Distributed Problems are Hard

Working on a distributed team is challenging.

• Time zones are thing.
• Learning from teammates requires more effort.
• It may be less obvious what the state of work is, including understanding what your contributions need to be, or have been.
• There are so many media to choose from so that communicating and coordinating feels like too much (or maybe inadequate or fractured).
• It can get lonely.

There is No Water Cooler

Proponents of in-office work have touted the benefits of close contact with teammates, including hand waving around the notion that it can lead to great ideas emerging as a direct result of this proximity. The proverbial image conjured for these discussions is a water cooler where two or more employees are huddled with dispoable paper cups (or something). One of them likely looks like they’re having an a-ha! moment.

What the image attempts to invoke is one of serendipity. A happy accident. But serendipty doesn’t strike simply because folks are in the same place at the same time. And it’s not serendipity we’re after; it’s insight generation.

There is no water cooler.

Supporting Insights

We can’t really know when insights will occur, but we can support the conditions that foster them. On a distributed team, doing so may feel insurmountable, but it’s not. We do have to work a little harder to maintain an environment that is conducive to generating insights, but all the worthwhile things come from rolling up our sleeves and focused execution.

By the way, feel free to substitute “insights” with “innovation”. I think of innovation as a subset of insights, where insights are broadly about solving problems.

RAW NOTES BELOW

NOTE: default options?

Externalizing our thinking; leaving a trail; using all available media to reach a broad audience.

Opinion: Effective teams share widely and consistently, to support broad awareness (intra-team and inter-team).

• Emphasize asynchronous comms and why it matters (serendipity)
  • Even in an office, trying to coordinate synchronous comms (read: meetings) incurs a heavy cost. It feels easier because the people you want to chat with are present. But it’s likely that that perceived value of an in-sync meeting is much less than the value of the collective group’s time being spent on delivering on their commitments.
  • Externalizing our thinking; creating new touch points that support collaboration and insight generation
  • Helps us scale knowledge rather than bottleneck in unknown/obscure ways
    • Read this vs ask so-and-so
• Writing is thinking. Writing is learning. Writing is sharing.
  • Something something about curation and default options for writing/storing/finding writing.
  • Async writing and feedback in GDocs/Confluence
  • I want to know what you know! You are smart and you know things I don’t know.
    • I would love to have that context because I’m curious. Because one day my work may overlap with yours and it will help me to know what you know.
    • Ignorance breeds fear. So let’s work to address our ignorance.
  • Meeting minutes, especially when a decision is made.
  • JIRA ticket status/blockers
  • Slack updates
• Managing up
  • Managers need to be able to summarize the status of work to their bosses.
    • Easy way to manage up: tell us what you’re working/stuck on before we need to ask.