20th
7/90: Uncertainty
Managing ambiguity and uncertainty is a huge part of life in organizations. While there are many techniques for formally evaluating performance in organizations, on a day-to-day basis, people have to make snap judgements about what is going on and how people are performing, based on very subtle cues. In collocated organizations, it is very easy to see when a workplace has a buzz that indicates it is performing well; social life is vibrant, people are moving about and activity is evident.
These same cues are missing in many virtual organizations. Even if the individual team members are engaged in creative and meaningful work, there are few channels where that vibrancy and energy can spill out into the rest of the organization. So, perhaps another grand challenge for remote collaboration is the ongoing assessment and evaluation of organizations - getting the who, what, when, where, why and how of what’s happening on a project at a given time.
