Making People and Technology Really Work

A while back when the internet was still fairly new, my colleague Tony Larcombe and I realized that electronic communications had made office location irrelevant to getting projects and work done. Not only did location not matter, physical boundaries and time differences didn’t matter either.

What mattered was that technology could be used to make sure that individuals and working teams could work on projects seamlessly regardless of where they were. We called our model the Electronic Umbrella and we set out our ideas in a white paper called The Electronic Umbrella: Fusing People and Technology so the Organization Really Works.

We were way ahead of our time. People thought the Umbrella Model was unrealistic.

In fact, our vision has begun to come true, in part, because of improved electronics and in part, because of the rising cost of travel both in terms of time and money. It’s more effective and cheaper to have the right team members whether or not they are in the same place. Moreover, easy communications can make re-location unnecessary. Some people call this using a distributed workforce.

Improved electronics, communications coupled with high travel costs all act in favor of a distributed workforce. Even so, the distributed workforce will not work well unless the entire staff has bought into some form of the Umbrella model and is not merely giving it lip-service in order to have a job. It will not work well unless a comfort zone is created so that people who are miles or even oceans apart are willing and able to work together on an on-going basis without thinking about or being affected by physical location or by any discomfort with the technology that makes this possible.

Getting that done takes some expertise. But it is possible, it is effective and it is likely the model for the future.

Basic Assumptions

Almost all of us have at least one area of expertise. Whatever it is, we know the subject matter backwards, forwards and in our sleep. Our expertise has been amassed over time and often, we’ve forgotten how hard we had to work when we first began to learn the material.

Indeed, because we are so familiar with the material, we know the items in the foundation on which they rest so well that we don’t have to think about them anymore. Over time, they have become basic assumptions. When we talk to others, we generally don’t mention them much less think about them — we likely proceed from the level above the foundation that comprises our basic assumptions.

The problem is that most people outside our area of expertise don’t know our area very well. They may know very little about it or nothing at all. They have no way to identify the basic assumptions that are crucial to understanding what we are saying. As a result, they may not understand what we are trying to tell them. It’s not that they are stupid. They are simply not experts in our field. In fact, if they were to talk to us about their area of expertise, we would run into the same problem.

It doesn’t matter whether one is an IT person, a financial expert, someone who knows history or politics or something else. If we want to talk to someone outside our own area of expertise and have them understand what we are saying, we have to dredge up those basic assumptions, uncover them and lay them out in the light of day.