Feeling lost in the digital tools for collaboration jungle?
Are you now cruising the cyberspace with remote work and online meetings as a default mode of collaboration these days?
Then you shouldn't be surprised to see that you can stay an equally productive person and conduct business almost as usual.
Thanks to the Digital Revolution we are fortunate to have reached a stage in our civilization where nothing prevents high-quality decision-making in teams regardless of physical presence.
I dare to say that with the appropriate technology and group facilitation you can have better decision-making online rather than face to face.
The technological choices for digital collaboration abound and if you feel dazzled or lost in the jungle of brands then you should read further. For the moment I rather have you to understand that the most important skills for collaboration are human.
There are obviously big challenges ahead as going remote on human collaboration is not an easy step. We must be embracing the effort and step out of our comfort zones with our heart guiding our mind.
Because the intention has a powerful effect on actions. If we aim for true collaboration in our hearts it’s going to be a true collaboration that will happen. Face to face or online it won’t matter.
Once you have identified the right skills needed for effective collaboration, you also need to apply suitable group processes for decision-making.
If you are meeting in Cyberspace there are a wealth of digital tools for collaboration that provide effective support for designing and using such collaborative processes online.
Below is an example of a process-flow offered by
Seeds for Change
a collective of group facilitators specialized in community work.
This flow can be implemented with any choice of videoconference tools such as Microsoft's
Teams,
Zoom, Cisco's
Webex
or Amazon's
Chime, complemented by a range of groupware tools that provide support for ideation and voting. You can check the ones I recommend in my
Digital Collab
page.
I do hope that World Health Organization and all world leaders get this message and start using online meetings and online conferences for tapping the best expertise available and for engaging the relevant stakeholders for effective decision-making to fight the covid-19 pandemic with clever measures and to prevent future outbreaks.
After this covid-19 outbreak, we all need to be working very hard to avoid going back to the middle age. On the brighter side, we have finally a unique opportunity to start rebuilding a much better world.
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About the author
Paul Nunesdea is the English pen name of Paulo Nunes de Abreu, Facilitator, Master of Ceremonies, Author, and Publisher of the book series - Architecting Collaboration, his LinkedIn profile can be reached here, or in Spanish here, or Portuguese here.
Paul is an IAF Certified Facilitator™ who designs and hosts events for clients ranging from large companies to municipalities and regional governments.
His academic background as a PhD researcher combined with +15 years of experience as a former CEO and entrepreneur has sharpened a client-serving mentality eager to co-create win-win solutions. As an NGO founder, he co-founded Digital Health Portugal and hosts the Health Regions Summit, the Health Data Forum among other initiatives.
As both a GroupMap™ and Howspace™ certified facilitator he co-founded the Digital Collaboration Academy with renowned facilitator Peter Seah united by the vision of creating and sustaining a new emerging field -
Digital Facilitation - augmented by the core competencies of the IAF - International Association of Facilitators.
