way I’d be able to think deeply about what I’m doing. This is really bad for innovation. When you’re on the treadmill like this, it’s just not possible to achieve flow.
I learned a lot in the class. Way more than I could have by reading about how to be successful. I don’t think our project output reflects the depth of the learning. I found myself taking shortcuts and aiming for “good enough”. Which is a much lower standard than I usually aim for.
The other thing I noticed is I did not get to meet many other people from the other classes at the Institute. It took all my focus to participate in the global teams’ class. There was so much audio processing from simulating conference calls, and having to listen very carefully to the variety of accents, I was totally exhausted by the end of the day. Usually I will attend the evening socials, which start at 9:30 PM. Not this time, I had to go home and go to bed. I have colleagues who were there who I did not even get a chance to talk to.
Blogging each day
This was a stretch for me. First because the days are long and I was really tired, but also because I am fairly reflective, and it’s hard for me to experience something new and then turn right around and write about it. I usually try to be clearer and spend more time on my posts, so it was new to throw unfinished ideas up on the blog.
Which technology?
I was surprised to see much of the class was about using conference calls, chat and email. It seems that these tools are what is still most common for many virtual teams. Certainly the people in the class who were working with organizations often had other web conferencing tools, but I saw way less social media tools than I expected. I realize that is still true in the larger whole, but I thought people who were involved in virtual teams would already be using the whole gamut of collaboration tools available. Instead, people were sharing tools and signing up in class for the ones they weren’t already using. It was also nice to see some of the older class members were using more of the tools than the younger members.
Photographs? Not under pressure
I’m not a snapshot photographer. It seldom occurs to me to take pictures unless I am specifically out on a photo shoot. So here I am in a visual company writing a blog without photographs again. I also realized I have a lot of things in my office to help me with the visuals like fancy software, digital tablets and a network drive full of photos. Away from the office on a strange laptop, suddenly everything seemed hard. So I just ignored it. The pressure to perform the tasks to get the assignments done superseded my need to illustrate my posts. I have a lot more empathy for people who don’t know where to start with photographs.
Take aways?
Building teams takes time. Over technology, it takes way more.
The process of how you will communicate, and even more how you will sense and respond when people are not communicating is really important. Dare I say, the most important?
The cost of not attending to all aspects of process is losing potential input that can be critical to move the outcome from good enough to high performance.
Cross cultural, technology, and communication skills separately will help you, but you have to learn all over again when you are combining them.
In order to work on a global virtual team regularly, I would need to come up with some way to have visual inputs. Shared visuals, and ways to draw on a whiteboard is really important to me, and central to the way I make meaning.
I’m left with a question posed by one of our class participants Miki Yamashita:
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