TechStew

Of course you do.

Lots and lots of live cultures are living in your communities of practice.

How cool is that? …and how challenging…?

Take something as simple and as complex as a conference call.

For many communities of practice, conference calls are a primary means of community communication – the place where members meet to check in, build relationships, problem solve, share information, and otherwise conduct the work of their community.

A preliminary surf of the web shows basic “how-tos” for managing conference calls. Most of these guides tend to focus on common facilitation techniques that are intended to provide structures and norms for productive outcomes. They rarely address the cultural assumptions underlying specific communities of practice, or the assumptions behind what it means to be “productive.”

The issue of culture struck me while on a conference call about conference calls. During the call, members of a distributed community of practice shared their practices of how they ran calls with their own CoPs. Some conducted their conference calls with the controlled finesse of a concert conductor. Others were more improvisational. And of course there were those who worked somewhere in between or who preferred to flow from one style to another.

Below are some examples of cultural norms that surfaced in the call:

• Speaking in turn, in an orderly fashion
• Speaking out of turn – interruptions are regarded as part of the conversation rather than as digressions
• Building in periods of reflective silence (and being able to tolerate this silence and understand it as productive within the context of the culture)
• Backchanneling during the call usually via email or IMing – some consider it rude that participants are multitasking; for others, it is an important way of actively engaging with colleagues to connect, share information, exchange comments, etc.
• Revolving membership in the community – people are constantly joining or leaving the community; the community is constantly changing
• Consistent membership in the community – people maintain their membership over time and might know each other from other venues

Community members shared some of their facilitation techniques for conference calls:

• Prime participants in advance of a call by sending out a provocative question to get them thinking about the topic
• Provide an outline of the call in advance, with stopping points
• Ask a key question at the beginning of the call that serves to measure issues common to the group, learn more about individual members’ work, break the ice by having each member participate, and launch the conversation
• Create a safe environment through the use of taxonomies questions – moving the group from factual, safe questions to more creative, analytic ones
• Have participants ask questions about the content of the call as part of the introduction process and as a way to uncover issues that are important to members
• Limit the length of presentations to 15 minutes or breaking them up with more interactive segments
• Use facilitation techniques adapted from face to face meetings, like fishbowl activities to model problem-solving and other process-oriented situations.

Whatever the culture of your community, customs and norms will emerge and change as it coalesces and matures. At the heart of these cultural issues is the ability to recognize them, appreciate them, and negotiate them.

Care to Share?

What are some of your favorite facilitation techniques for your community of practice? How do they reflect your community’s cultural norms and goals?

Learn More:

Conference call practices to generate knowledge and record learning by John D. Smith and Shawn Callahan with comments from Madelyn Blair

Facilitating to Lead! Leadership Strategies for a Networked World by Ingrid Bens, published by Jossey-Bass, 2006. See especially pp. 86-90.

Good practice for phone-based CoP teleconferences by Kate Pugh

Telephone Conference Call Tips by Nancy White

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Community, Identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.