Last month, Inc Magazine announced they were going to leave their fancy office & become a virtual organisation.

At least for a month – for a test run. The April issue of the magazine will let us know how they went.

Along the way they’ve been talking to others who work virtually. I caught this video convo with Matt Mullenweg from Automattic /Wordpress.

Matt talks about their distributed organisation & something he said just clicked with me. When asked about the problems with the communicating to his staff around the world he said that communication problems aren’t a problem. That they’re just something to be aware of. Everything has strength & weakness.

That immediately took me back to a conversation I had multiple times with a former boss. Our video conference system was bad (fuzzy video, hard to hear audio). Everyone was aware the system was bad but not many seemed aware of the small things that could make it better… making sure you were close to the microphone when speaking, making sure everyone had received the file electronically before the meeting, letting 1 person talk at a time so the microphone could pick up that 1 sound, etc. Often I pointed out small things like this could make the difference but I could tell it went into the too hard basket. *

Each communication tool has strengths & weaknesses. You just need to understand what those are & how to work with the weakness. It’s not a problem. FANTASTIC!

(*Actually, the more video meetings we had, the more some people adapted but there wasn’t ever a mindset change)

HBR published this article – Obama’s Five Collaboration Mistakes.

It seems the mistakes he’s made are

• He may talk about collaboration & use all the right language but his team doesn’t (thus sending mixed messages)
• He delegated to others, not collaborated with others
• Not all parties felt like they had been heard
• There need to be compromises (you can’t win them all)
• Lack of a compelling overall goal

I don’t know know if I agree with those in regards to what Obama is doing or has done but they are good things to keep in mind when you’re trying to bring people together.

dave and his guitar have been getting press. lots of it.

if you don’t know the story, dave is in a band and united didn’t take very good care of the equipment he checked during a flight. after 9 months of trying to get united to pay for the damages and united refusing, dave is serenading them with what can’t be called a love song. check out the dave’s video called ‘united breaks guitars‘ on youtube.

as i write this, the video has almost 3 million views. it seems CNN, NPR and CBS have run stories. he’s being interviewed for rolling stone. the viral started by dave sending an email to his friends.

everyone has gotten the message by now – it might even be sinking in at united considering their tweets over the last couple days state they have donated money as per dave’s request. they claim they will use the video in training and they have learned from their mistake. but it doesn’t feel very sincere, does it?

i don’t see anything on the united.com website. there doesn’t seem to be a response on youtube. no post on twitter directing you to a page which explains exactly what they did, how they messed up and what this training and learning impact will be.

i fly united a bit. have a lot of freq flyer miles with them. i know they’re not an amazing airline but in my experience they’re not any worse than other airlines (i know, such an endorsement!). dave’s treatment doesn’t make me want to fly with them and i wonder if they recognise that damage is occurring.

oh! one other thing united (if you’re listening), the promotion you’re running… of getting 50,000 number of twitter followers by july 17 to give x% discount is sending a bad message. it tells me you only want masses of numbers and you will treat me as such (just like you treated dave). perhaps this is why you haven’t hit the follower targets? (currently at 16,854 on july 15).

over at harvard business blogs, gina trapani of lifehacker gives her best practice tips for not being in the office – in Master the Art of Working Remotely.

her tips include:

• get better at using email
• using IM so you are ‘present’ in the office for those quick off the cuff conversations
• use online tools that fit the client & the project (like shared calendars & docs or wikis)
• have regular voice/webcam chats

i agree with all 4 of those but want to put extra emphasis on the last item. i recommend organising regular (1-2x a week) voice communication from the very first day of the team or remote working relationship. depending on the stage of the project, increase the frequency (launching in 4 weeks? testing and need quick turn arounds? schedule a phone SCRUM for everyday).

it’s also a good idea to prepare and encourage folks to pick up the phone or use skype IMPROMPTU just as they would if the person was at the other end of the same building. perhaps it’s a hangover of thinking how much this long distance call will cost but email seems to be more popular.

having any sort of real time conversation takes more planning. check a time zone calculator! no one wants to wake someone up at 3am. make sure there’s at least an hour overlap in both people’s schedules and rotate the pain of the 10pm phone call if that’s required.

i have seen situations where emails went back & forth for a week or more with no resolution and only increasing frustration on both sides until a phone call clarified the situation (and then everyone realised the problem was small and easy to fix). This continued frustration hurts the relationship & trust and damages the ability of the team to continue working together.

making sure you have ‘f2f’ time is important. if you’re lucky enough to have overlapping time zones, make sure you use IM and other collaborative tools. being able to look at the same document/picture/video/etc in real time and discuss or mark up the object will save hours of work and cut down on mis-understanding.

a new study has shown there’s a link between living overseas and creativity.

using a multi-method approach, 5 studies explored the relationship btwn creativity and living abroad. it seems the act of adapting to a different culture and how much you adapt is the key to improved creativity. and it seems just traveling overseas doesn’t have the same link.

“It may be that those critical months or years of turning cultural bewilderment into concrete understanding may instill not only the ability to ‘think outside the box’ but also the capacity to realise that the box is more than a simple square, more than its simple form, but also a repository of many creative possibilities.”

the authors state this is just the beginning of the research needed but i think they are onto something. living overseas exposes you to different ideas, ways of doing things, mindsets, cultures, etc. you may be exposed to these same things when traveling but it’s not until you need to do those mundane daily things like ordering a coffee or leasing an apartment that the brain needs to kick some creativity into the process and re-learn.

one research question i’d love to see further developed by folks going into this stream is – is your creativity enhanced by the degree of foreignness of the country you choose to live in? for example, an american in japan vs an american in the UK. i think this study was european & americans but i’m not sure what countries the cultural experiences were in (i haven’t read the full article).

hmmm…. had i moved to a country that didn’t speak english and didn’t use the same characters, would my creativity be enhanced more than it is now (having lived in 3 english speaking countries)? maybe i should head to tokyo to find out…

Maddux, W., & Galinsky, A. (2009). Cultural borders and mental barriers: The relationship between living abroad and creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96 (5), 1047-1061

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