jason fried of 37 signals spoke at the collaboration loop conference in boston last week. you can watch the video. he addresses 4 items – team size, team location, meetings & decisions – in addition to the usual jason phrases like ‘software gets in the way’ and ‘less is more’ (if you can’t tell, i’ve heard him speak several times and while i agree on some things… others, like his seeming distaste of planning/functional spec/etc, i disagree with. but i won’t go into that now).

his team (well, the entire company) consists of 7 people. he said at one point they went across 9 time zones and even the folks who live in the same city typically see each other in the office about once a month due to different working hours or working from home. they would have been an amazing team for my thesis research!

he advises keeping your team small. small keeps the ‘noise’ down. it also decreases the chances of ending up playing telephone (the childhood game where the message gets distorted as it goes from person to person).

he advocates keeping your team away from each other. they found the more distant they were, the more work they got done b/c there wasn’t as many interruptions. this is an excellent point about virtual work IF your team works out of their homes. it’s not such a great tip if your team happens to work in different offices and there’s plenty of other people to interrupt them. i loved the bit when he says even in their offices they don’t all sit together but sit at opposite ends in order to keep the distance/no interruption thing.

jason feels meetings are toxic and symptoms of problems. he thinks the more meetings you have the more people don’t know what’s going on and that meetings should be used as a last resort. i tend to agree here (though again, not with every bit of this) especially considering a conversation i had during a job interview recently. during the interview i was told someone thought the team had communication issues and then proceeded to have like 4 meetings around how they were not communicating!! brilliant!

the last point is to make tiny decisions. decisions are progress so make them & move on. tiny decisions mean u can’t make big mistakes.

but i think my favourite take away from the speech was –

collaboration is about communication not control

excellent. this was just in passing concerning not looking for software to control or watch what your employees are doing but to faciliate communication but it’s such a great thought to end on.