Nice piece entitled “Team Coordination Is Key in Businesses” by the Heath bros on the importance of coordination for success.  As they smartly point out:

We tend to underestimate the amount of effort needed to coordinate with other people. In one academic experiment, a team of students was asked to build a giant Lego man as quickly as possible. To save time, the team members split up their work. One person would craft an arm, another would build the torso, and so forth. (At least one person, of course, was charged with tweeting compulsively about what the others were doing.)

Often, the parts were carefully designed, yet they didn’t quite fit together properly, like a Lego Heidi Montag. The problem was that nobody was paying attention to the integration. The researchers found that the teams were consistently better at specializing than they were at coordinating.

The skills required for coordination and collaboration are indeed the skills of the Tummler!  Now to discuss the HOW – the how is to reward and ensure that the role of the Tummler is indeed recognized, encouraged and rewarded.

Great Ted talk from Ethan Zuckerman on the fact that we are less cross-linked and cross connected than we think we are.

Our argument to avoid the homophily that Zuckerman discusses ? Tummlers, of course!

I sniffed out a few great articles that echo the Tummel Manifesto – of bringing our human-selves with us in business, culture and tech [whether online or offline]:

• Linda Stone’s recent piece on “Conscious Computing: A new era of post-productivity computing?
• Dev Patnaik from Jump Associates piece on the link between empathy & innovation: Innovation starts with empathy
• Paul Adams’ great preso entitled the Real life Social Network demonstrates how designers are indeed recognizing the need to build a more integrated set of tools that reflect our real life behaviors.

There is definitely something in the air these days bringing forth the conversation on our more ‘human side’.  An often overlooked impact of “Web2.0” or “Social Media” – is the renewed focus on what it means to collaborate, share, participate and how can we create, design and develop systems and organizations that allow these natural behaviors to flourish.  Exciting stuff – it’s about time. I hear the original promise of the Web hitting it’s mark and it sounds sweet.

In an effort NOT to put our east coast hostess and our east coasts guests into sleep deprivation, we are moving Tummelvision to a NEW TIME.  Starting June 24th we will be LIVE two hours earlier.  Join Us!

NEW TUMMELVISION TIME

5pm pst / 8pm est

We hope this new time is better for you – the participants as well!

Episode Notes

Heather, Kevin and Deb talk with Valdis Krebs, the founder and Chief Scientist at orgnet.com. Valdis is a management consultant, researcher, trainer, author, and the developer of InFlow software for social and organizational network analysis [SNA/ONA]. Since 1987, Valdis has participated in almost 500 SNA/ONA projects. His work has been covered in major media including New York Times Magazine, Fast Company, CNN, Entrepreneur, Forbes, FORTUNE, MSNBC.com and several major newspapers around the world including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Cleveland Plain Dealer, USA Today, Washington Post, and Associated Press.

Join us live at 7 PM PST/10 EST for TummelVision…