Writely or Wrongly, a Failing Grade, So Far, for a Promising Tool

One of the purposes of the new flood of social networking tools is to try to organize, facilitate and improve the effectiveness of conversations and collaborative activities. The power and promise of these tools was and is considerable, and a year ago Steve Barth even predicted the demise of group e-mails (in favour of next-gen wikis and other more dynamic tools). But most of these tools remain underused, or hardly used at all. The following table is my rough take on current usage of these tools:

What’s happening here? I think there are seven main reasons for this underutilization:

1. Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns. 
2. Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use. 
3. The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they’re awkward.
4. Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don’t solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
5. The training materials for these tools don’t match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
6. Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren’t online.
7. Often we don’t even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we’ve discovered who the right people are, we’re likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
8. We are not accustomed to learning with others. Traditional schooling rewards individual effort (e.g. you take the test by yourself).

In many cases the cost of limiting our conversations and collaborations to the 20% or 2% of people who can effectively use these tools is just too high, so we revert to the lowest-common-denominator tools in the left column above.

But the consequence of this is suboptimal conversations and collaborations: A lot of wasted time, high travel cost, a great deal of miscommunication and non-communication, misunderstandings about what has been learned and decided, great ideas and important information not heard or not used, learnings and information lost or forgotten, and collaborations dominated by the loudest or most powerful instead of drawing on the best from all participants.

Many people seem to believe the answer is to make the tools better and wait for the rest of the world (or the next generation) to catch up with the 2% or 20%. But I’m not so sure. The digital divide seems to grow ever wider, not narrower, and if a tool as simple, free and intuitive as Skype can’t replace the telephone even for tech-savvy users, what hope is there for more complicated, sophisticated tools?

And while better education and training in conversational and collaboration skills, and in the use of enabling tools, would certainly help, my guess is that we’re too busy, or don’t consider it urgent or important enough, to make acquiring these skills and tool familiarity a priority, so it just ain’t going to happen. A generation from now someone will write an article very much like this one, and nothing will have changed.

So let’s try an experiment in online collaboration, using Google Writely, one of the right-column tools, and see if we can come up, through conversation and collaboration, with some better answers, or at least an understanding of why social networking tools aren’t going to change the world. You can find a copy of this article on Google Writely here. If you want to participate in this conversation and collaboration, here’s what to do:

1. Send me an e-mail so that I can give you editing rights to the Writely document.
2. On the editable Writely version, help create a conversation around the five questions I’ve asked below by answering them right in the document, any way that makes sense to you, and let’s see whether, by using this tool and putting our heads together, in a self-organizing way, we can turn this post into something powerful that will guide social networking tool designers and teach us all how to be more effective communicators and collaborators.

As long as it isn’t a dog’s breakfast, once everyone has had their say, I will replace this version with the collaborative Writely version here on the blog. If it turns out really well, I may make this standard procedure on many of my blog posts.

Time for your say (to get round the writely formatting issues – I’ve changed over to bullet points):

• Why are conversation and collaboration tools so underused? Is my list of 7 reasons missing anything? Are any of the reasons predominant?  See below, response to first Q#2.

        I would expand on point 4 above and say that the majority of people do not realise there a need to collaborate more effectively.

• Is the answer making the tools better? If so, how? If not, what is the answer?  Well, I can’t help noticing that my editing of this document is messing up your format (numbering, etc.).  Eg., if I try to hit “return” before typing my answer, I add another numbered item to this list, for example, and right now I see that instead of the original 1, 2, 3, 4 itemisation, I’ve somehow jammed it to create 1, 2, 1, 2…  I do think it’s little things like this that really end up putting people off.  KISS — not a bad leitmotif…  Good user interface is crucially important — that doesn’t mean that crap with bad UI will fail (unfortunately, it won’t), but that it’s very important to stress good UI.  (I recommend Donald Norman’s book, Things that make us smart. Thanks for the tip on book.  What’s bad about writely, BTW, is that you need to know that you have to pull down the “file” tab and click on “view as web page” before you get to see this page as a link, and it’s not even that “smooth” a matter to create the link in the first place (sometimes it ends cleanly, other times it wants to continue into the text you continue typing ad infinitum…) (You can also click the ‘Preview’ link at the top to get a quick preview – Marg :o)

• Given time, do you think people will eventually learn to use these tools, despite their shortcomings? Which tools, current or envisioned, will be the winners, the killer apps for online-enabled conversation and collaboration, and why?  Depends on what you want to do; I’ve used writely to share meeting minutes with people at my kids’s distance ed. school, and they like writely fine for that, but they don’t use it for their own projects.  Why not?  I don’t know.  Perhaps because they can’t see how/ why they should or could use it?  On the other hand, my son and I have used writely for months to collaborate on his English assignments/ his “think pieces,” and he likes using it very much.  At the same time, there are plenty of “youth” in his youth group who know nothing about any of these “collaborative” tools, and who couldn’t care less.  I think most of everything depends on what people are carrying around in their heads in the first place.  Many people carry … well, the mental equivalent of Jersey barriers.    
  As for killer apps, one of my favourites at this time has to be diigo.com, which lets me bookmark & annotate my online research, PLUS share it with those who need to be in on the loop.
  Content volume is what kills all these collaboration tools. I have used Lotus Teamrooms, Groove, Basecamp and in each case when the volume of the content becomes unweildy the users stop using. Considerable effort is required to clean out the material, archive it, highlight what’s important and bring to people’s attention the key things to notice. At the moment I favour web-based tools like basecamp because of their keep it simple philosophy and the fact it’s browser-based (see my comment above) which every net user knows how to use.
  Anything is possible. Remember the days when executives thought it undignified to touch a keyboard? Or when people could not imagine buying anything on the net? As recently as ten years ago, CIOs were debating if the net would ever amount to anything.
  

• What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better conversationalists, and how would we do this?

• What one simple thing should we do/learn to most effectively enable people to become better collaborators, and how would we do this?
  Focus on the practice of collaboration and only introduce tools when the need arises. For example, a research group might think a new ways to harness energy from heat is a promising research project. They start off chatting on the phone, sending emails to one another and then someone says: “It would be good if we could track the versions on this document we are creating.” That’s the point a tool should be introduced. I would run a poster campaign in an organisation with the title “Avoid using collaboration tools for as long as possible” and then use the rest of the poster to describe the signs the team should look out for to introduce effective tools. Put practice and process before tools.

I managed to reformat the list so that Nelles’s edits didn’t create new numbered list elements by going into the html view. I note the html for this document does not contain any html paragraph tags, and that new ‘paragraphs’ are created simply by inserting break tags. By the way, the html appears to be xhtml 1.0 transitional, though it’s not a perfect match to the spec. I don’t want to discuss the issues with Writely per se, though the lack of paragraph tags is worrisome to me.

I think your seven main reasons are spot on. Learning how to use such tools never seems urgent, and there are always workarounds (like sending an email) that get the immediate task done. One addition I might suggest is that such tools acquire value only after being used for some time and generating a corpus of materials, as in, a one or two page wiki is useless.

–> indeed, training in these tools doesn’t match the ways in which we learn, especially if you consider that the ways in which we learn are changing as well! We are trying to train with the expectation that our learners are homogenous groups and we don’t need to think about each learner’s personal experience of that training. A question I would add here is this: are we training for the tool or training people to discover innovative uses of the tool to satisfy a need or satiate curiousity? There is always a tension between teaching and technology that is both positive and negative: the tools can push us to change the ways we do things just as the pedagogy can inform good practice uses of technology.
–> online communication and those who we want to communicate with may not necessary be online as you point out. However, I think we shouldn’t dismiss tools that link us to others simply because they don’t Skype or IM! It is not always necessary to replace existing tools with online tools. The serendipity with which online tools allow for communication is also one of its strengths I find!

All in all, it comes back to our attitudes and the ways in which we accept the systems and administrative features of our working lives (seeing as this is the place/activity we seem to come back to in these discussions). Watching young children handle technology is an eye-opener. They show no fear and much curiousity. Perhaps these tools will find more use in their hands – if we let it happen?

1. Most people are still unfamiliar with the tools in the middle and right columns. – 
   • That pretty much says it – no need to expand this point other than the unfamilar becomes familiar after use. Most of us don’t understand collaboration because have not been exposed to it. 
2. Many of these tools are unintuitive and hence not easy to learn to use.
   
   • While it seems contradictory to my statement above, I tend to disagree. I used my intuition to get to this point. Whether I’m using the tool rightly or wrongly, the tool is allowing me to put thoughts down. Intuition tells me if allowed – it must work and I must be doing something correctly. It took a minute or two but I am using the tool. Came back today to check on progress – to see – and I begin to get the hang of it. This tool has a learning curve. Its messy – not a bad thing. Understanding how to make sense of it all does not seem very intuitive.
3. The way you have to use these tools is not the way most people converse and collaborate, i.e. they’re awkward.
   
   • It certainly is awkward. I feel because we – at least in US – are not used to it. Will we ever be comfortable (less awkward)? With exposure and practice – yes. I might be one of the few who actually enjoy the way my group converses and collaborates. I might not always agree but there IS a degree of enjoyment.
4. Most people have poor listening, communication and collaboration skills, and these tools don’t solve (and can exacerbate) this underlying problem of ineffective interpersonal skills.
   
   • I might be one of the most classic example of falling short in these skills. But one ability of humans is to improve skills with practice. We do it by leading, loving, and learning. By helping one another to succeed.
5. The training materials for these tools don’t match the way most of us learn and discover (i.e. by doing, by watching others, and iteratively by trial and error).
   
   • I hate reading through training materials. But I love learning and discovering ways to do things. Philip is also editing this document the entire time I have been working on this document – it would be very cool to see what Philip is writing. It would be great to see what his editing looks like, in process. This is a great point – I feel the central point of the argument, David.
6. Often the people we most want to converse or collaborate with aren’t online.
   
   • Not sure that matters? I’d consider losing this point unless I’m totally unclear on the concept.
7. Often we don’t even know who the right people are to converse or collaborate with, so we need to go through a process of discovering who those people are first, which these tools cannot yet effectively help us with; once we’ve discovered who the right people are, we’re likely already talking with them using the ubiquitous tools in the left column above.
   
   • I feel ubiquitous tools are worthy in many cases. The tool we are using here won’t help us find the right people unless a stream of thought catches the authors eye. If this tool is meant to aid in discovery maybe its good and maybe its not.

The following statement reminds me of the miserable failed attempt at conversion to the metric system in the US – replace conversational and collaboration skills with metric conversion…though I’m not convinced we are too busy. I tend to believe it is a priority question.
And while better education and training in conversational and collaboration skills, and in the use of enabling tools, would certainly help, my guess is that we’re too busy, or don’t consider it urgent or important enough, to make acquiring these skills and tool familiarity a priority, so it just ain’t going to happen. A generation from now someone will write an article very much like this one, and nothing will have changed.

I don’t see the equivalence between getting better at collaboration and conversation and metric conversion. Also, at least in Silicon Valley, I see a lot of adoption of these tools and methodologies in both technology and political organizing. So I guess I am much more optimistic. Wikis and blogs are only ten years old, it normally takes about 30 years for an invention to get widely adopted.