A recent article in the Washington Post highlighted the importance of meeting face to face for those who are striving to achieve specific business outcomes. As technology professionals, CIOs and their teams are certainly, and appropriately, focused on delivering the productivity-enhancing capabilities needed by the businesses they support. At the same time, however, they can be evangelists for the idea that for effective communications to take place, beginning with the goal in mind and then selecting the correct tool to produce the results is crucial.
This is, of course, not a suggestion that every meeting become a face to face effort. In fact, many exchanges of information do not require this level of contextualization. Rather, the point is that for things that are particularly tricky, have significant nuances, or which may have notable political overtones, having the ability to jointly confront issues in person can move the discussion forward and improve decision making velocity. This assumes that the right people are in the right place, for the right reason.
Understanding the best way to achieve results when engaging groups of people spans an organizational hierarchy. When thinking about the selection of the correct tools and forums for meeting engagement, it is also important to factor in the idea that different demographic generations will consume and absorb information in different ways. While tech-savvy organizations are frequently focused on virtualization as a means of boosting productivity and enhancing delivery capacity, one of the things we’ve noted on repeated visits to explore innovation in Silicon Valley is the degree to which face time is so critical. In fact, Amazon shared their “two-pizza rule,” which highlights the notion that in-person connections are critical to innovative collaboration, but there is a practical metric for a group that shouldn’t be bigger than a size that could reasonably split two pizzas for lunch.
Like many other things, the technology acquisition itself turns out to be relatively easy. The complexity comes when combining it with both people and process. On the other hand, this is also clearly a case where the proper combination of people and technology is far more effective than either on their own.
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